CHANGES GOOD AND EVIL.

With the death of Lord Palmerston in 1865, a sort of truce in the strife of parties, which his supremacy had secured, came to an end.  That supremacy had been imperilled for a moment when the Government declined to make an armed intervention in the struggle between Denmark and the German Powers in 1864.  Such an intervention would have been very popular with the English people, who could hardly know that “all Germany would rise as one man” to repel it if it were risked.  But the English Premier’s rare command of his audience in Parliament enabled him to overcome even this difficulty; and the gigantic series of contests on the Continent which resulted in the consolidation of the German empire, the complete liberation of Italy, the overthrow of Imperialism in France and of the temporal power of the Pope even in Rome itself, went on its way without our interference also, which would hardly have been the case had we intermeddled in the ill-understood contention between Denmark and its adversaries as to the Schleswig-Holstein succession.

[Illustration:  Sir Robert Napier.]

That strange crime, the murder of President Lincoln, in America just when the long contest between North and South had ended and the cause of true freedom had triumphed, was actually fruitful of good as regarded this country and the United States.  A cry of horror went up from all England at the news of that “most accursed assassination,” which seemed at the moment to brand the losing cause, whose partisan was guilty of it, with the very mark of Cain.  Expressions of sympathy with the outraged country and of admiring regret for its murdered head were lavished by every respectable organ of opinion; while the Queen, by writing in personal sympathy, as one widow to another, to the bereaved wife of Lincoln, made herself, as she has often done, the mouthpiece of her people’s best feeling.  Again and again has it been manifested that America and England are in more cordial relations with each other since the tremendous civil war than before it.  It is no matter of statecraft, but a better understanding between two great English-speaking peoples, drawn into closer fellowship by far more easy communication than of old.

A little war with Ashantee, not too successful, a difficulty with Japan, some more serious troubles with New Zealand, exhaust the list of the warlike enterprises of England in the last years of Palmerston.  In a year or two after his death we were engaged in a brief and entirely successful campaign against the barbaric King Theodore of Abyssinia, “a compound of savage virtue and more than savage ambition and cruelty,” who, imagining himself wronged and slighted by England, had seized a number of British subjects, held them in hard captivity, and treated them with such capricious cruelty as made it very manifest that their lives were not worth an hour’s purchase.  It fell to the Ministry of Mr. Disraeli,