Pour le moment!"
She is absent during the sudden dissolution of Parliament in 1874.
"London woke yesterday morning and found that your friend Gladstone
had made a coup-d'etat. He has dissolved Parliament at a moment
when no human being expected it, and my impression is that he has
made a good hit, and that the renovated Parliament will give him a
great majority." The impression was wildly wrong; and he found a
cause for the Conservative majority in Gladstone's tame foreign
policy, and especially in the pusillanimity his government showed
when insulted by Gortschakoff. He always does justice to her
influence with Gladstone; his great majority at the polls in 1880
is HER victory and HER triumph; but his Turkophobia is no less her
creation: "England is stricken with incapacity because you have
stirred up the seething caldron that boils under Gladstone's skull,
putting in diabolical charms and poisons of theology to overturn
the structure of English polity:" she will be able, he thinks, to
tell her government that Gladstone is doing his best to break up
the British Empire.
He quotes with approbation the newspaper comparison of her to the
Princess Lieven.
Pages:
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111