It is to the same period, made memorable by these internal reforms, that we have to refer the final settlement of the long-standing controversy between Great Britain and the United States as to the Alabama claims.  We have already referred to these claims and the peaceful though very costly manner of their adjustment.  That the award on the whole should go against us was not very grateful to the English people; but when the natural irritation of the hour had time to subside, the substantial justice of the decision was little disputed.  While England was thus busied in strengthening her walls and making straight her ways, her great neighbour and rival was passing through a very furnace of misery.  The colossal-seeming Empire, whose head was rather of strangely mingled Corinthian metal than of fine gold, and whose iron feet were mixed with miry clay, was tottering to its overthrow, and fell in the wild days of 1870 with a world-awakening crash.  Again it was a dispute concerning the throne of Spain which precipitated the fall of a French sovereign.  It would seem as if interference with the affairs of its Southern neighbour was ever to be ominous of evil to France.  The first great Napoleon had had to rue such interference; it had been disastrous to Louis Philippe; now Louis Napoleon, making the candidature of Leopold of Hohenzollern for the Spanish crown a pretext for war with Prussia, forced on the strife which was to dethrone himself, to cast down his dynasty, and to despoil France of two fair provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, once taken from Germany, now reconquered for United Germany.  With that strife, which resulted in the exaltation of the Prussian King, our Princess Royal’s father-in-law, as German Emperor, England had absolutely nothing to do, except to pity the fallen and help the suffering as far as in her lay; but it awakened profoundest interest, especially while the long siege of Paris dragged on through the hard winter of 1870-71; hardly yet is the interest of the subject exhausted.

A certain fleeting effect was produced in England by the erection of a New Republic in France in place of the fallen Empire, while the family of the defeated ruler—­rejected by his realm more for lack of success than for his bad government—­escaped to the safety of this country from the angry hatred of their own.  A few people here began to talk republicanism in public, and to commend the “logical superiority” of that mode of government, oblivious of the fact that practical Britain prefers a system, however illogical, that actually works well, to the most beautifully reasoned but untested paper theory.  But the wild excesses of the Commune in Paris, outdoing in horror the sufferings of the siege, quickly produced the same effect here that was wrought in the last century by the French Reign of Terror, and English republicanism relapsed into the dormant state from which it had only just awakened.  The dangerous illness that attacked the Prince of Wales in the last