Our own interests, I repeat, were jeopardized in every quarter where the present Government has stirred hand or foot. That is its broad justification. But I must certainly go a step farther than this. The present Ministry assuredly would not be satisfied with an acquittal on the Liberal arraignment; nor is that the verdict which the public has given. The British people find this Government guilty of having won for it and for themselves much honour. When Lord Beaconsfield saw that in any event he was committed to a contest with Russia for the defence of English interests, he had the courage and the wit to determine that the issue of it should be the better for the world. It is for this noble superfluity of skilful statesmanship, this Imperial scope given to England's ruling, that Europe has thanked him, and the bulk of this nation applauded him. By-and-by, he will reap still further credit, for besides checking Russia he will eventually coerce the Turk. That further obligation naturally arose out of the course he took, and he added it to his proper task of safeguarding our own interests, just as impartially as he did the other aim of arresting the Muscovite. I shall not push this reasoning further: it seems to me sufficiently triumphant as it stands. If Lord Beaconsfield has upheld the Turk, it was because it was necessary, not because he admired him. But there is another remark, coming much nearer home, that I wish to make before concluding this section. The foreign policy of Lord Beaconsfield has brought to him and to his party much renown; but it has brought them nothing else. That there has been the need for it is for the Conservatives a positive misfortune. It has nearly entirely put aside the domestic legislation on which they reckoned for at once redressing some grievances of their own, and for satisfying the town populations who their true friends were. Let it not be forgotten that it was on this very claim of having a domestic policy that the Conservatives appealed to the people at the last election. Their opponents, who now make a pretence of measures of this kind being lacking, then denounced it loudly enough as a "policy of sewage." But Lord Beaconsfield's rivals have tried hard to make it seem that he sought out, or even invented, these hazardous events abroad which put aside his home policy. The very attempt impugns the common sense of the general public. A sort of pretext might have been found for insinuating such a notion if Lord Beaconsfield had been nearing the end of expending his Parliamentary majority by carrying party measures. But to suppose that a Minister attaining power in the triumphant way he did would wish to be plunged straightway into foreign entanglements, is to imagine him stricken with idiocy. Lord Beaconsfield had had far too much experience to make such a preposterous mistake. He knew at the beginning, as he knows now, that neither Minister nor party has much to gain in any way of permanent