Nor was it on account of these affairs that Mr. Gladstone's fall occurred when it came, which is another reason why it would be waste of time to discuss them in connection with him. Who is proposing to alter these things now that they have been fought out between the great parties of the State and decided? As a supplement to his Irish Land Bill, we now have the Irish peasants refusing to pay any rent at all: but in these days when a thing is done in our Parliament it is done. The Conservatives, in spite of the majority at their back, have never put forward a finger to touch those settlements, nor do they mean to do so; and yet not only our own country, but all Europe, and indeed realms farther away still, have been keenly aware that the Beaconsfield Ministry has been very busy for years undoing something that Mr. Gladstone had done.
What was this gigantic task, which was not the repealing of legislation, or the passing of statutes of any kind, but which required courage and effort more arduous than those things? There must have been some cause for the bursts of applause which have again and again echoed on our shores from all parts of the civilized globe at something that was going on. It was, we hasten to answer, the rehabilitation of England in the eyes of the world,--the restoration of her ancient power as a factor in the enforcement and administration of public right among the nations. Somehow, coincidently with Mr. Gladstone's prosperity as a Minister, England, his country, had sunk, and in exactly answering ratio, and was sinking lower and lower still daily. He was very famous, or at least very notorious, at home, but the renown of Britain abroad was clouding; and our people never will bear that, as history had shown before. This man, who at heart was but a financier, and who ought in the fitness of things never to have risen higher in office than a Chancellor of the Exchequer, whose function it should have been to find funds for some one else as a Prime Minister capable of a policy in the higher international politics befitting an Empire, was conducting our foreign affairs in the spirit of a commercial traveller; willing to effect a little saving by giving up a group of islands in one part or a bit of territory in another, and to effect an economy at another time by backing out of a treaty. Though, at the same time, if anybody insisted, and there loomed, however distantly, a possibility of war, he would pay the money down in a hurry by millions, as he did in the Alabama case. We should have had all the world insisting very soon, making peace more costly than war itself, besides the shame of unjustifiable surrender.