ng with blood, and in the air tainted with
every imaginable deed of crime and shame,--all this vehemence was hailed
with eager acclamation by multitudes who felt all that he felt, and found
in his passionate invective words and a voice. Mr. Gladstone was not the
man, his readers and his public were not the men, for mere denunciation.
They found in him a policy. Indignation, he said in a thoroughly
characteristic sentence, indignation is froth, except as it leads to
action; mere remonstrance is mockery. There are states of affairs, he told
them, in which human sympathy refuses to be confined by the rules,
necessarily limited and conventional, of international law. Servia and
Montenegro in going to war against Turkey might plead human sympathies,
broad, deep, and legitimate, and that they committed no moral offence. The
policy of the British government was the _status quo_, "as you were." This
meant the maintenance of Turkish executive authority. What was really
needed was the total withdrawal of the administrative rule of the Turk.
And here he used words that became very famous in the controversy:--

But I return to, and end with, that which is the omega as well as
the alpha of this great and most mournful case. An old servant of
the crown and state, I entreat my countrymen, upon whom far more
than perhaps any other people of Europe it depends, to require and
to insist that our government which has been working in one
direction shall work in the other, and shall apply all its vigour
to concur with the other states of Europe in obtaining the
extinction of the Turkish executive power in Bulgaria. Let the
Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner,
namely by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their
Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and
their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall I hope clear out
from the province they have desolated and profaned.

At Blackheath, under dripping rain clouds, he said the same, though with
the invective tempered. "You shall receive your regular tribute," he said
in slow sentences to imaginary Ottomans, whom he seemed to hold before his
visual eye, "you shall retain your titular sovereignty, your empire shall
not be invaded, but never again as the years roll in their course, so far
as it is in our power to determine, never again shall the hand of violence
be raised by you, never a