Excerpt from Speech of the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M. P. For the University of Oxford, on the War and the Negotiations: In the House of Commons, on the 3rd of August, 1855 And now, with respect to the statement of facts made by my right honourable friend. Here I am at issue with him on every point. If my honourable friend, the member for Wick, wanted any justification for raising this discussion, he would, I think, find it in the confused and per plexed state in which the narrative of these events yet stands before this House and the world; for well may they find it impenetrably obscure, when I can undertake to show that the speech of a man in the position. And with all the knowledge, ability, and integrity of my right honourable friend, presents a distorted view of those facts, and does not at all raise the issues upon which this House will have definitively, and I trust before any very long time, to judge. If we were to take our views from the Speech of the right honourable gentleman, those who have listened to it might believe that the whole case before us turned upon the difference between the two projects of counterpoise and limitation; but I will show that it is no such thing. And, again, it might be supposed, from the speech of my right honourable friend, that there had not been proposed to us, or not proposed to us in due time, by Austria any set of terms on the rejection of which by Russia she would go to war. And this I understood to be a capital point in my right honourable friend's speech. I think he thus represented to us the case, that when a proposal was made at the end of April, it was rejected by the allies; and it consequently gave to Austria no Opportunity of going to war to enforce it; and that when the proposal of limitation was made in June, Austria declared, as he states, that she would not go to war for the sake of that proposal, if Russia should reject it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.