compensated with the sands of the Sahara. It is plain that here, as well as in respect of the agreements with Germany and Portugal, British diplomacy had got the best of the bargain, and these bloodless African settlements are probably the most enduring monument of Salisbury's skill.
To return to home affairs. In 1888 the prime minister himself introduced in the House of Lords a life peerage bill, empowering the crown to create fifty peers for life, selected from the superior ranks of judges, officers in the army and navy, civil servants, and diplomatists as well as from among ex-colonial governors. The bill passed its second reading, but was then withdrawn. In 1891 the government passed a Free Education Act, which Salisbury had foreshadowed in 1885 (Newport speech), when he argued that since the state had made education compulsory, it was not fair that the very poor should have to find the money for it. But it was neither by this non-controversial act nor by that introducing local government in 1888 that the government was judged. It had been constituted upon the Irish issue, and Irish affairs played a conspicuous part in its history. The appointment of the Parnell commission Salisbury supported on the ground that it was most nearly analogous to the practice adopted by the House of Commons in respect of exceptional cases of bribery and some other matters (speech in the House of Lords, 10 August 1888). The discretion which Mr. Balfour showed in defending the Crimes Act of 1887, and the indiscretion which brought Parnell into the divorce court in 1890, enabled the ministry to fulfil its natural term of office.
At the general election of 1892, however, Gladstone was returned with a coalition majority of forty, and Salisbury gave place to the liberal leader. Gladstone introduced his second home rule bill, which, on Salisbury's advice, was rejected by the House of Lords. The new government retained office, however, under Lord Rosebery's leadership, until its defeat in 1895, when Salisbury formed a coalition ministry with Devonshire and Mr. Chamberlain (June 1895). At the ensuing general election he secured a majority of 152, and the country, in accordance with his ideas, entered upon a seven-year period of singularly unobtrusive but not unimportant legislation, which included such measures as the Workmen's Compensation Act (1897), the Criminal Evidence Act (1898), and the Inebriates Act (1898) (see for a useful list of laws passed Mee, Lord Salisbury, Appendix II). His special activities, however, lay at the foreign office, which he again combined with the premiership. Between 1895 and 1900 England found herself on the brink of war with each of the four great powers of the world, but no war occurred. The first crisis was produced by President Cleveland, who in his message to the United States Congress on 17 Dec. 1895 declared that Salisbury's refusal to agree to arbitration in the matter of the boundary between British Guiana and Venezuela amounted to a violation of the Monroe doctrine, and asked leave to appoint a boundary commission, whose finding should be enforced by the Republic. Salisbury took no immediate notice of this intemperate action, which roused American feeling to fever-point, but, when the clamour began to subside, supplied to the United States Commission, without prejudice, papers setting out the British case. That case was in fact so strong that the international tribunal, which in the end determined the dispute, decided almost wholly in its favour. A reaction in favour of England had meanwhile set in in America. Salisbury was careful to encourage it, by refusing to consent to European intervention in the Spanish-American war of 1898; thus reversing the traditional English policy of keeping Cuba out of the hands of a first-class power. He spared no effort to bring about a good understanding between the two Anglo-Saxon communities. Even though his project of a general treaty of arbitration was thrown out by the United States Senate hi 1897, he continued to manifest good-will by the surrender of the British rights in Samoa, including the harbour of Pago-Pago in 1899, while by the abrogation (Hay-Pauncefote treaty, 1901) of that part of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty of 1850 which stood in the way of a canal at Panama under American control, he allowed the United States to strengthen further their dominant influence over Central America.
The crisis in Anglo-German relations was destined to leave more durable memories. Within three weeks of Cleveland's message (on 3 Jan. 1896) the German Emperor despatched a telegram to President Kruger of the South African Republic congratulating him in imprudent language on the suppression of the Jameson Raid. English feeling rose high, but Salisbury contented himself with a naval demonstration in home waters which was probably so
