And above and beyond the mere commercial gain, there rose under Mr. Gladstone's magic wand the vista of an age of security and peace-disbanded armaments, forgotten jealousies, immunity not only from the scourge but from the panic of war; pleasant dreams, constantly belied by experience, constantly renewed by theorists, but too closely linked to the hopes of all who believe either in material progress or in the promises of religion ever to be abandoned as chimera.