officials must be expelled from Bulgaria “bag and baggage,” and the European Provinces of Turkey granted such powers of self-government under the suzerainty of the Sultan, as would protect them from being seized by Austria and Russia on the one hand and devastated by Asiatic savages on the other. Sir Stafford Northcote and Lord Derby, in subsequent speeches, seemed to adopt the principle of Mr. Gladstone’s policy. They admitted that it was the duty of England to join the civilised Powers in preventing Turkey from opening again the floodgates of lust, rapine, and murder in Bulgaria, and the English people for the first time understood how, with the cries of their tortured neighbours ringing in their ears, the Servians and Montenegrins had flown to arms. Some Conservative writers and speakers still tried to persuade the world that the Russian Government had bribed the Turkish Pashas to commit and the Bulgarians to submit to outrages, in order to discredit Ottoman rule in Europe. But their efforts were futile, and the word went forth from all sides that never again would England draw her sword, as in 1854, to save Turkey from the consequences of her incurable barbarism. Strange to say, Lord Beaconsfield failed to gauge the strength of this feeling. On the 20th of September, in his speech at Aylesford, he neither adopted nor rejected the policy suggested by Sir Stafford Northcote and Lord Derby, but he spoke in a querulous tone of the popular meetings which were being held all over England expressing sympathy with Bulgaria and urging the Government to shield her from the cruelty of her oppressors. The agitation, he said, was “impolitic, and founded on erroneous data.” Those who got up these meetings, he declared, were guilty of outrages on “the principle of patriotism, worse than any of those Bulgarian atrocities of which we have heard so much.” His negative policy which destroyed the Berlin Memorandum without putting any counter proposals in its place, would, he contended, have had a happy issue in negotiations. These, however, were upset by the unexpected Servian declaration of war against Turkey, which was prompted by “the Secret Societies.” Yet England had signed the Andrassy Note, which warned Turkey that this unexpected war would be waged against her by Servia, unless she granted the reforms demanded in the Note. When Turkey, instead of granting these reforms, massacred the population that craved for them, it was absurd to suppose that “the Secret Societies of Europe,” rather than the popular sympathies of the Christian Slavs, forced the Servian Government into war. That the speech fell flat was seen by the polling at the Buckinghamshire Election next day, when in Lord Beaconsfield’s own county Mr. Freemantle only saved the seat from the attack of Mr. Rupert Carrington, the Liberal candidate, by the small majority of 186. There were now two voices in the Cabinet; for on the day after