NEWS OF THE WEEK • T HE great incident of the
anti-Turkish agitation occurred on Thursday, when Mr. Gladstone spoke for an hour and a quarter in Hengler's Circus, Liverpool, to an audience of six thousand persona of both parties, every man of whom was able to catch every sentence of the orator. As a speaker Mr. Gladstone has lost little of his form, and some of his sentences were of exceeding force, as when he declared that the massacres in Constantinople were no worse than those in the provinces, but to "all else was added consummate insolence," or when he showed that these massacres were intended as tests of the patience of Europe—" he paraded massacre under the eyes of every Court in Europe "—and that their result must encourage the Sultan to advance on the infamous course he had begun. Mr. Gladstone taunted diplomacy with its weakness, and showed by many illustrations that the "Concert of Europe," august power as it was, had in the East proved usually a failure. Twenty millions of people had been rescued from the Turkish Pashas, but it had been by the efforts of individual Powers,— that is, of England as regarded Thessaly and Montenegro ; of Austria as regarded Bosnia; of Russia as regarded Bul- garia. Still, he would work in concert with the Powers, but so far "the Powers collectively have undergone miserable disgrace."
