He was jeered at for it by journalists and politicians who had not the capacity to think or the courage to tell their thoughts.

And he had one yet finer quality which redeems a hundred lapses of anarchic cynicism.

He could change his mind upon the platform: he could repent in public.

He could not only think aloud; he could "think better" aloud.
And one of the turning-points of Europe had come in the hour when he avowed his conversion from the un-Christian and un-European policy into which his dexterous Oriental master, Disraeli, had dragged him; and declared that England had "put her money on the wrong horse." When he said it, he referred to the backing we gave to the Turk under a fallacious fear of Russia.

But I cannot but think that if he had lived much longer, he would have come to feel the same disgust for his long diplomatic support of the Turk's great ally in the North.