Although Mr. Gladstone must always be associated with those who were responsible for the guilt of dragging this country, and perhaps France, into the Crimean war in defence of a State and a people whom he declared in other days should be turned out of Europe “bag and baggage” because of her unwholesome Government and hideous crimes to her subject races, he had the courage and the honesty to declare in later life that the part he took in allowing himself to acquiesce in a policy he did not approve, would always be a bitter thought to him.  Had he been at the head of the Government then, and had he lived at the time of the continental upheaval that followed the French Revolution, all the evidences of his humane spirit and prodigious capacity lead us to the belief that there were no circumstances affecting our vital national interests that would have led him to take up arms against France.  Nor do we think that a statesman of Lord Salisbury’s stamp would have failed to find a way out.  Disraeli was a different type.  He lived in a picturesque world, and thirsted for sensation.  The enormity of war was meaningless to him.  He was not a constitutional statesman, but merely a politician who liked to arouse emotions.  Mr. Asquith, whose head is free from the wafting of feathers, would, with strong and loyal backers, have applied his inimitable powers of persuasion and tact in accomplishing his ends without a rupture; and Lord Morley would as soon have thought of dancing a hornpipe on his mother’s tomb as have yielded to the clamour for war by any number of the people or any number of his colleagues, no matter how numerous or how powerful they might be; even though his opinion of the French Emperor were strongly adverse, he would have angled for peace or resigned.  I would rather place the guidance of the country through intricate courses in this man’s hands than in that of a man mentally constituted as was Pitt.  The present Viscount Grey would have taken the line his namesake took in 1815 by strongly advocating a peaceful solution.

Take another man of our own time, the Right Hon. Arthur Balfour.  He would have parleyed and schemed until the time had passed for any useful object to be gained by our joining in the war, always provided that the Jingo spirit were not too irrepressible for him to overpower and bewilder with his engaging philosophy.  If George III had been blessed with these types of statesmen to advise him instead of the Castlereaghs, he might not have lost his reason.  Napoleon would never have gone to Egypt, and our shores would never have been threatened with invasion.  Nor would British and neutral trade have been paralysed in such a way as to bring in its wake ruin, riots, bankruptcies, and every form of devastation in 1811.  And as a natural corollary, we were plunged into a war with America which lasted from 1812 to 1814, and which left, as it well might, long years of bitter and vindictive memories in the minds of a people who were of our race and kindred.  Our people as a whole (but especially the poorer classes) were treated in a manner akin to barbarism, while their rulers invoked them to bear like patriots the suffering they had bestowed upon them.