MR. GLADSTONE ON THE WAR.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume V, Issue 249, 22 October 1870, Page 2

MR. GLADSTONE ON THE WAR.

(From the London Daily News, August 1. Some clitics will complain of Mr. Gladstone's speech as beiug too sombre and gloomy. The light-hearledness with which the ostensible Prime Minister of France enters on the war is not shared by the English Premier, who merely contemplates it. Mr. Gladstone, though of course it is not for him to say so in plain words, evidently stands aghast, as all thoughtful and Christian men do, at the appalling display of human wickedness and folly which this gratuitous war reveals. Europe is to be turned into a vast slaugh-ter-house on pretexts more frivolous than were ever averred before. Two great nations which, so far as the Contiuent is concerned, are the chief factors of European civilization, instead of co-operating in the arts of peace and the benefit of mankind, are rushing madly, as if under some demoniac influence, to rend and destroy each other. Nothing was needed beyond the revelations connected with the projected treaty to complete the disclosure

of guilt. Four years of unexampled deceit and treachery on one side or the other, and possibly of conspiracy on both against the peace of the world, the safeguards of Treaties, and the very life of independent States, find in the war their murderous consummation, and it may be their Nemesis. The doom which awaits those whose feet are swift to shed blood will one day or another work itself out. It is matter of satisfaction that at a time like this England has at the head of affairs one who is not only well qualified to direct the action of the nation, but also to inform its judgment, and to give the true color to its sentiment. Mr. Gladstone spoke within a limit of time which he might have widely extended, and which, indeed, he himself subsequently enlarged, when he declared that we now find ourselves confronting the saddest and most melancholy event that this century has presented. He spoke, not merely in his own name, nor even as the leader of a party, nor as the , head of a government, when speaking '* in the name of wounded humanity, in the name of grieving civilisation, in the name of our religion, afflicted with what it witnesses," he declared " that nothing more deplorable, nothing more dismal, has marked, perhaps, the history of mankind in our time than the spectacle of nations of the highest civilisation, with institutions the most perfectly developed, with celebrity established in every department of history, with the first positious in the civilized world to which it is possible for any nation to attain, pushing on their troops by hundreds of thousands, and almost by millions, to deadly conflict, for causes which it is very difficult to appreciate." For remainder of News see Fourth page.