“You will expect,” said Sir William Harcourt at Oxford, on December 30, “that I should say something to you on the subject of the Suez Canal shares. Well, that is a matter on which no prudent politician in our present state of information will hazard a competent opinion. At the same time, after all that has been said on the matter, to be wholly silent would be an affectation of reserve. For my part, if the matter had been allowed to remain in the regions of high policy, I should have been content to abstain from criticising it altogether. I am not unfavourable to a far-seeing and a bold policy in the conduct of great affairs. We have had somewhat too little of that spirit of late. But all reticence upon that score is at an end. The most contradictory and, in some respects, the most absurd surmises with respect to this transaction were afloat some weeks ago. Lord Hartington, at the beginning of this month, invited a declaration from the Government of the real meaning and object of their policy, and Lord Derby accepted the challenge with perfect frankness. Since the speech of the Foreign Secretary the whole aspect of the question has been completely changed both at home and abroad. Up to that time a sort of glamour had invested a very plain business with the unnatural haze that distorts the true proportion of things. There was something Asiatic in this mysterious melodrama. It was like ‘The Thousand and One Nights,’ when, in the midst of the fumes of incense, a shadowy Genie astonished the bewildered spectators. The public mind was dazzled, fascinated, mystified. We had done we did not know exactly what--we were not told precisely why--_omne ignotum pro magnifico_. The Government maintained an imposing and perplexing silence. But our daily and weekly instructors gave free rein to their imagination. We were told by those who assumed the patronage of the grand arcanum that a great blow had been struck, that a new policy had been inaugurated, and that England had at length resumed her lead among the nations. The Eastern Question had been settled by a _coup d’état_ on the Stock Exchange, and Turkey was abandoned to her fate. Egypt was annexed. The Bulls of England had vanquished the Bears of Russia. Moab was to be our washpot and over Edom we had cast our shoe. France and M. de Lesseps were confounded. We were a very great people; we had done a very big thing, and, to consummate the achievement, a Satrap from Shoreham, attended by a plump of financial Janissaries, was despatched to administer the subject provinces of the English protectorate on the Nile. All this, if somewhat nebulous, was in the grand manner, and if any inquisitive person, like the troublesome little boy on the field of Blenheim, was disposed to ask ‘what good came of it at last,’ we could always answer, like the judicious Kasper-- “‘Why, that I cannot tell,’ said he, ‘But ’twas a glorious victory.’