ABSTRACT
William Ewart Gladstone was profoundly agitated by the thought that thousands of Christians—men, women and children—had been massacred, and that England, the champion of liberty and justice, was standing by indifferent, with folded arms—or even worse, was shielding these Turks whose hands were dripping with blood. In 1877 Lord Carnarvon, the Colonial Secretary of Benjamin Disraeli’s Cabinet, annexed the Transvaal Republic. Neither the Foreign Secretary, Lord Derby, nor the Colonial Secretary, Lord Carnarvon, nor the Secretary for India, Lord Salisbury, was able to share his persistent friendship for the Turks and his indifference to their crimes. Meanwhile the date of the reassembling of Parliament was approaching, and Gladstone felt that he could not further postpone his decision as to resigning the Leadership. At Greenwich Gladstone’s constituents gathered about him in a huge meeting of demonstration and enthusiastically applauded his speech.
