reserve. Mr. Gladstone said he wished to make me "his
depositary" as things gradually moved on, and he wrote me a series of
short letters from day to day. If they could be read aloud in Westminster
Hall, no harm would be done either to surviving colleagues or to others;
they would furnish no new reason for thinking either better or worse of
anybody; and no one with a decent sense of the value of time would concern
himself in all the minor detail of an ineffectual controversy. The central
facts were simple. Two things weighed with him, first his infirmities, and
second his disapproval of the policy. How, he asked himself, could he turn
his back on his former self by becoming a party to swollen expenditure?
True he had changed from conservative to liberal in general politics, but
when he was conservative, that party was the economic party, "Peel its
leader being a Cobdenite." To assent to this new outlay in time of peace
was to revolutionise policy. Then he would go on--"Owing to the part which
I was drawn to take, first in Italy, then as to Greece, then on the
eastern question, I have come to be considered not only an English but a
European statesman. My name stands in Europe as a symbol of the policy of
peace, moderation, and non-aggression. What would be said of my active
participation in a policy that will be taken as plunging England into the
whirlpool of militarism? Third, I have been in active public life for a
period nearly as long as the time between the beginning of Mr. Pitt's
first ministry and the close of Sir Robert Peel's; between 1783 and
1846--sixty-two years and a half. During that time I have uniformly opposed
militarism." Thus he would put his case.

After the naval estimates were brought forward, attempts were naturally
made at accommodation, for whether he availed himself of the end of the
session as a proper occasion of retirement or not, he was bound to try to
get the estimates down if he could. He laboured hard at the task of
conversion, and though some of his colleagues needed no conversion, with
the majority he did not prevail. He admitted that he had made limited
concessions to scares in 1860 and in 1884, and that he had besides been
repeatedly responsible for extraordinary financial provisions having
reference to some crisis of the day:--

I did this, (1) By a preliminary budget in 1854; (2) By the final
budget of July 1859; by the vote of credit in July 1870; and again
by the vo