Gladstone’s extraordinary power, and of the sure respect of a British audience for manful handling and firm dealing in a minister, if only the appeal be high enough.

Gladstone had studied all the arts for husbanding vocal resources—carried his words beyond the five or six thousand persons that are commonly understood to be the limit of possible hearers in the open air.

In his character the mellowing process has continued to advance, and whatever he may have been thirty years ago, he is now a gentle and tender being.

Gladstone felt, as he told Lord Hatherley, that “it was not right to hawk the appointment about,” and he offered it to Sir Robert Collier, then attorney-general.

I have not a grain of inclination to recede from the course marked out, and if you had proposed to abandon the appointment, I should have remonstrated.

Extravagance is being substituted for energy by the government.

He agreed that distant colonies could only have their affairs administered by self-government.

Self-government, when it was conceded, ought to have been conceded as part of a great policy of imperial consolidation.

Opinion in the country was at last rising against disintegration.

The people had decided that the empire should not be destroyed.

You have nothing to trust to but your own energy and the sublime instinct of an ancient people.

When power fell into his hands, he made no single move of solid effect for either social reform or imperial unity.

The Northern states have been drifted, or rather plunged into war without having any intelligible aim or policy.

The South fight for independence; but what do the North fight for, except to gratify passion or pride?”—Letters, p. 395, etc.

Gladstone protested against the bill as “inequitable, unusual, and unwise,” and it was largely modified in committee.

Yet he had prepared this document for the very purpose of tempting France into a declaration of war.

For this line of contention he was called an “unpatriotic trumpet of disaster,” and other names commonly bestowed on all men in all countries who venture to say that what chances for the hour to be a popular war is a blunder.

People still believe that Russian diplomats are particularly crafty and clever, full of artifices and stratagems, but that is not the case.

It is a case so to speak of “limited liability.” We are bound in honour—you cannot put a legal construction upon it—to see in concert with others that these arrangements are maintained.

If they, situated exactly as we are, decline to join, we are not bound single-handed to make up the deficiencies of the rest.

Can wool repair The colours that it lost when soaked with dye?

True merit once resigned, No trick nor feint will serve as well.

A rendering less apt for this occasion finds favour with some scholars, that true virtue can never be restored to those who have once fallen away from it.

Individuals may recover from even serious sickness; it does not appear to be the way with governments.”—Mr.

They might learn how the true gentleman speaks of one whom he cannot but admit to have devoted a long life to the search of truth, and allow to have sacrificed every personal prospect to the promulgation of that which appeared to him as…