bill came to be debated in Committee. It was impossible to catch Mr.
Gladstone tripping on a point of fact, or unprepared with a reply to
the arguments of an opponent. He seemed to revel in the toil of
mastering a tangle of technical details.

It is long since England, in this respect not favoured by her
parliamentary system, has produced a great foreign minister, nor has
that title been claimed for Mr. Gladstone. But he showed on several
occasions both his independence of tradition and his faith in broad
principles as fit to be applied in international relations; and his
action in that field, though felt only at intervals, has left abiding
results in European history. In 1851, he being then still a Tory, his
pamphlet denouncing the cruelties of the Bourbon government of Naples,
and the sympathy he subsequently avowed with the national movement in
Italy, gave that movement a new standing in Europe by powerfully
recommending it to English opinion. In 1870 the prompt action of his
ministry in arranging a treaty for the neutrality of Belgium on the
outbreak of the war between France and Germany, averted the risk that
Belgium might be drawn into the strife. In 1871, by concluding the
treaty of Washington, which provided for the settlement by arbitration
of the _Alabama_ claims, he not only set a precedent full of promise
for the future, but delivered England from what would have been, in
case of her being at war with any European power, a danger fatal to
her ocean commerce. And, in 1876, his onslaught upon the Turks, after
the Bulgarian massacres, roused an intense feeling in England, turning
the current of opinion so decisively that Disraeli's ministry were
forced to leave the Sultan to his fate, and thus became a cause of the
ultimate deliverance of Bulgaria, Eastern Rumelia, Bosnia, and
Thessaly from Mussulman tyranny. Few English statesmen have equally
earned the gratitude of the oppressed.

Nothing lay nearer to his heart than the protection of the Christians
of the East. His sense of personal duty to them was partly due to the
feeling that the Crimean War had prolonged the rule of the Turk, and
had thus imposed a special responsibility on Britain, and on the
members of Lord Aberdeen's cabinet which drifted into that war. Twenty
years after the agitation of 1876, and when he had finally retired
from Parliament and political life, the massacres perpetrated by the
Sultan on his Armenian subjects brought him once more in