gain shall the flood-gates of lust be open to
you, never again shall the dire refinements of cruelty be devised by you
for the sake of making mankind miserable."

Once again, it was not words that made the power of the orator, it was the
relation in purpose, feeling, and conviction between him and his audience.
He forced them into unity with himself by the vivid strength of his
resolution and imagination; he could not believe that his own power of
emotion was not theirs too:--

On Monday morning last between four and five o'clock, I was
rattling down from Euston station through the calm and silent
streets of London, when there was not a footfall to disturb them.
Every house looked so still, that it might well have been a
receptacle of the dead. But as I came through those long lines of
streets, I felt it to be an inspiring and a noble thought that in
every one of these houses there were intelligent human beings, my
fellow-countrymen, who when they woke would give many of their
earliest thoughts, aye and some of their most energetic actions,
to the terrors and sufferings of Bulgaria.

All this was the very spirit of Milton's imperishable sonnet upon the late
Massacre in Piedmont; the spirit that made Cromwell say that the slaughter
in the Waldensian valleys "came as near to his heart as if his own nearest
and dearest had been concerned."

(M178) Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, who had been one of the most
responsible promoters of the policy of the Crimean war, told Mr. Gladstone
of his own strong impression (Sept. 10), that the formidable crisis would
not have arisen, had England in the first instance taken part with the
other Powers. Not that he believed that Russia was always and fully
trustworthy, but she was so circumstanced then as to be open to the full
bearing of our moral influence. Six weeks later Lord Stratford again
expressed his unaltered opinion that if in the beginning England had taken
her place at the side of the three emperors, the cloud on the horizon
would never have swelled out into its present colossal proportions. "It
seems to me," he said, "that Russia has been gradually drawn into a
position from which she can hardly retreat with credit." "Whatever shades
of difference appear in our opinions," he told Mr. Gladstone in September,
"may be traced in a great measure to your having made Bulgaria the main
object of your appeal, whereas the whole eastern questi