A correspondent at Vienna telegraphed on Wednesday to the Daily
News that the Sultan had offered Mr. Gladstone £50,000 a year to put the Turkish finances straight. This rumour seems to have been flashed back to Constantinople, where Mr. Gladstone was believed to have accepted the offer, and then was reported to Paris, where, of course, any amount of details were forthcoming. Mr. Gladstone had accepted the offer, had stipulated for five years certain, had asked for a palace on the Bosphorus, and had arranged for the dismissal of all speculating employe's of the department. The story is probably a canard, built on some jocular suggestion. The Sultan does not want to im- prove his finances, but to get money, which he can do easily by breaking his engagements, and Mr. Gladstone, besides being a steady friend of the Greeks against the Turks, would be as powerless in that cesspool of corruption as Lord Hobart was. Only a Sultan can reform Turkish administration, and that by the sabre's edge.
