“If, when you have attained the objects of the war, you continue it for the sake of mere military glory, I say you tempt the justice of Him in whose hands the fates of armies are as absolutely lodged as the fate of the infant slumbering in its cradle.”

This being his general view of war, it was inevitable that he should regard with horror the prospect of intervention in the Franco-German War, which broke out with startling suddenness, when he was Prime Minister, in the summer of 1870.  He strained every nerve to keep England out of the struggle, and was profoundly thankful that Providence enabled him to do so.  Yet all through that terrible crisis he saw quite clearly that either of the belligerent Powers might take a step which would oblige England to intervene, and he made a simultaneous agreement with Prussia and France that, if either violated the neutrality of Belgium, England would co-operate with the other to defend the little State.  Should Belgium, he said, “go plump down the maw of another country to satisfy dynastic greed,” such a tragedy would “come near to an extinction of public right in Europe, and I do not think we could look on while the sacrifice of freedom and independence was in course of consummation.”

3.  WAR-FINANCE AND ECONOMY.

A colleague once said about Gladstone, “The only two things which really interest him are Religion and Finance.”  The saying is much too unguarded, but it conveys a certain truth.  My own opinion is that Finance was the field of intellectual effort in which his powers were most conspicuously displayed; and it was always remarked that, when he came to deal with the most prosaic details of national income and expenditure, his eloquence rose to an unusual height and power.  At the same time, he was a most vigilant guardian of the public purse, and he was incessantly on the alert to prevent the national wealth, which his finance had done so much to increase, from being squandered on unnecessary and unprofitable objects.  This jealousy of foolish expenditure combined with his love of peace to make him very chary of spending money on national defences.  When he was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Palmerston, his eagerness in this regard caused his chief to write to the Queen that “it would be better to lose Mr. Gladstone than to run the risk of losing Portsmouth or Plymouth.”  At the end of his career, his final retirement was precipitated by his reluctance to sanction a greatly increased expenditure on the Navy, which the Admiralty considered necessary.  From first to last he sheltered himself under a dogma of his financial master—­Sir Robert Peel—­to the effect that it is possible for a nation, as for an individual, so to over-insure its property as to sacrifice its income.  “My name,” he said at the end, “stands in Europe as a symbol of the policy of peace, moderation, and non-aggression.  What would be said of my active participation in a policy that will be taken as plunging England into the whirlpool of Militarism?”