Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century | Page 9

all the energies of the "Grand Old Man" were mustered to carry a new law differing somewhat from the bill of 1886. Though it passed the Commons (301 to 267) it was thrown out by the Lords by 419 to 41, and his successor, Lord Rosebery, had no mind to renew the contest.
The Gladstonian foreign policy was such as might have been expected from a leader whose motto was "Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform." It was never aggressive, and in the opinion of many, it was lacking in the assertion of British rights. Thus, in 1871, when Russia refused to be bound longer by the treaty stipulations forbidding her to maintain a war fleet on the Euxine, Mr. Gladstone did not hold her to her engagement. In England it was thought to be a sign of weakness in his government to allow the "Alabama" and "San Juan Boundary" questions to be settled by arbitrators instead of by diplomacy or a show of force. In 1881, when the Boers of the Transvaal had worsted the British at Majuba Hill, they received from Gladstone an honorable peace instead of extermination. The abandonment of the Egyptian Soudan, in 1883, which carried with it the massacre of General Gordon, at Khartoum, was perhaps the heaviest load that the Gladstonian foreign policy ever had to bear.
DISRAELI AND IMPERIALISM
Foreign affairs were the field of Disraeli's most brilliant exploits. "He had two ruling ideas," says the historian Oman, "the first was the conception of England as an imperial world- power, interested in European politics, but still more interested in the maintenance and development of her vast colonial and Indian empire. This is the notion which friends and enemies now using the word in different senses call 'imperialism.' The second ruling thought in Disraeli's mind was the conviction that the Conservative party ought to step forward as rival to the Liberal party in commanding the sympathies and allegiance of the masses." In pursuance of this second idea he took the "leap in the dark," in 1867, carrying a reform bill which was but little short of democratic in its extension of the right to vote. This was followed up by legislation favoring the English tenant-farmers, and improving the condition of workingmen in towns. Even after Disraeli's death, Lord Salisbury continued his domestic policy, instituting local government by means of county councils in 1888, making the schools free in 1891, and refunding the national debt in 1888.
It was a great day for the British empire when Disraeli's telegram to the hard-pressed Khedive of Egypt, in 1875, bought for England the controlling interest in the Suez canal, the water-gate to India. It was a bold stroke of Disraeli's also which, at the close of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, compelled the victor to take his paw from the throat of his victim and submit the treaty to a congress of the powers at Berlin, where its terms were modified and England was admitted to its benefits. The Second Afghan War (1878-80), and the Zulu War (1878-79), and the Boer War, which brought little glory to Britain, were the direct result of the Prime Minister's desire to extend the empire and strengthen its frontiers. It may have been theatrical, but it was certainly impressive to the assembled princes of India when Lord Lytton, the Viceroy, proclaimed Victoria Empress of India in Delhi, the old capital of the Moguls, on January 1, 1877. And though Disraeli (raised to the peerage as Lord Beaconsfield) was in his grave, his spirit dominated the pageantry of 1887 and 1897, when every nation and tribe and kindred and people of the Greater Britain sent representatives to London to celebrate the jubilee and diamond jubilee of the Empress-Queen, to whose aggrandizement he had contributed so effectively.
AFTER A HUNDRED YEARS
The century closes upon another England than that which was struggling against Napoleon at its dawn. Instead of the "right little tight little island," a compact and self-contained nation, it is now the head of an empire comparable in extent and population with no other since the Rome of Augustus. Canada, Federal Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa form a Greater Britain, while the subject lands and islands dot the globe. The problem which confronts the English at the end of the century is not whether they can hold their own against a foreign power as in the days of Waterloo, but whether all these British commonwealths can be made to work together in some sort of federal union, or whether the present ties are to dissolve or snap asunder and girdle the globe with independent states like the American republic, where each may be free to develop under its peculiar conditions the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race.

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW
1. How was England situated at the opening of the nineteenth