A couple of months later our friendly relations with Italy inspired a cartoon in which Britannia congratulates Italy, but advises her to be less visionary and more practical. Italy's finances were causing her trouble; otherwise the advice showed an inability to sound the springs of Italian policy. _Punch's_ pacific dreams were dispelled in the autumn by the renewed troubles in Ashanti. Britannia, as he put it, expected more than an umbrella this time; King Coffee's umbrella had cost us £900,000 in 1874. Happily the expedition was well organized and its immediate purpose executed, though a further expedition became necessary in 1900. Far graver anxieties threatened us from Africa at the close of the year, and since _Punch's_ criticisms of and comments on the successive phases of controversy and conflict betray a certain amount of variation and even inconsistency, it is as well to point out that the unfriendly tone he had shown towards "Joe" in previous years had largely abated upon Mr. Chamberlain's accession to office as Colonial Secretary. In the account of a dinner held in the late autumn of 1895 to celebrate the opening of railway communication between Natal and the Cape, Mr. Chamberlain's speech is extolled as "splendidly pitched, admirably phrased, and full of the Palmerstonian ring." Simultaneously in "The Imperial Federalists' Vade Mecum" _Punch_ discourses on the difficulties, no longer insuperable, which attended on the translation into reality of that dream of Imperial Federation which had once been regarded as a nightmare. [Sidenote: _Dr. Jameson's Popularity_] The abortive Jameson Raid at the close of December, 1895, came as a bombshell; and _Punch_, in his "Tug of War" cartoon, shows the Uitlander trying to pull the British Lion into the Transvaal, while Mr. Chamberlain is pulling him back. Canning's well-known lines on "The Pilot that weathered the Storm" are rewritten in honour of Mr. Chamberlain's handling of the crisis. A few months earlier _Punch_ had ridiculed the Kaiser for his arbitrary absolutism in sending to prison a private University teacher "for writing in praise of a certain kind of soap." The famous telegram to President Krüger was dealt with more audaciously in an apocryphal letter purporting to have been sent by the Queen to her grandson:--