Granville at last plucked up heart to remonstrate with Germany, her victorious armies had made sacrifices that rendered his tardy protests impertinent. Italy and Russia had sense enough to recognise this fact. They therefore refused to join England when Lord Granville sent his remonstrance to Von Bismarck, who tossed it into his diplomatic waste-paper basket.[25] It may be readily conceived, then, that, despite its public services, its invincible majority, and the failure of the Tory leaders to put before the country any policy of their own, signs of decay were already visible in the Government. Mr. Bruce had converted every publican into an enemy. The Dissenters had vowed vengeance against the Ministry, because Mr. Forster had increased the grant to denominational schools. The officers of the Army and the upper and upper-middle classes of society had resolved to punish Mr. Gladstone because he had allowed Mr. Cardwell to abolish Purchase. A few Radicals and many Whigs were also alarmed, because it had been abolished by Royal Prerogative, the use of which to coerce the Peers was resented by the aristocracy as an insult. The abolition of Purchase was to have been followed by an effective reorganisation of the Army. Hence the nation was profoundly disappointed to find the question of Army organisation made light of by Ministers during the recess. Mr. Cardwell’s project for autumn manœuvres on a large scale on the Berkshire Downs had to be abandoned, because his Control Department could not feed or supply his troops. When he substituted for this scheme a sham campaign in the neighbourhood of Aldershot, the Transport Service was found to be so bad that the Artillery had to be drawn upon to supply it with horses, carts, and drivers. The disaster to the _Agincourt_ and the wreck of the _Megæra_, also gave colour to slanders against the Government which had issued from the Admiralty from the day that Mr. Childers began to reform its wasteful administration, and Mr. Goschen had continued his work.[26] The Duke of Somerset, after the failure of the Berkshire campaign, had scoffed at the Government because they gave the nation “armies that could not march and ships that could not swim,” and the epigram was soon everywhere repeated. Mr. Gladstone’s appointment of Sir Robert Collier, the Attorney-General, to a seat on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council was denounced far and wide as a job perpetrated by a tricky evasion of the law.[27] The Prime Minister’s management of the House of Commons had also cost him many friends. As Mr. Disraeli once said, it was like that of a [Illustration: METZ.]