not know whether the constituencies surprised Mr. Gladstone. They certainly surprised most persons, including themselves. The result of the elections was to upset completely the balance of power. In a few days the Liberal majority was gone. Mr. Gladstone fought a gallant fight himself, and addressed vast open-air meetings at Blackheath with the energy of another O'Connell. But it was a hopeless fight against reaction. When the result of the polls came to be made up, it was found that the Conservatives had a majority of about fifty, even on the calculation, far too favorable to the other side, which counted every Home Ruler as a Liberal. Mr. Gladstone followed the example set by Mr. Disraeli six years before, and at once resigned office. The great reforming Liberal Administration was gone. The organizing energy which had accomplished such marvels during three or four resplendent years had spent itself and was out of breath. Many causes, indeed, concurred to bring about the fall of the Liberal Administration. It had committed grave faults itself; some of its members had done it serious harm. Various powerful interests were arrayed against it. But when all allowance has been made for such considerations, it will probably be seen that the most potent influence which bore down the Gladstone Government was the fact that people in general had grown tired of doing great things, and had got into the mood of the lady described in one of Mr. Charles Reade's novels, who frankly declares that heroes are her abomination. The English constituencies bad grown weary of the heroic, and would have a change.

Had the Liberal Ministers consented to remain in power a few days, a very few, longer, they would have been able to announce the satisfactory conclusion of a very unsatisfactory war. This was one of the least of all our little wars; a war from which it was simply impossible to extract anything in the way of glory, and in which the only honor could be just that which the skill of the English commander was able to secure; the honor of success won in the promptest manner and with the least possible expenditure of life. The Ashantee war arose out of a sort of misunderstanding. The Ashantees are a very fierce and warlike tribe on the Gold Coast of Africa. They were at war with England in

1824, and in one instance they won an extraordinary victory over a British force of about 1000 men, and carried home with them as a trophy the skull of the British Commanderin-chief, Sir Charles M'Carthy. The Ashantees were afterward defeated, and a treaty of peace was concluded with them by the Governor of our Gold Coast settlements, Mr. MacLean, the husband of Miss Landon, better known to literature by her initials "L. E. L.," a woman whose poetical gifts, not in themselves very great, combined with her unhappy story to make her at one time a celebrity in England. In 1863, as has been already told in these pages, a war was begun against the Ashantees prematurely and rashly by the Governor of the Gold Coast settlements, and it had to be abandoned owing to the ravages done by sickness among Our men. In 1872 some Dutch possessions on the Gold Coast were transferred, by purchase and arrangement of other kinds, to England; and this transaction ended, like most of the same nature, by entangling us in misunderstanding, quarrel, and war. The King of Ashantee claimed a tribute formerly allowed to him by the Dutch, and refused to evacuate the territory ceded to England. He attacked the Fantees, a tribe of very worthless allies of ours, and a straggling harassing war began between him and our garrisons. The great danger was that if the Ashantees obtained any considerable success, or seeming success, even for a moment, all the surrounding tribes would make common cause with them. The Government, therefore, determined to take up the matter seriously, and send a sufficient force under an experienced and well-qualified commander, with instructions to take advantage of the cool season and penetrate to the Ashantee capital, Coomassie, and there inflict a blow which would prove that the Ashantee King could not harass the English settlers with impunity. When the choice of a commander came to be discussed, only one name, as it would seem, arose to the lips of all men. That was the name of Sir Garnet Wolseley, who had commanded the successful expedition to the Red River region in 1870. Sir Garnet Wolseley had the rare good fortune to sustain the reputation conferred upon him in advance by popular acclaim. He had a very hard task to perform. Of course he could have no difficulty in fighting the Ashantees. The

weapons and the discipline of the English army put all thought of serious battle out of the question. But the King of Ashantee had a force fighting on his side far more formidable than the General January and General February on whom the Emperor Nicholas of Russia vainly relied. Wordsworth, in his noble ode to Toussaint L'Ouverture, tells the fallen chief to be of good heart, for he has on his side "powers that will work for him," "great allies ;" and these are, he says, "earth, air, and skies;" "not a breathing of the common wind," he declares, "that will forget" to support his cause. In a literal and terrible sense the King of Ashantee had just such allies. Earth, air, and skies—the earth, the air, the skies of the Gold Coast region would at the right time work for him; not a breathing of the common wind that would forget to breathe pestilence into the ranks of his enemies. The whole campaign must be over and done within the limited range of the cooler months, or there would come into the field, to do battle for the African King, allies against whom an Alexander or a Cæsar would be powerless. Sir Garnet Wolseley and those who fought under him—sailors, marines, and soldiers-did their work well. They defeated the Ashantees wherever they could get at them; but that was a matter of course. They forced their way to Coomassie, compelled the King to come to terms, one of the conditions being the prohibition of human sacrifices, and they were able to leave the country within the appointed time. The success of the campaign was a question of days and almost of hours; and the victory was snatched out of the very jaws of approaching sun and fever. Sir Garnet Wolseley sailed from England on September 12th, 1873, and returned to Portsmouth, having accomplished all his objects, on March 21st, 1874. The war was not one to be proud of: it might easily have been avoided; it is not certain that England was entirely in the right of the quarrel first or last; but nothing could be more satisfactory than the ease, success, and completeness with which the campaign had been pushed through to its end.

