It is long since England, in this respect not favoured by her parliamentary system, has produced a great foreign minister, nor has that title been claimed for Mr. Gladstone. But he showed on several occasions both his independence of tradition and his faith in broad principles as fit to be applied in international relations; and his action in that field, though felt only at intervals, has left abiding results in European history. In 1851, he being then still a Tory, his pamphlet denouncing the cruelties of the Bourbon government of Naples, and the sympathy he subsequently avowed with the national movement in Italy, gave that movement a new standing in Europe by powerfully recommending it to English opinion. In 1870 the prompt action of his ministry in arranging a treaty for the neutrality of Belgium on the outbreak of the war between France and Germany, averted the risk that Belgium might be drawn into the strife. In 1871, by concluding the treaty of Washington, which provided for the settlement by arbitration of the _Alabama_ claims, he not only set a precedent full of promise for the future, but delivered England from what would have been, in case of her being at war with any European power, a danger fatal to her ocean commerce. And, in 1876, his onslaught upon the Turks, after the Bulgarian massacres, roused an intense feeling in England, turning the current of opinion so decisively that Disraeli's ministry were forced to leave the Sultan to his fate, and thus became a cause of the ultimate deliverance of Bulgaria, Eastern Rumelia, Bosnia, and Thessaly from Mussulman tyranny. Few English statesmen have equally earned the gratitude of the oppressed.
Nothing lay nearer to his heart than the protection of the Christians of the East. His sense of personal duty to them was partly due to the feeling that the Crimean War had prolonged the rule of the Turk, and had thus imposed a special responsibility on Britain, and on the members of Lord Aberdeen's cabinet which drifted into 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 favour of British intervention to rescue the Eastern Christians. In the following spring he followed this up by a 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 upon which it had already entered. Poignant regrets were expressed that Mr. Gladstone was no longer able to take effective action in the cause of humanity; yet it was a consolation to be assured that age and infirmity had not dulled his sympathies with that cause.