to transcendent oratory and the profoundest statesmanship,—­for it is undeniable that his financial speeches brought him more fame and importance in the House of Commons than all the others he made during those seven years of parliamentary gladiatorship.  One of these triumphantly carried through Parliament a commercial reciprocity treaty with France, arranged by Mr. Cobden; and another, scarcely less notable, repealed the duty on paper,—­a measure of great importance for the facilitation of making books and cheapening newspapers, but both of which were desperately opposed by the monopolists and manufacturers.

Some of Mr. Gladstone’s other speeches stand on higher ground and are of permanent value; they will live for the lofty sentiments and the comprehensive knowledge which marked them,—­appealing to the highest intellect as well as to the hearts of those common people of whom all nations are chiefly composed.  Among these might be mentioned those which related to Italian affairs, sympathizing with the struggle which the Italians were making to secure constitutional liberty and the unity of their nation,—­severe on the despotism of that miserable king of Naples, Francis II., whom Garibaldi had overthrown with a handful of men.  Mr. Gladstone, ever since his last visit to Naples, had abominated the outrages which its government had perpetrated on a gallant and aspiring people, and warmly supported them by his eloquence.  In the same friendly spirit, in 1858, he advocated in Parliament a free constitution for the Ionian islands, then under British rule; and when sent thither as British commissioner he addressed the Senate of those islands, at Corfu, in the Italian language.  The islands were by their own desire finally ceded to Greece, whose prosperity as an independent and united nation Mr. Gladstone ever had at heart.  The land of Homer to him was hallowed ground.

On one subject Mr. Gladstone made a great mistake, which he afterward squarely acknowledged,—­and this was in reference to the American civil war.  In 1862, while chancellor of the exchequer, he made a speech at Newcastle in which he expressed his conviction that Jefferson Davis had “already succeeded in making the Southern States of America [which were in revolt] an independent nation.”  This opinion caused a great sensation in both England and the United States, and alienated many friends,—­especially as Earl Russell, the minister of foreign affairs, had refused to recognize the Confederate States.  It was the indiscretion of the chancellor of the exchequer which disturbed some of his warmest supporters in England; but in America the pain arose from the fact that so great a man had expressed such an opinion,—­a man, moreover, for whom America had then and still has the greatest admiration and reverence.  It was feared that his sympathies, like those of a great majority of the upper classes in England at the time, were with the South rather than the North, and chiefly