were mysteriously beckoned away from dinner-tables, and drawing-rooms, and club-rooms. Agitated messengers hurried to ministerial deors seeking for information. There was commotion in the newspaper offices; the telegraph was set in constant action. Next morning all the world read the news in the papers. Mr. Gladstone had suddenly made up his mind to dissolve Parliament, and seek for a restoration of the authority of the Liberal Government by an appeal to the people. He vindicated his decision in an address to his constituents, which was, unfortunately, all too long for genuine popular effect. What the country understood by it was, that Mr. Gladstone did not choose to bear the humiliation of seeming to have the authority he had received in 1868 now "sunk below the point necessary for the due defence and prosecution of the public interests;" that he proposed to obtain a new lease of authority by a popular verdict; and that if restored to power he would introduce a series of financial measures which would include the total repeal of the income tax. The country was taken utterly by surprise. Many of Mr. Gladstone's own colleagues had not known what was to be done until the announcement was actually made. The feeling all over the three kingdoms was one of almost unanimous disapproval. Mr. Gladstone's sudden resolve was openly condemned as petulant and unstatesmanlike; it was privately grumbled at on various personal grounds. To us it seems to have been impatient, imprudent, irregular, but certainly spirited and magnanimous. Impolitic it no doubt was; but it ought not to have been unpopular. It must have caused great and, at that time, superfluous inconvenience to Liberal politicians everywhere, and we cannot wonder if they complained. But to the country in general there ought to have been something fascinating in the very quixotry of a resolve which proclaimed that the minister disdained to remain in office one hour a... he had found reason to believe that he no longer pos

sessed the confidence of the people. It was an error indeed, but it was at least a generous error; the mistake of a sensitive and a chivalrous nature.

Mr. Gladstone had surprised the constituencies. We do not know whether the constituencies surprised Mr. Gladstone. They certainly surprised most persons, including themselves. The result of the election was to upset com. pletely 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 Conservative 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 had 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 commander-inchief, Sir Charles McCarthy. 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 for. midable 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 sup. port 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 breath 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, mariners, 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. Thy 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.