And yet the positive part of Mr. Gladstone's speech was
scarcely more powerful than his indignant and lofty attack on the vacillating and dishonest policy of the Conservative Government, "sometimes watered down to the extreme of debility, sometimes flying to the seventh heaven of rhetorical exaggeration, and tell- ing us that we were proposing that which was worse than foreign conquest." The policy of Mr. Disraeli was such that you need not fear his not ultimately conceding, as happened after the Hyde Park riots, the very measures asked by the Liberals ; but "you would get them at that stage at which, instead of enlightened conviction, a slavish fear has become the motive." "I look," con- cluded Mr. Gladstone, "to this Protestant people to put down Protestant ascendancy, which pretends to reach its ends by doing homage to religious truth, and instead of consecrating politics, desecrates religion," adding a few sentences of simple, stately, and most eloquent peroration, which Mr. Bright, in his greatest speeches, has seldom surpassed.
