It is not, however, in matters of law only.  We have been busy in alienating the sympathies of free peoples.  The free Slavonic peoples of the East of Europe—­the people of Roumania, the people of Montenegro, the people of Servia, the people of Bulgaria—­each and all of these have been painfully taught in these last few years to look upon the free institutions of this country as being for them a dream, as being, perhaps, for the enjoyment of this country, but not as availing to animate a nation with a generous desire to extend to others the blessings they enjoyed themselves.  In other times—­it was so when Mr. Canning was the Minister of this country, when Lord Palmerston was the Minister of this country, when Lord Clarendon was the Minister of this country at the Foreign Office—­it was well known that England, while regardful of her own just interests, and while measuring on every occasion her strength and her responsibility, yet was willing to use and willing to find opportunities for giving cordial aid and sympathy to freedom; and by aid and sympathy many a nation has been raised to its present position of free independence, which, without that sympathy, would probably never have attained to such a height in the order of civilization.  The sympathies of free people ought to be a dear and precious object of our ambition.  Ambition may be a questionable quality:  if you give a certain meaning to the phrase, it ill comports with the Christian law.  But there is one sense in which ambition will never mislead men; that is the ambition to be good, and the ambition to do good in relieving from evil those who are grievously suffering, and who have not deserved the evils they endure:  that is the ambition which every British statesman ought to cherish.  But, as I have said, for the last two years especially—­and even for more than two years—­more or less, I think, during the whole active period of the foreign policy of the Beaconsfield Administration—­the sympathies of these now free peoples of the East have been constantly more and more alienated; and except, perhaps, in a single case which I am glad to cling to—­the single and isolated case of Eastern Roumania—­except this case, the whole strength of England, as far as they have been conversant with it, has been exercised for the purpose of opposing their best interests.

Well, gentlemen, while free peoples have been alienated, a despotic Power has been aggrandized through our direct agency.  We have more than any other Power of Europe contributed to the direct aggrandizement of Russia and to its territorial extension.  And how?  Not by following the counsels of the Liberal party.  The counsels of the Liberal party were the concert of Europe—­the authoritative declaration of the will of Europe to Turkey.  Had that authoritative declaration been made, we believe that it would have been enforced without the shedding of a drop of blood.  But even suppose there had been bloodshed—­I am not now speaking of