240 ENGLISHSAGA

Disraeli was sensitive to these mighty forces: his countrymen
were not. He realised that England's present place in the world
depended on the abandonment of the policy of "meddle and
muddle" so dear to liberal and humanitarian sentiment, and
its replacement by her historic doctrine of balancing Power
against Power. Still more clearly he realised that her future
depended on her capacity to find an outlet for her 'swelling
population beyond her own dangerously congested shores.
Because of this he was the first statesman to grasp the signifi-
cance of the great canal which French engineers built in the
'sixties across the eastern Egyptian desert to link the Red Sea
with the Mediterranean. By securing for his country the
bankrupt Khedive of Egypt's controlling shares in the Suez
Canal Company, Disraeli during his final tenure of power
placed the most vital artery in the British Empire beyond the
control of an international financial power. By simultaneously
opposing a renewed Russian advance on Constantinople and the
Mediterranean he defended the same artery from the threat of
what seemed at that time—though as many believe wrongly—,
the dominant European* power of the future.

In doing so Disraeli was solicitous for interests still beyond
the narrow ken of the average British voter and statesman. The
tired imperial statesng&n who brought back " peace with honour*
from- the Berlin Conference unwittingly offended the humani-
tarian conscience of his country. It was his misfortune—many
enthusiastic opponents regarded it as his fault—to have to
maintain the independence of a Mohammedan despotism against
an uprising of Christian peoples. To the kindly middle classes
the inviolability of treaties, the balance of European power and
England's strategic communications with India meant little or
nothing. But the stories of the atrocities committed by Turkish
irregulars in the Bulgarian provinces did. They aroused the
country.

In die hands of Gladstone, the very incarnation of the English

conscience, all this became a weapon to scourge a cynic in office.

' The north-country working man was swept off his feet by

his appeal for moral righteousness. -To humble minds the

great Liberal's electoral campaign of iSSo1 seemed a crusade for

XA Conservative sjpeaker who told his audience that Gladstone was only an
ambitious politician -with his eyes on the Treasury Bench -was answered with a "Yes
and he'll have his bottom on it soon if you don't look out.*—Ether, Memoirs.