t majority; and all these are the acts which those
who are invited to vote or who intend to vote for my noble
opponent--whatever may be his personal claims, all these are the
acts, the responsibility of which they are now invited to take upon
themselves, and the repetition of which, by giving that vote, they
will directly encourage.

The next charge is the charge of broken laws. We have contended--it is
impossible to trouble you with argument--but we have contended, and I
think we have demonstrated, in the House of Commons, sustained by a
great array of legal strength and bearing, that in making that war in
Afghanistan, the Government of this country absolutely broke the laws
which regulate the Government of India. I do not say they admit it;
on the contrary, they deny it. But we have argued it; we believe, we
think we have shown it. It is a very grave and serious question; but
this much, I think, is plain, that unless our construction of that
Indian Government Act, which limits the power of the Crown as to the
employment of the Indian forces at the cost of the Indian revenue
without the consent of Parliament--unless our construction of that Act
be true, the restraining clauses of that Act are absolutely worthless,
and the people who passed those restraining clauses, and who most
carefully considered them at the time, must have been people entirely
unequal to their business; although two persons--I won't speak of
myself, who had much to do with them, but two persons who next to
myself were most concerned, were the present and the late Lord Derby,
neither of them persons very likely to go to work upon a subject
of that kind without taking care that what their hand did was done
effectually.

Now besides the honour, if it be an honour, of broken laws, the
Government has the honour of broken treaties. When I discussed the
case of broken laws, I told you fairly that the Government denied the
breaking of the laws, and make their own argument to show--I suppose
they think they show--that they did not break the laws. But when I
pass to the next head, of the broken treaties, the case is different,
especially in one of the most material points, which I will state in a
few words, but clearly. The first case which we consider to be that of
a distinctly broken treaty is that of sending the warships of England
through the Dardanelles without the consent of the Sultan of Turkey.
We believe that to be a clear breach of the Treaty of