[Footnote 1: Josiah Tatnall, flag-officer of the East India Squadron in 1856.] It was in the same spirit that _Punch_ welcomed a remark in the New York _Morning Press_: "After all the English people are our people, and we are theirs," and deprecated as suicidal any efforts to forsake a common heritage and rend asunder a family tree. The tension passed, thanks to diplomacy and arbitration, and towards the close of the year we find _Punch_ welcoming Mr. McKinley on his election as President, the Shade of Washington (with a somewhat bulbous nose) congratulating Columbia: "'Sound Money' is the best policy." Meanwhile the expedition to Khartum had been decided on; the House of Commons, reassured by a confident speech from Mr. Chamberlain, having approved of the forward policy by a two to one vote, in spite of the misgivings of Mr. Morley, Sir William Harcourt and Sir Charles Dilke. _Punch_, mindful of 1884, registered his approval in the cartoon in which the Shade of Gordon in the desert utters the one word, "Remember!" Wars and rumours of wars did not distract _Punch's_ attention from the peaceful rivalry of commerce. He was still much concerned by Germany's competition, which he typified in his cartoon of British Trade as the old woman whose petticoats were "cut all round about," while she was asleep, by a German pedlar. And the commercial significance of Li Hung Chang's visit is not overlooked in the generally farcical handling of that extremely astute Oriental. In the cartoon "China in the Bull Shop," rival Continental shopkeepers, who had got no orders out of him, are consumed with envy and curiosity. If _Punch_ is to be believed, their envy was ill-founded. Li Hung Chang displayed a boundless inquisitiveness, but there was "nothing doing" in the way of business between him and his hosts. _Punch_ drew mainly on his imagination for the events of the visit, and ascribed to Li Hung Chang a number of topical Chinese proverbs. The best of them--"Half an official welcome is better than an ill-bred mobbing"--refers to his arrival in the "dead" season. [Sidenote: _Two Modern Hamlets_] Lord Rosebery resigned the leadership of the Liberal Party in June. While still in office he had estranged the Radical stalwarts by his Imperialist foreign policy and his heretical view of the necessity of converting the "predominant partner," England, before attempting to revive Home Rule. His Government, as one of his colleagues put it, were condemned to the task of "ploughing the sands." In the intervening year the gulf that severed him from the stalwarts and the Nonconformist conscience had been widened by his refusal to join in Mr. Gladstone's Armenian crusade, and henceforth he decided to "plough a lonely furrow." In later years he made occasional dramatic interventions, but his official career, like that of his contemporary at Eton, Lord Randolph Churchill, closed before he was fifty. [Illustration: THE CHESTERFIELD HAMLET