“_G._ Well—you really have done good service to your country and your Czar by dividing and confusing these absurd English, and getting us out of the scrape we were in in that—Balkan Peninsula.
“_Miss O._ Well, certainly I did my best; but I fear I have ruined the political reputation of my English partizans, for in order to make them ‘beloved of the Slave,’ I of course had to make them, poor souls! go against their own country; and their country, stupid as it is, has now I fear found them out.
“_G._ _Tant pis pour eux_! _Entre nous_, if I had been Gladstone, I should have preferred the love of my own country to the love of these—Slaves of yours. But, tell me, how did you get hold of Gladstone?
“_Miss O._ _Rien de plus simple_! Four or five years ago I asked what was his weak point, and was told that he had two, ‘Effervescence,’ and ‘Theology.’ With that knowledge I found it all child’s play to manage him. I just sent him to Munich, and there boiled him up in a weak decoction of ‘Filioque,’ then kept him ready for use, and impatiently awaited the moment when our plans for getting up the ‘Bulgarian atrocities’ should be mature. I say ‘impatiently,’ for, Heavens, how slow you all were! at least so it strikes a woman. The arrangement of the ‘atrocities’ was begun by our people in 1871, and yet till 1876, though I had Gladstone ready in 1875, nothing really was done! I assure you, Prince, it is a trying thing to a woman to be kept waiting for promised atrocities such an unconscionable time.
“_G._ That brother-in-law of yours was partly the cause of our slowness. He was always wanting to have the orders for fire and blood in neat formal despatches, signed by me, and copied by clerks. However, I hope you are satisfied now, with the butcheries and the flames, and the —?
She is absent during the sudden dissolution of Parliament in 1874. “London woke yesterday morning and found that your friend Gladstone had made a _coup-d’état_. He has dissolved Parliament at a moment when no human being expected it, and my impression is that he has made a good hit, and that the renovated Parliament will give him a great majority.” The impression was wildly wrong; and he found a cause for the Conservative majority in Gladstone’s tame foreign policy, and especially in the pusillanimity his government showed when insulted by Gortschakoff. He always does justice to her influence with Gladstone; his great majority at the polls in 1880 is _her_ victory and _her_ triumph; but his Turkophobia is no less her creation: “England is stricken with incapacity because you have stirred up the seething caldron that boils under Gladstone’s skull, putting in diabolical charms and poisons of theology to overturn the structure of English polity:” she will be able, he thinks, to tell her government that Gladstone is doing his best to break up the British Empire.
