ng impetus of right carries them up to a
certain point, and a residue of that impetus, drawn from the
contact with human passion and infirmity, pushes them beyond it.
They vault into the saddle; they fall on the other side. The
instance most commonly present to my mind is the error of England
in entering the Revolutionary war in 1793. Slow sometimes to go
in, she is slower yet to come out, and if she had then held her
hand, the course of the revolution and the fate of Europe would in
all likelihood have been widely different. There might have been
no Napoleon. There might have been no Sedan.

The changes in the political map effected by these dire months of
diplomacy and war were almost comparable in one sense to those of the
treaty of Muenster, or the treaty of the Pyrenees, or the treaties of
Vienna, save that those great instruments all left a consolidated Europe.
Italy had crowned her work by the acquisition of Rome. Russia had wiped
out the humiliation of 1856. Prussia, after three wars in six years, had
conquered the primacy of a united Germany. Austria had fallen as Prussia
rose. France had fallen, but she had shaken off a government that had no
root in the noblest qualities of her people.

Chapter VII. "Day's Work Of A Giant". (1870-1872)

We have not been an idle government. We have had an active life,
and that is substantially one of the conditions of a happy
life.... I am thankful to have been the leader of the liberal
party at a period of the history of this country, when it has been
my privilege and my duty to give the word of advance to able
coadjutors and trusty and gallant adherents.--GLADSTONE.

I

The most marked administrative performance of Mr. Gladstone's great
government was the reform and reorganisation of the army. In Mr. Cardwell
he was fortunate enough to have a public servant of the first order; not a
political leader nor a popular orator, but one of the best disciples of
Peel's school; sound, careful, active, firm, and with an enlightened and
independent mind admirably fitted for the effective despatch of business.
Before he had been a month at the war office, the new secretary of state
submitted to Mr. Gladstone his ideas of a plan that would give us an
effective force for defence at a greatly reduced cost. The reorganisation
of the army was one of the results of that great central event, from which
in every dir