he order of the Star of India from Albert Edward, the
Prince of Wales. From the painting by Sydney Hall, P.M.A.]

Lord Beaconsfield had crowned his dramatic and picturesque Ministerial
career by placing a new diadem on the head of the {171} widowed Queen,
who was now Empress of India. His successor, William Ewart Gladstone,
the great leader of the Liberal party, was content with a less showy
field. He had in 1869 relieved Ireland from the unjust burden of
supporting a Church the tenets of which she considered blasphemous; and
one which her own, the Roman Catholic, had for three centuries been
trying to overthrow. We cannot wonder that the memory of a tyranny so
odious is not easily effaced; nor that there is less gratitude for its
removal, than bitterness that it should so long have been. It is
certainly true that the disestablishment of the English Church in
Ireland was one of the most righteous acts of this reign.

The Irish question is such a tangled web of wrong and injustice
complicated by folly and outrage, that the wisest and best-intentioned
statesmanship is baffled. Whether the conditions would be improved by
giving them their own Parliament, could only be determined by
experiment; and that experiment England is not yet willing to try.

{172}

CHAPTER XIV

A fitting companion to the Story of England's Empire in India, is that
of her South African Colonial Possessions.

It was about the year 1652, while Oliver Cromwell's star was highest in
the heavens, that the Dutch East India Company, needing a resting place
on the way to the East, planted the germ of an Empire at the Cape of
Good Hope. The Portuguese, those pioneers in exploration had only
lightly touched this uninviting spot, and then were away chasing rumors
of gold.

But the Hollanders were men of a different sort. They asked no
indulgences from Nature; and when their roots had once grappled the
soil, however disheartening the conditions, they were not to be lured
away by glistening surfaces farther on. All they asked was a place on
which to {173} grow. And so with stolid persistence they worked away
in a field the least promising ever offered to human endeavor.

But the fates befriended them, and after the Revocation of the "Edict
of Nantes," a touch of grace and charm was brought into their sterile
life by the arrival of three hundred Huguenot refugees. And there, in
that austere land, for more than a century these children fro