Then came the pamphlet. The story of this memorable publication is told in the diary:—

Aug. 28, 1876.—Church 8-½ a.m. Worked on a beginning for a possible pamphlet on the Turkish question. I stupidly brought on again my lumbago by physical exertion. Was obliged to put off my pamphlet. Read The Salvation of all Men ... 29.—Kept my bed long. Wrote to Lord Granville, etc. ... and as a treat began Waverley once more. Lumbago bad. 30.—Much bed; forswear all writing. Read St. Thomas Aquinas on the Soul.... Waverley. A snug evening in the Temple of Peace. 31.—Kept my bed till four, and made tolerable play in writing on Bulgarian horrors. Sept. 1.—Wrote [16 letters]. Again worked hard in bed and sent off more than half to the printers. Read Waverley. Short drive with C. 2.—This day I wrote again a good piece of the pamphlet in bed, but improved considerably. Rose at four. [pg 552] Read Waverley in the evening. 3.—Hawarden Church 11 a.m. and 6-½ p.m. Wrote [16 letters]. Off at 10.15 p.m. for London. 4.—Reached 18 C.H.T. at five in the morning by limited mail; bed till nine. Saw Lord Granville, Mr. Delane, Sir A. Panizzi, Mr. Clowes, Messrs. Murray, the American minister. In six or seven hours, principally at the British Museum, I completed my ms., making all the needful searches of papers and journals. Also worked on proof sheets.

To Mrs. Gladstone.—We had an interesting little party at Granville's. I had a long talk with Delane. We, he and I, are much of one mind in thinking the Turks must go out of Bulgaria, though retaining a titular supremacy if they like. Between ourselves, Granville a little hangs back from this, but he could not persuade me to hold it back.

5.— ... Saw Lord Granville, Lord Hartington.... Finished the correction of revises before one, discussing the text with Lord Granville and making various alterations of phrase which he recommended. At seven I received complete copies. We went to the Haymarket theatre. Arranged my papers after this, and sent off copies in various directions.

Bulgarian Pamphlet

The pamphlet spread like fire.[340] Within three or four days of its first appearance forty thousand copies had gone. It was instantly followed up by a tremendous demonstration among his constituents. “Sept. 9, 1876.—Thought over my subject for Blackheath. Off at two. A very large meeting. The most enthusiastic far that I ever saw. Spoke over an hour.” This is his very prosaic story of the first of those huge and excited multitudes of which for months and years to come he was to confront so many. The pamphlet and the Blackheath speech were his rejoinder to the light and callous tones of Mr. Disraeli, and the sceptical language of his foreign secretary, “I have a strong suspicion,” he told the Duke of Argyll, who was a fervent sympathiser, “that Dizzy's crypto-Judaism has had to do with his policy. The Jews of the east bitterly hate the Christians; who have not always used them well.” This suspicion was constant. “Disraeli,” he said to Mr. Gladstone, “may be willing to risk [pg 553] his government for his Judaic feeling,—the deepest and truest, now that his wife has gone, in his whole mind.”

The tract beats with a sustained pulse and passion that recall Burke's letters on the Regicide Peace. The exhortation against moral complicity with “the basest and blackest outrages upon record within the present century, if not within the memory of man”; the branding of the Turkish race as “the one great anti-human specimen of humanity”; the talk of “fell satanic orgies”; the declaration that there was not a criminal in a European gaol nor a cannibal in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation would not rise at the recital of that which had been done, which remained unavenged, which had left behind all the foul and all the fierce passions that produced it, and might again spring up in another murderous harvest, from the soil soaked and reeking with blood, and in the air tainted with every imaginable deed of crime and shame,—all this vehemence was hailed with eager acclamation by multitudes who felt all that he felt, and found in his passionate invective words and a voice. Mr. Gladstone was not the man, his readers and his public were not the men, for mere denunciation. They found in him a policy. Indignation, he said in a thoroughly characteristic sentence, indignation is froth, except as it leads to action; mere remonstrance is mockery. There are states of affairs, he told them, in which human sympathy refuses to be confined by the rules, necessarily limited and conventional, of international law. Servia and Montenegro in going to war against Turkey might plead human sympathies, broad, deep, and legitimate, and that they committed no moral offence. The policy of the British government was the status quo, “as you were.” This meant the maintenance of Turkish executive authority. What was really needed was the total withdrawal of the administrative rule of the Turk. And here he used words that became very famous in the controversy:—

But I return to, and end with, that which is the omega as well as the alpha of this great and most mournful case. An old servant of the crown and state, I entreat my countrymen, upon [pg 554] whom far more than perhaps any other people of Europe it depends, to require and to insist that our government which has been working in one direction shall work in the other, and shall apply all its vigour to concur with the other states of Europe in obtaining the extinction of the Turkish executive power in Bulgaria. Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall I hope clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned.

At Blackheath, under dripping rain clouds, he said the same, though with the invective tempered. “You shall receive your regular tribute,” he said in slow sentences to imaginary Ottomans, whom he seemed to hold before his visual eye, “you shall retain your titular sovereignty, your empire shall not be invaded, but never again as the years roll in their course, so far as it is in our power to determine, never again shall the hand of violence be raised by you, never again shall the flood-gates of lust be open to you, never again shall the dire refinements of cruelty be devised by you for the sake of making mankind miserable.”

Once again, it was not words that made the power of the orator, it was the relation in purpose, feeling, and conviction between him and his audience. He forced them into unity with himself by the vivid strength of his resolution and imagination; he could not believe that his own power of emotion was not theirs too:—