621.  Death of Gladstone; the Cabot Tower; Centennial of the First
     Savings Bank, 1899.

Meanwhile, Mr. Gladstone, the great Liberal leader, died, full of years and honors, at his residence, Hawarden Castle, in North Wales (1898).  The “Grand Old Man”—­as his friends delighted to call him—­ was buried in that Abbey at Westminster which holds so much of England’s most precious dust.  His grave is not far from the memorial to Lord Beaconsfield, the eminent Conservative leader, who was his lifelong rival and political opponent.

In the autumn (1898) the Cabot monument was opened at Bristol.  It is a commanding tower, overlooking the ancient city and port from which John Cabot (S335) sailed in the spring of 1497.  The monument commemorates that explorer’s discovery of the mainland of the New World.  An inscription on the face of the tower expresses “the earnest hope that Peace and Friendship may ever continue between the kindred peoples” of England and America.

In May of the next year, 1899, the one hundredth anniversary of the establishment of savings banks in Great Britain was celebrated.  Near the closing year of the eighteenth century, 1799, Reverend Joseph Smith, Vicar of Wendover in Buckinghamshire, invited the laborers of his parish to deposit their savings with him on interest.  “Upon the first day of the week,” said he, quoting St. Paul’s injuction, “let every one of you lay by him in store."[1] He offered to receive sums as small as twopence.  Before the end of the year he had sixty depositors.  Eventually the government took up the scheme and established the present system of national postal savings banks.

[1] The quotation is from I Corinthians xvi, 2.

They have done and are doing incalculable good.  At present there are over eleven million depositors in the United Kingdom.  Most of them belong to the wage-earning class, and they hold more than 212,000,000 pounds.  In this case certainly the grain of mustard seed, sown a few generations ago, has produced a mighty harvest.

622.  England in Egypt; Progress in Africa.

While busy at home, the English had been busy outside of their island.  Five years after the opening of the Suez Canal (1869), Lord Beaconsfield, then the Conservative Prime Minister, bought nearly half of the canal property from the Governor of Egypt.  Since then England has kept her hand on the country of the Pharaohs and the pyramids, and kept it there greatly to the advantage of the laboring class.

About ten years later (1881), Arabi Pasha, an ambitious colonel in the native army, raised the cry, “Down with all foreigners—­Egypt for the Egyptians!” Lord Wolseley defeated Arabi’s forces, and the colonel was banished from the country.