is country against her European
enemies," February 27, 1782. This was followed, on March 4, by an
address on the same basis; and by a resolution declaring that any
ministers who should advise or attempt to frustrate it should be
considered "as enemies to his Majesty and to this country." I
ought, perhaps, to add that I have never stated, and I do not
conceive, that a change in the public opinion of the country is
the ground on which the cabinet have founded the change in their
advice concerning the Soudan.

III

The reader has by this time perhaps forgotten how Mr. Gladstone
good-humouredly remonstrated with Lord Palmerston for associating him as
one of the same school as Cobden and Bright.(117) The twenty intervening
years had brought him more and more into sympathy with those two eminent
comrades in good causes, but he was not any less alive to the
inconvenience of the label. Speaking in Midlothian after the dissolution
in 1880, he denied the cant allegation that to instal the liberals in
power would be to hand over the destinies of the country to the Manchester
school.(118) "Abhorring all selfishness of policy," he said, "friendly to
freedom in every country of the earth attached, to the modes of reason,
detesting the ways of force, this Manchester school, this peace-party, has
sprung prematurely to the conclusion that wars may be considered as having
closed their melancholy and miserable history, and that the affairs of the
world may henceforth be conducted by methods more adapted to the dignity
of man, more suited both to his strength and to his weakness, less likely
to lead him out of the ways of duty, to stimulate his evil passions, to
make him guilty before God for inflicting misery on his fellow-creatures."
Such a view, he said, was a serious error, though it was not only a
respectable, it was even a noble error. Then he went on, "However much you
may detest war--and you cannot detest it too much--there is no war--except
one, the war for liberty--that does not contain in it elements of
corruption, as well as of misery, that are deplorable to recollect and to
consider; but however deplorable wars may be, they are among the
necessities of our condition; and there are times when justice, when
faith, when the welfare of mankind, require a man not to shrink from the
responsibility of undertaking them. And if you undertake war, so also you
are often obliged to undertake measures