On the 8th of February the Queen opened Parliament in person, and was well received in the crowded streets, but Mr. Gladstone, Lord Beaconsfield, and the Chinese Ambassador and his suite were for the time the real heroes of the mob. The scene in the House of Lords was one of exceptional brilliancy, and after the Speech, was read by Lord Cairns, the Queen, descending the steps of the Throne, left the Chamber, the ceremony, so far as her Majesty was concerned, not occupying more than fifteen minutes. It need not be said that in both Houses the debates on the Address centred round the Eastern Question. The Conference had been a failure, and the Government were seriously embarrassed. Logically, Ministers, as men of spirit, were bound to make the demands of the Conference effective, for was it not their own device for settling the Eastern Question, and were not its demands their demands? That was the view which Lord Hartington vindicated in a speech of great power and cogency. On the other hand, it was clear that the Cabinet had no fixed aim when it organised the Conference--that if it ever contemplated the contingency of failure, which its supporters by their fierce attacks on Lord Salisbury had virtually manufactured, it had hoped to tide over the difficulty by letting matters drift. Lord Derby had begun by assuming that it was not the right or duty of England to insist on Turkey conceding reforms to Bulgaria. The autumnal agitation about the atrocities induced him to change front, and to admit that it was alike the duty and right of England, as one of the Powers whose support maintained the Turkish Empire, to demand that its European Provinces should not be submerged in barbarism. He had organised the Powers in support of this demand, and now, when the Turks refused to yield to it, he reverted to his original theory that England had no more right to interfere with Turkey, than with Austria or France. What made matters worse for the Cabinet was the prevailing belief that, though they sent Lord Salisbury to Constantinople to insist on reforms, their agents privily assured Midhat Pasha, then Grand Vizier, that no harm would come if Turkey upset the Conference. The State Papers furnish no confirmation of this belief. Indeed, they show that Lord Derby told Lord Salisbury to warn the Turks that though England would take no part in coercive measures against them, the Porte “is to be made to understand that it can expect no assistance from England in the case of war.”[99] The Turks, however, had a fixed conviction that England would help them in a war with Russia. Nothing but a strong statement from Lord Beaconsfield would have eradicated this belief, and all that the English Government can be blamed for is, that Lord Beaconsfield failed or refused to make this statement. According to Prince Bismarck, no statesman who aspires to influence abroad will permit his Government to be associated with a failure in diplomacy. Yet