despatch. The famous Circular addressed to the European Governments, which bears his name was, in spite of Dilke's confident attribution of it to Cairns, his own work. He wrote it with closed doors in a single night; and it was accepted by the Cabinet the next morning with the omission only of a superfluous pronoun. Though it was generally regarded as his finest diplomatic achievement, it was not a success, as his biographer tells us, that he rated highly himself, for 'his own conception of a perfect diplomacy was always of one whose victories come without observation.' The leading points in the Circular were two: the sanctity of treaties in general and of the Treaty of Paris in particular, unless or until revised or set aside by the contracting parties; and, secondly, the need for a revision of the Treaty of San Stefano not merely in certain specified parts but as a whole, because it was in the drift of the whole and not in the provisions of the parts that its importance really lay. There was nothing here very different from, or very much in advance of, the position already taken up by Great Britain. It was the clarity of expression and the strength of purpose shown in the Circular that electrified the atmosphere. Europe had been waiting for a lead, and the lead had at last been given.

Good-fortune helped a diplomacy that helped itself. The illness of Gortchakoff, the Russian Chancellor, strengthened the hands of Schouvaloff, the Russian Ambassador, and enabled him to get his way, which was the way of compromise. Roughly speaking, Great Britain consented to let Russia keep her gains in Asia on condition that she moderated her demands in Europe. The project of a 'big' Bulgaria in particular was to be abandoned. With this much agreed by a secret convention between the leading controversialists, a European Congress might reasonably expect to assemble in good hope of success. Inconveniently enough, however, at least from the English point of view, a version of the Convention was sold by Charles Marvin, a copying clerk in the Foreign Office, whom Salisbury supposed to have been primed by Schouvaloff, to the 'Globe' newspaper. It was not a perfectly correct version; and Salisbury, when, after its publication, a question was asked in the House of Lords, characterised it as 'wholly unauthentic

and not deserving the confidence of your Lordships' house.' He said too much. It was in fact unauthentic only in one vital point. But Lady Gwendolen falls back upon the argument that secrets are sacred, and that honour is a higher obligation than candour. That is perhaps a good defence against a busybody, but the ethical difficulty here is more subtle. Parliament, in a country constituted like our own, has a right to call for information; and, if a Minister is to be allowed to decide for himself whether his reply should be accurate or misleading, one of the most essential checks upon the Executive disappears and, what is as bad or worse, the word of public men ceases to carry weight.

To some eyes the British negotiations preliminary to the Treaty of Berlin seemed to raise another case of conscience. While Salisbury was arranging the secret convention with Russia, he was also negotiating a private pact with Turkey, under which the Turks surrendered Cyprus in return for a British guarantee of their Asiatic possessions. If they supposed, however, that those possessions included the captured cities of Kars and Batum, they were mistaken, for these were being to all intents and purposes simultaneously signed away by the British Government to Russia. But perhaps they did not suppose it, since no one has been in the habit of returning to Turkey what has been wrenched away from her. The Cyprus Convention, anyhow, safeguarded the Asiatic half of British interests. And, though there is a passage in Tancred' which enables Beaconsfield's admirers to attribute the credit of that acquisition to his early imagination, the project for practical purposes took shape in Salisbury's mind after some talk with an intelligent British Intelligence Officer during his visit to Constantinople in 1876. It was at that time that he had made himself, to borrow his Chief's own words, 'a consummate master' of all the details of Near Eastern affairs.

once

The outlines of a settlement, then, were arranged before the Congress began, but it remained to secure a great spectacular triumph for the Prime Minister. This was achieved by a dexterous and fortunate combination of Machiavellian glances, dramatic postures, fine phrases and sensational tales. An epigram appraising

the respective values of Beaconsfield and Salisbury was put into the mouth of Bismarck and repeated by one journalist after another until it became a household word. Salisbury, the German Chancellor is supposed to have said, was but a lath painted to look like iron, while the 'old Jew' meant business. Critical history has, however, for some while rejected the amusing fable; and Eckhardstein in his lately published memoirs professes to have traced its origin to an observation of Bismarck's to Andrássy to the effect that Salisbury had undoubtedly great qualities as a statesman but that 'the old Jew beat him by several lengths.' In this form the story sounds probable enough. For the Germans measure statesmanship by Judaic rather than Christian standards.

