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 o