THE agitation in 1876 in condemnation of the atrocities inflicted by
the Turks on their Bulgarian subjects has a double interest. It was
one of the great semi-religious, semi-political agitations which
aimed in nineteenth-century Britain at bringing the force of or-
ganised moral indignation to bear on the conduct of public affairs.
These agitations are well worthy of study. Together with the
purely religious revivals, which clearly tapped the same spiritual
and emotional head springs, they reveal much about the nature of
public opinion in a large section of society and about the spiritual
to which it responded. Because they operated on parliament and
public from outside the ordinary party system and did not need to
employ the ordinary social influences which controlled the con-
stituencies, they were an effective instrument for the self-ex-
pression of classes who had inherited little traditional political
power. Moreover, this anti-Turk agitation has peculiar character-
istics which give it a special interest. It developed suddenly and
apparently spontaneously as the result of tragic events in a strange
environment in countries remote from Britain; it was partly
sponsored by men who did not normally take part in these agita-
tions; it came remarkably quickly to boiling point; and it in-
fluenced an unusual cross-section of opinion.

However, the anti-Turk agitation has an additional interest of a
different nature. Because it was what it was and came when it did,
it probably affected the history of the Liberal party decisively, and
it provided the prologue to the most interesting portion of the
career of Gladstone, that ultimately tragic part which starts when
he became Prime Minister for the second time and ends with the
failure of the Second Home Rule Bill. It brought to him, in the
retirement in which he had taken refuge after the failure of his first
ministry, an inescapable challenge, and it committed him to the

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