back, and, speaking as if he held a brief for his friends the Russians, he denounced the demand of the Government in thunderous invective, and the House rang with his measured heroics.
It was perhaps fitting that he who had so indelibly written his name in the history of his country should end his great career in the thunder of his own eloquence. Such a man could not pass from the stage he had so long occupied as a central figure without the loud clashing of music, the burning of red fire, and the tumultuous roar of enthusiasm rising from the throats of his multitudinous audience. It was a fitting close to the final act, upon which the curtain was so soon to fall, leaving only the memory of a great name and the dust and smoke of party strife. That Ireland was seething with sedition; that the mighty Empire of India was threatened by an unscrupulous and ambitious enemy; that the Soudan was in a blaze, and Egypt crushed, torn, and bleeding; that dangerous friction existed between England and France; that everywhere were signs and sounds as of the moan of the wind before the bursting of the storm; that stagnation in trade was apparent throughout the land; that thousands and thousands of unhappy people were dying for the want of food; that gaunt, famine-stricken men were in their desperation ready to rise in fury at any one's call and scatter death and ruin around;—all these things were nothing as compared with party feeling. And though the misery, and the ruin, and the danger were the outcome of years of Liberal mismanagement, Mr. Gladstone and his fanatical followers hurled their thunderbolts of accusation at the Conservatives and blamed them for it all.
If the spirit of decay had not already set in, it is certain that Englishmen, at this exciting period of their history, would not have allowed the clamour of politics to have deafened them to the warnings of danger; nor would they have allowed the dying flash of an expiring genius to have dazzled them so that they failed to see the portentous signs that were making themselves manifest in the firmament of their Empire. But so it was; and as a result the Government fell. By holding out bribes should they be returned to office the Opposition secured the Irish votes, and the Government were defeated by a large majority, which left
