A brighter passage in the record of 1866 is that which commemorates the completion of telegraphic communication between Great Britain and America. Attempts had been made in 1857, 1858, and 1865 to lay a cable across the Atlantic, all of which ended in failure; but Mr. Cyrus Field would not abandon his dream. The _Great Eastern_ steamship sailed from Berehaven on July 12, and on July 27 the first messages were exchanged between the old and new worlds. A feat hardly less inspiring was performed later in the same season, in the recovery of the broken cable of 1865, which was spliced, thereby effecting a second connection between the two continents. [Sidenote: "A Leap in the Dark."] Mr. Disraeli, as has been said, had undertaken the task in which Mr. Gladstone had failed, and brought in a Reform Bill early in the session of 1867. It cost the Government a heavy price at the outset: Lord Carnarvon, Lord Cranbourne (now Marquis of Salisbury), and General Peel resigned their seats in the Cabinet because they disapproved of it. The Bill went forward, and, after undergoing many changes, finally passed in a form conferring household suffrage in boroughs and a £12 franchise in counties. "No doubt," said Lord Derby on the third reading of the Bill in the Lords, quoting a remark made by Lord Cranbourne in the other House, "no doubt we are making a great experiment and 'taking a leap in the dark,' but I have the greatest confidence in the sound sense of my fellow-countrymen." But another saying by Lord Derby gives a truer insight into the real object of a Conservative Government in doing work so repugnant to its accredited principles. Somebody having observed to him that the measure was dangerously democratic--"We have dished the Whigs!" was all that Derby replied. Mr. Disraeli, in reference to the same subject, made use of a phrase which gave bitter offence to some of his party, and deepened the distrust with which the old school of Conservatives regarded him almost to the end of his life. On October 29, 1867, he was entertained at a banquet by the Conservatives of Edinburgh, and when passing in review the events of the session, and especially his Reform Act, he said: "I had to prepare the mind of the country, and to educate--if it be not arrogant to use such a phrase--to educate our party." [Illustration: _From a Photograph_} {_by Beattie, Hobart._ HOBART, TASMANIA. Tasmania, formerly known as Van Diemen's Land, was taken possession of by the British in 1803. It was governed from Sydney until 1825, when it became an independent province; and it received its existing Constitution in 1855. Population (1895), 160,834; imports, £1,094,457; exports, £1,373,063.] [Illustration: _From a Photograph_} {_by Beattie, Hobart._ LAUNCESTON, TASMANIA.] [Sidenote: The Fenians.]