ABSTRACT
William Gladstone was certainly the most reluctant of foreign interventionists or unilateralists. He vehemently opposed Disraeli's new imperialism from the 1870s. Palmerston's unilateral China policy in the Opium Wars, for example, accordingly appalled Gladstone's internationalist statesmanship. Gladstone's concern throughout was not so much for the national interest' per se, but rather with a kind of national project' the nurturing of a transformative and expanding greater world' within what he saw to be a progressive phase in world history. Laissez faire and free trade became the battle cries towards this New Jerusalem'. Gladstone's positive outlook on the world, and on the course of modern history, became essentially alien to most of humanity after the historic divide of the Great War and he all too easily became one of Lytton Strachey's flawed Eminent Victorians. An earlier generation of scholars than our own gave us the liberal internationalist to match Morley's liberal emancipist.
