Governor-General, Lord Ripon, who had been sent out by the Gladstone Cabinet, to replace his predecessor Lord Lytton. The Boers in the Transvaal were laughing British power to scorn, and indulging their proclivities for rapine, fire, and slaughter. The hereditary hatred of France for England was showing itself in an alarming way. Russia was creeping nearer and nearer to the Afghan frontier; and Germany had been seized with a mania for colonising, which promised to be productive of serious complications for England.
The history of the world hardly, and the history of England certainly does not afford another example of a powerful Government of a mighty empire blindly and, it may almost be said now, wilfully endangering its diplomatic relations, and ravelling its policy into such intricate knots that even the most profound optimist was bound to admit the strong probability that they would have to be cut with the sword.
We of the present day, looking back to that eventful time, cannot but marvel that men could be found who were willing to trifle with the destinies of a great nation. The condition of British interests was such that they required to be watched and guarded by a bold, a vigorous, a decisive, and yet not aggressive policy. Further extension of the empire was neither desirable nor sought for; but the power of the British flag ought to have been maintained wherever it waved. There were those, however, who thought otherwise—men who could calmly witness the flag trodden under foot and trailed in the dust by insolent Boers, and yet raise no protesting voice. A strongly radical—nay, a democratic spirit had for some time been manifesting itself, and the pusillanimous doctrines as taught by John Bright, John Morley, and a few kindred spirits, were allowed to take the place of right coupled with might, which had hitherto been regarded as peculiarly an English creed. John Bright was a central figure of the era we are dealing with, but for no other reason than that he had been gifted with matchless powers of oratory. As a statesman he was an utter failure, and the cause of this might be epigrammatically expressed in the phrase that he was a Quaker first, a patriot after, and John Bright before every-
