statesmen who formed the cabinet which undertook that war. Twenty
years after the agitation of 1876, and when he had finally retired
from Parliament and political life, the massacres perpetrated by the
Sultan on his Armenian subjects brought him once more into the
field, and his last speech in public (delivered at Liverpool in the
autumn of 1896) was a powerful argument in favor of British
intervention to rescue the Eastern Christians. In the following
spring he followed this up by a spirited pamphlet on behalf of the
freedom of Crete. In neither of these two cases did success crown
his efforts, for the government, commanding a large majority in
Parliament, pursued the course it had already entered on. Many
poignant regrets were expressed in England that Mr. Gladstone was no
longer able to take practical action in the cause of humanity; yet
it was a consolation to have the assurance that his sympathies with
that cause had been nowise dulled by age and physical infirmity.

That he was right in the view he took of the Turks and British
policy in 1876-78 has been now virtually admitted even by his
opponents. That he was also right in 1896 and 1897, when urging
action to protect the Eastern Christians, will probably be admitted
ten years hence, when partizan passion has cooled. In both cases it
was not merely religious sympathy, but also a far-sighted view of
policy that governed his judgment. The only charge that can fairly
be brought against his conduct in foreign, and especially in
Eastern, affairs is, that he did not keep a sufficiently watchful
eye upon them at all times, but frequently allowed himself to be so
engrossed by British domestic questions as to lose the opportunity
which his tenure of power from time to time gave him of averting
approaching dangers. Those who know how tremendous is the strain
which the headship of a cabinet and the leadership of the House of