nt than foreigners can possess."

In the middle of September Thiers, in the course of his valiant mission to
European courts, reached London. "Yesterday," Mr. Gladstone writes (Sept.
14), "I saw Thiers and had a long conversation with him; he was very clear
and touching in parts. But the purpose of his mission is vague. He seems
come to do just what he can." The vagueness of Thiers did but mirror the
distractions of France. Not even from his ingenious, confident, and
fertile mind could men hope for a clue through the labyrinth of European
confusions. Great Britain along with four other powers recognised the new
government of the Republic in France at the beginning of February 1871.

(M111) It was about this time that Mr. Gladstone took what was for a prime
minister the rather curious step of volunteering an anonymous article in a
review, upon these great affairs in which his personal responsibility was
both heavy and direct.(219) The precedent can hardly be called a good one,
for as anybody might have known, the veil was torn aside in a few hours
after the _Edinburgh Review_ containing his article appeared. Its object,
he said afterwards, was "to give what I thought needful information on a
matter of great national importance, which involved at the time no
interest of party whatever. If such interests had been involved, a rule
from which I have never as a minister diverted would have debarred me from
writing." Lord Granville told him that, "It seemed to be an admirable
argument, the more so as it is the sort of thing Thiers ought to have said
and did not." The article made a great noise, as well it might, for it was
written with much eloquence, truth, and power, and was calculated to
console his countrymen for seeing a colossal European conflict going on,
without the privilege of a share in it. One passage about happy
England--happy especially that the wise dispensation of Providence had cut
her off by the streak of silver sea from continental dangers--rather
irritated than convinced. The production of such an article under such
circumstances was a striking illustration of Mr. Gladstone's fervid
desire--the desire of a true orator's temperament--to throw his eager mind
upon a multitude of men, to spread the light of his own urgent conviction,
to play the part of missionary with a high evangel, which had been his
earliest ideal forty years before. Everybody will agree that it was better
to have a minister writing his own