But when Lord Derby resigned it was not known that Indian troops were to be brought to Cyprus and landed in Syria, and the Ministerial explanations were so couched as to make it appear that he left the Government merely because the Reserves were called out. His real reasons could not be given at the moment, and he had to submit to a tirade of abuse from Tory speakers and writers unparalleled in its ferocity. Even his personal character was attacked by abominable slanders. Violence and virulence are the outward and visible signs of decaying power in a political Party. These evil qualities had, however, never been displayed to a greater extent by the Tories since the wars of the Protectionists and the Peelites in 1852, when a band of the former one day after dinner at the Carlton Club explored the drawing-room in order to “fling Mr. Gladstone out of the window.”[129] Yet it is curious to observe that Lord Beaconsfield and his followers were forced by events to adopt the policy and even the method of their slandered colleague. They floundered deeper and deeper every day into a quagmire of difficulties, till they actually made a secret arrangement with Russia as to the points in the Treaty of San Stefano, about which, however much they might wage a sham fight in the coming Congress, neither Power would go to war. In fact it is now evident that of the statesmen who figured in the controversy at this crisis, Lord Derby is the one who emerges from it with least damage to his reputation. Alike in his strength and weakness, in his resolute determination to spend neither British blood nor British treasure for the sake of Turkey, and in his lack of red-hot enthusiasm for the cause of Slavic [Illustration: THE MARINA, LARNACA, CYPRUS.] nationality, Lord Derby’s diplomacy was the diplomacy of the British people in their saner moments, when they were not under the spell of passion or partisanship. His blunders--the rejection of the Berlin Memorandum and the refusal to give an executive character to the decisions of the Constantinople Conference--had at all events wrought no evil to England or the world, unless it were an evil to hasten the destruction of Ottoman tyranny in Europe, and the deliverance of Bulgaria from barbarism.[130] As for his successes, they are now obvious. His shrewd appreciation of British interests, and his firmness, candour, courtesy, and lucidity in defining them at the outset of the struggle between the belligerents, made it easy for Russia to avoid a collision with England. That he fell short of his opportunity in neglecting to establish British influence in Egypt was a mistake excusable in a minister whose leader, like a character in one of his own novels, “had but one idea in Foreign [Illustration: SALONICA.]