Doubtless the old Jew meant business, but we have henceforward to accustom ourselves to the knowledge of the fact that Salisbury did it. The picture of the rusé old diplomat, which Mr Buckle's Life seemed to confirm, fades away into romantic legend. What with deafness, ignorance of French, and Bismarck's extraordinary mode of speech-here is the damning sentence in Salisbury's contemporary correspondence with his wife-'Beaconsfield has the dimmest idea of what is going on, understands everything crossways, and imagines a perpetual conspiracy.' The date of this observation is not unimportant. It was June 23. Two evenings before, according to Beaconsfield's contemporaneous letter to the Queen, he had sacrificed his shattered constitution in Bismarck's smoking-room in order to convince the German Chancellor that, if Turkey were not allowed to garrison the passes of the Balkans, Great Britain would break up the Congress. And on the morning of June 21, according to his private secretary's oft-told tale, he had given instructions for the ordering of a special train which might signify to the watchful eyes around him the full strength of his determination not to give way. Mr Buckle bids us treat these incidents gravely, and treats them so himself, even to the point of making them the climax of his chapter and the crux of the great diplomatic game that was played at the Congress. Yet we ought, perhaps, to have remembered that in Beaconsfield we had a romanticist and in Corry a raconteur.

Salisbury, it is to be inferred, knew nothing of these fine, sensational goings-on, or else he would presumably have retailed them to his wife. Bismarck to all appearance knew nothing of them either, for he makes no mention of them in his 'Reminiscences,' and apparently did not confide them to Busch. Moüy too, we may guess from his silence, had caught no wind of them. And Hanotaux, who had the conspicuous advantage of seeing the unpublished memoirs of Schouvaloff and Carathéodory, records them not. But what seems most decisive of all is the fact, as Lady Gwendolen points out in a modest footnote, that the Russian Emperor must have made up his mind to surrender and actually despatched his consent some hours before Beaconsfield and Corry planned and executed their theatricals. Bismarck's afternoon call and evening dinner made of course capital staging for the play; and the German Chancellor no doubt maintained his rôle of honest broker. But the really critical business, it seems pretty clear, was as good as settled before the British Prime Minister and his secretary had even dramatised their novel.

The Congress ended in time to allow Bismarck to take his accustomed waters at Kissingen, and in a manner that enabled Beaconsfield to wreathe himself with laurels and phrases, with stars and garters. Salisbury, on whom the blue ribbon was also conferred at his colleague's insistence rather than at his own desire, characteristically disliked and distrusted all this tinsel brilliance. It was not in keeping, as it seemed to him, with the sober England that he knew; and he felt convinced that the party managers would presently find this out at the polls. Not the least ironical feature of the 1880 election, indeed, was the fact that the Foreign Secretary, whose particular department was most in the public mind, half sympathised with the feelings of his critics. Within the limits of their knowledge, the electors had judged as he was conscious that he himself would have judged under similar restrictions. They disliked sensationalism in policy, and so did he.'

There for the present the biography closes. Lady Gwendolen shuts the book quietly, not pausing to depict, even though perhaps she witnessed it, the last episode in Beaconsfield's curious relations with her father-the

old statesman receiving at Hatfield, in the house of one who had been his bitterest political foe and had grown through the strange chances and changes of public life to be his firmest political friend, the news of those successive defeats at the polls which at his age could mean nothing less than the end of his official career. He has been the foil of her first two volumes; and she will miss his figure sadly when she comes to write her next, for he retains his infinite variety in spite of the making of many books. Meanwhile every student of politics and history will wish her God-speed upon the long road she has yet to travel. Her labour has fallen in a fortunate and important time. Parties are once more in the making; and a subject like hers, treated as it is in essay form and enriched by lucid and facile expression, can hardly leave opinion wholly unaffected. Conservative though he was as well by conviction as inheritance, it is a moot point to what party Salisbury would have attached himself in a world changed, like our own, out of all recognition. When those who have the best claim to represent him wander restlessly on the confines of their former camp, we may well ask whether he would have thought the tradition of sound government, stable policy, and individual freedom better honoured by the dubious offspring of the great party he once led, with its new element of wizardry and its complement of master-pressmen, than among its comparatively old-fashioned opponents. And, whatever answer is returned, we may at least feel confident that, as the biography advances, the contrast between his method of doing things and that of many leading politicians in office to-day, between the tone he adopted to teach his countrymen to think politically and that at present in vogue, will force itself, especially if we should happen to be of Bagehot's way of thinking, more and more insistently upon the mind.