XXIV. CHAP. lovers of peace from the duty of further questioning; for if Lord Aberdeen continued to head the Ministry which was leading the country into war, people thought he must have attained a bitter certainty that war was needed: and, on the other hand, it was clear that Mr Gladstone, remaining in office, and taking it upon his conscience to prepare funds for the bloody strife, was giving to the public a sure guarantee that the enterprise in which he helped to engage the country was blameless at the very least, and even perhaps pure and holy. It was thus that the conscience of the people got quieted. It was a hard task to have to argue that peace could be honestly and wisely maintained when Lord Aberdeen was levying war. None but a bold man could say that the war was needless or wicked whilst Mr Gladstone was feeding it with his own hand. It was thus that, by the course which Lord Aberdeen and Mr Gladstone had been taking, the efforts of those who loved peace were paralysed. No doubt a cold retrospect, carried on with the light of the past, may enable a political critic to fix upon more than one occasion when, holding the opinions which they did, these two Ministers might have resolved to make a stand for peace; and it is believed that, long before his death, Lord Aberdeen saw this and grieved: but if any man will honestly recall the state of his own feelings and opinions in the year 1853, he will find perhaps that he himself at the time was carried down by the flood of events; and when he has submitted to this self-discipline, he will be the better able to understand that others, CHA P. XXIV. though honest and able, might easily lose their footing. At all events, the errors of Lord Aberdeen and Mr Gladstone, if errors they were, were only errors of judgment. The scrupulous purity of their motives has never been brought into question. The ruin of their cause was not for want of ample stand upon. But if these were the causes which inclined the bulk of the English people to desire or to assent to the war, they hardly yield reasons sufficing to show why the lesser number of men, who honestly thought grounds to that peace ought to be maintained, should suffer themselves to be overpowered without making stand enough to prove that they clung to their old faith, and that England, however warlike, was, at all events, not of one mind. The hottest defenders of the warpolicy could hardly refuse to acknowledge that there was much semblance of reason on the side of their adversaries. No one could say that the interest which England had in the perfect independence of the Ottoman Empire was so obvious and so deep as to exclude all questioning; and even if a man were driven from that first ground, still, without being guilty of paradox, he might fairly dispute, and say that the independence of the Sultan was not really brought into peril by a form of words which, during some weeks, had received the approval of every one of the five great Powers. But if these views were only plausible, there was another which was sound. It could be fairly maintained that the intrusion of Russia into two provinces lying far away on the south-eastern frontiers CHAP. of Austria was no cause why England alone, nor XXIV. why England and France together, should undertake Nor for want of power. to stand forward and perform, at their own charge and cost, a duty which attached upon Austria in the first place, and next upon Europe at large. Of course, the actual and immediate success of any oratorical such struggle for the maintenance of peace was grievously embarrassed, in the way already shown, by the course which had been taken by Lord Aberdeen and Mr Gladstone; but it is not the custom of the English to be utterly disheartened by political losses; and it happened that outside the Government Offices the cause of peace was headed by two men who had been powerful in their time, and who retained the qualities of mind and body by which, in former years, they had gained a great sway. Mr Cobden and Mr Cobden and Mr Bright were members of the Mr Bright. House of Commons. Both had the gift of a manly strenuous eloquence; and their diction, being founded upon English lore rather than upon shreds of weak Latin, went straight to the mind of their hearers. Of these men the one could persuade, the other could attack; and, indeed, Mr Bright's oratory was singularly well qualified for preventing an erroneous acquiescence in the policy of the day; for, besides that he was honest and fearless-besides that, with a ringing voice, he had all the clearness and force which resulted from his great natural gifts, as well as from his one-sided method of thinking-he had the advantage of being generally able to speak in a state of sincere anger. In former years, whilst XXIV. their minds were disciplined by the almost mathe- CHAP. matic exactness of the reasonings on which they relied, and when they were acting in concert with the shrewd traders of the north who had a very plain object in view, these two orators had shown with what a strength, with what a masterly skill, with what patience, with what a high courage, they could carry a great scientific truth through the storms of politics. They had shown that they could arouse and govern the assenting thousands who listened to them with delight-that they could bend the House of Commons-that they could press their creed upon a Prime Minister, and put upon his mind so hard a stress that, after a while, he felt it to be a torture and a violence to his reason to have to make stand against them. Nay, more each of these two gifted men had proved that he could go bravely into the midst of angry opponents-could show them their fallacies one by one-destroy their favourite theories before their very faces, and triumphantly argue them down. Now these two men were honestly devoted to the cause of peace. They honestly believed that the impending war with Russia was a needless war. There was no stain upon their names. How came it that they sank, and were able to make no good stand for the cause they loved so well? The answer is simple. why they Upon the question of peace or war (the very Reasons question upon which more than any other a man were able might well desire to make his counsels tell) these two no stand. VOL. I. 2 E to make CHAP. gifted men had forfeited their hold upon the ear of XXIV. the country. They had forfeited it by their former want of moderation. It was not by any intemperate words upon the question of this war with Russia that they had shut themselves out from the counsels of the nation; but in former years they had adopted and put forward, in their strenuous way, some of the more extravagant doctrines of the Peace Party. In times when no war was in question, they had run down the practice of war in terms so broad and indiscriminate that they were understood to commit themselves to a disapproval of all wars not strictly defensive, and to decline to treat as defensive those wars which, although not waged against an actual invader of the Queen's dominions, might still be undertaken by England in the performance of a European duty, or for the purpose of checking the undue ascendancy of another Power. Of course the knowledge that they held doctrines of this wide sort disqualified them from arguing with any effect against the war then impending. A man cannot have weight as an opponent of any particular war if he is. one who is known to be against almost all war. It is vain for him to offer to be moderate for the nonce, and to propose to argue the question in a way which his hearers will recognise. In vain he declares that for the sake of argument he will lay aside his own broad principles and mimic the reasoning of his hearers. Practical men know that his mind is under the sway of an antecedent determination which dispenses him from the more narrow but more important inquiry |