ur cares, for to maintain our neutrality in such a case as
this, will be a most arduous task. On the face of the facts France is
wrong, but as to personal trustworthiness the two moving spirits on the
respective sides, Napoleon and Bismarck, are nearly on a par." His
individual activity was unsparing. He held almost daily conferences with
Lord Granville at the foreign office; criticised and minuted despatches;
contributed freely to the drafts. "There has not, I think," he wrote to
Bright (Sept. 12), "been a single day on which Granville and I have not
been in anxious communication on the subject of the war." When Lord
Granville went to Walmer he wrote to Mr. Gladstone, "I miss our
discussions here over the despatches as they come in very much." "I hope I
need not say that while you are laid up with gout at Walmer," Mr.
Gladstone wrote in October, "I am most ready to start at a few hours'
notice at any time of day or night, to join you upon any matter which you
may find to require it. Indeed I could not properly or with comfort remain
here upon any other terms." Details of this agitating time, with all its
convulsions and readjustments, belong to the history of Europe. The part
taken by Mr. Gladstone and his cabinet was for several months in pretty
close harmony with the humour of the country. It will be enough for us to
mark their action at decisive moments.

On July 16 he wrote to Cardwell at the war office:--

If, unhappily, which God forbid, we have to act in this war, it
will not be with six months', nor three months', nor even one
month's notice. The real question is, supposing an urgent call of
honour and of duty in an emergency for 15,000 or 20,000 men, what
would you do? What answer would the military authorities make to
this question, those of them especially who have brains rather
than mere position? Have you no fuller battalions than those of
500? At home or in the Mediterranean? If in the latter, should
they not be brought home? Childers seemed to offer a handsome
subscription of marines, and that the artillery would count for
much in such a case is most probable. What I should like is to
study the means of sending 20,000 men to Antwerp with as much
promptitude as at the Trent affair we sent 10,000 to Canada.

The figures of the army and navy were promptly supplied to the prime
minister, Cardwell adding with, a certain shrillness that, though he had
n