Does Mr. Gladstone foresee an “irrepressible conflict” between England and Islam? Is he instinctively bringing on a conflict which will be the less perilous the sooner it comes? Will history add to his rare good fortune by making him glorious as the beginner of a defense of Christendom which he has never dreamed of organizing? Disraeli’s conception followed logic and history. He made a Christian queen empress of India, and he contemplated with composure a time when the descendant of Victoria should be born in India, and be reared in the faith of Mohammed, the center of the British empire having gone to its proper place. Against such ideas Christian England revolted. Is Mr. Gladstone reversing centuries of history and setting the Moslem and Christian worlds by the ears again? If he is moving on that line, his armies should conquer and hold Egypt and the Soudan, the Nile and the Red Sea, the ancient Delta and its modern canal, with the grip England once laid on North America. The audacity of the conquest would provoke diplomatic criminations; but it were easier far to face them than to answer the hard questions which are provoked by fruitless slaughter in Moslem lands. England is only the heart of the British empire. A quiet and gentle England is a possible dream; but the empire is war, conquest, dominion, at the expense of weak peoples. The empire can not survive the definitive abandonment of an imperial policy. The empire must dominate by force or fall to pieces. It is not worth while to seek in the history of the Egyptian debt, and the “grasping disposition of the English bondholders,” for the key of the present situation. Those who make a religion, or at least a philanthropy, of heaping abuse on bondholders anywhere and everywhere, are the least reasonable of Christians. It is not a crime to deny ourselves, save money and lend it to others. To refuse to pay debts freely contracted is not the first of virtues or the best of policies. The bondholders are commonly poor people who have saved a little by pinching themselves, and have bought bonds for the holy purposes of family forethought. Repudiated debts are baptised in the self-renouncing spirit which is at the heart of our religion, and repudiators make war on the foundations of character and society. In so far as England protects her money lenders, she protects her noble middle class, whose honest thrift lies at the foundation of her wealth. It is among the strangest perversions of feeling that prodigals and prodigal governments should get the sympathy of mankind. Let England foreclose her mortgage on Egypt, and the honest world will thank her for abolishing one nest of spendthrifts. Much is said of the miserable Egyptian peasants, from whom the taxes to pay interest are wrung with every form of despotic oppression. Let us not be deceived by such false-toned appeals for sympathy. The fellaheen of the Nile are oppressed irrespective of the bondholders. Arabi or El Mahdi