sank and sank, and on August 7 he
talked for the last time coherently and composedly to those who were
around him. Then he met his approaching death with a resigned and
cheerful spirit, and his latest words showed that he knew where to
repose his trust for the great change which was so near. Shortly
before four o'clock on the morning of August 8, 1827, the struggle was
over and the great statesman was at rest. Even at that early hour the
villa was surrounded by a large crowd of anxious watchers, who could
not leave the grounds until they heard the last tidings that were to
come from the sick-chamber. The funeral of Canning in Westminster
Abbey, although it was in name a private ceremonial, was followed by a
throng of sorrowing admirers, among whom were princes and nobles,
statesmen and prelates, politicians of all orders, and men and women of
all ranks down to the very poorest, who thus bore their spontaneous
tribute to the services and the memory of the great Prime Minister, and
expressed in the only way left to them their sense of the loss which
his country and the cause of peace and freedom had sustained by his
death.

{62}

[Sidenote: 1827--Canning and the English ministers]

Canning had only just completed his fifty-seventh year when his career
came to a close. He died before his old friend and colleague whose
sudden illness had left open to him the place of Prime Minister, for
Lord Liverpool did not die until December 4 of the following year. The
place of Canning in English history is more clear to us now than it was
to the world even when the anxious crowd was watching round the villa
at Chiswick and when the throng followed his remains to Westminster
Abbey. He was, as we have already said, the founder of that system of
foreign policy which English statesmanship has professed ever since his
time. His was that doctrine of conditional non-intervention for which,
in later days, men like John Stuart Mill contended as the doctrine
which ought to be the governing principle of a great council of
European States, if such could be established. Canning's idea was not
that England should proclaim such a principle of non-intervention as
that which Cobden and Bright, and other men equally sincere and
patriotic, endeavored to impress on public opinion at a later day.
Canning's principle was that England should not intervene even on the
right side of any Continental struggle in which she had no direct
concern, unl