The Gladstone Government had also had to deal with one of the periodical famines breaking out in Bengal, and if they had remained in office might have been able within a very short time to report that their efforts had been successful.

Mr. Gladstone's sudden action, however, deprived them of any such opportunity. They bequeathed to their successors the announcement of a war triumphantly concluded, and a famine checked; and they bequeathed to them also a very handsome financial surplus. So sudden a fall from power had not up to that time been known in the modern political history of the country. To find its parallel we shall have to come down six years later still. The great Liberal Administration had fallen as suddenly as the French Empire; had disappeared like Aladdin's palace, which was erect and ablaze with light and splendor last night and is not to be seen this morning.

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CHAPTER LXIII.

CONSERVATIVE REACTION :" INSTALLED IN OFFICE.

MR. DISRAELI was not long in forming a Ministry. He reduced the number of the Cabinet in the first instance to twelve. Lord Cairns became Lord Chancellor. Lord Derby was made Foreign Secretary, an appointment which gratified sober-minded men. Lord Salisbury was intrusted with the charge of the Indian Department. This too was an appointment which gave satisfaction outside the range of the Conservative party as well as within it. During his former administration of the India Office, Lord Salisbury had shown great ability and self-command, and he had acquired a reputation for firmness of character and large and liberal views. He was now and for some time after looked upon as the most rising man and the most high-minded politician on the Conservative side. The country was pleased to see that Mr. Disraeli made no account of the differences that formerly existed between Lord Salisbury and himself; of the dislike that Lord Salisbury had evidently felt toward him at one time, and of the manner in which he had broken away from the Conservative Ministry at the time of the Reform Bill of 1867. Lord Carnarvon became Colonial Secretary. Mr. Cross, a Lancashire lawyer, who had never been in office of any kind before, was lifted into the position of Home Secretary. Mr. Gathorne Hardy was made Secretary for War,

and Mr. Ward Hunt First Lord of the Admiralty. Sir Staf ford Northcote, who had been trained to finance by Mr. Gladstone, accepted the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Duke of Richmond, as Lord President of the Council, made a safe, inoffensive, and respectable leader of the Government in the House of Lords.

The Liberals seemed to have received a stunning blow. The whole party reeled under it, and did not appear capable for the moment of rallying against the shock. Nothing could be more disheartening than the appearance of the front opposition benches during a great part of the session. To accumulate the difficulties, Mr. Gladstone suddenly announced his intention of retiring from the position of leader of the Liberal party. In a letter to Lord Granville, dated March 12th, 1874, he explained that, “for a variety of reasons personal to myself," he "could not contemplate any unlimited extension of active political service," and that it might be necessary "to divest myself of all the responsibilities of leadership at no distant time." For the present he held the rank of leader only in a sort of conditional way, and he had frankly announced to Lord Granville that he could not give "more than an occasional attendance in the House of Commons" during that session. This seemed the one step needed to complete the disorganization of the party. There were many complaints, not loud but deep, of the course taken by Mr. Gladstone. It was contrasted openly as well as secretly with the perseverance, the unwearying patience which Mr. Disraeli had shown in keeping his place at the head of his party during long years of what must often have seemed hopeless struggle. Mr. Gladstone pleaded his advancing years; but it was asked, are not the years of Mr. Disraeli still further advanced? Who brought us, some discontented Liberals asked, into all this difficulty? Who but the man who now deserts us in the face of the enemy?

The Opposition were for awhile apparently not only without a leader but even without a policy, or a motive for existence. For awhile it seemed as if, to adopt the correct and concise description given by Mr. Clayden in his "England under Lord Beaconsfield," "the Opposition had nothing to oppose." The Ministry had succeeded to a handsome.