Mr. Gladstone's great speech in the Edinburgh Music Hall on
Wednesday it is, of course, simply impossible to condense, or even to characterise, in the few lines at our disposal. It was a speech on the strength of the Empire, on the policy best calculated to preserve and increase that strength, and it drew a contrast between the means selected for that purpose by the Liberals and the Tories. Mr. Glad- stone contrasted Lord Beaconsfield's recent assertion that the foreign policy of his predecessors had bequeathed to him a political inheritance of difficulty and European depreciation of England, with Lord Derby's official announcement that in succeeding to office he had found the foreign relations of the British Government all that could be wished ; and he compared what the Liberal Government had done for the defence of Belgium, when a con- spiracy against its independence was revealed, with what the Tory Government had done for the defence of Turkey, after it had accepted the mission of defending the integrity of the Turkish Empire. Mr. Gladstone's main point was that the Government proposed to themselves a bad end in relation to Turkey, spent a great deal of money and bluster on that end, and so far from achieving it, left Turkey in ruins ; while the Liberal Government proposed to itself a good end in relation to Belgium, spent enough upon it to show they were abso- lutely in earnest, and completely secured their end. The meet- ing, which contained persons of both parties, passed a vote of confidence in Mr. Gladstone, with only three dissentients.
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