MR. STANLEY ON MR. GLADSTONE.

Evening Post, Volume L, Issue 125, 23 November 1895, Page 1 (Supplement)

MR. STANLEY ON MR. GLADSTONE.

Mr. PL M. Stanley has just been telling a Canadian interviewer an anecdote illustrative of Mr. Gladstone's infallibility. " I was having an interview with Mr. Gladstone on the African slave trade, which I wished him to suppress. I had a great map of Africa placed before him. ' There,' said I, 'is the harbour of Mombasa, into which you could put the whole British fleet — the finest harbour in the world.' ' Who made it ?' was the quick question. ' Nature, sir,' said I, quietly. 'Oh, no' — very emphatically — ' nature makes roadsteads ; man makes harbours.' 1 Excuse me, sir, nature makes harbours, too, and this is one of them.' He shook his head. He waa Prime Minister of Kngland. I would not arguo with him. Well, I put my finger to Lake Victoria, and said, 'Here you have the second largest inland sea in the world after Lake Superior, and the source of the Nile.' I talked away about it until I found he -was not paying the slightest attention to what I was saying, but was looking intently at some mountains on the map. ' What do you call those mountains ?' ' Gordon Bennett-Mackay, sir.' ' And who gave those mountains such ridiculous names?' 'I did, sir; it was I who discovered them.' ' No, no,' was Mr. Gladstone's reply; ' those mountains were discovered twenty-six centuries ago by Herodotus.' " t