Parliament was prorogued peacefully on the 13th of August, and, on the whole, Ministers emerged from the Session with credit. Mr. Disraeli’s bright wit, his cheerful temper, and his airy jocularity in meeting serious attacks, recalled pleasant memories of Lord Palmerston, and tempted the House to forget his occasional blunders as its Leader. The Recess, however, brought serious peril to his Cabinet--peril which, however, it had done little to deserve. In the middle of September it was discovered that the Foreign Office had induced the Admiralty to issue a Fugitive Slave Circular to naval officers. They were told they must not receive fugitive slaves in territorial waters unless their lives were in danger. If the fugitive slave came on board a British ship in territorial waters, he was not to remain if it were proved he were a slave. If received on the high seas, he must be surrendered when the ship came within the territorial waters of the country from which he had escaped. The Circular, in fact, defined the legal obligations under which British ships of war must logically lie if they chose to enter the territorial waters of slave States, with which England was not at war. It was a Circular embodying regulations on which every Liberal Minister had habitually acted, but the Liberal Party immediately proceeded to make political capital out of it. An agitation as fierce as that which was caused by the abandonment of the Merchant Shipping Bill sprang up, and Lord Derby, at whose instance the Admiralty issued the Circular, was accused of attempting to commit England to a furtive partnership with slave-owners. The most that could be said in fairness against the document was that it was so badly drafted as to imply that the deck of a Queen’s ship was subject to foreign jurisdiction. Moreover, the order to surrender a fugitive slave who had taken refuge on a Queen’s ship on the high seas, was so completely indefensible that Lord Derby himself struck it out of the second edition of his Circular. He might as well have ordered a British Consul in Rio to arrest and surrender a Brazilian slave who, having gained freedom by escaping to English soil, had afterwards returned to that port. Till Parliament met in 1876, the country rang with the inflated protests of Liberal partisans against the amended Circular, which was published after the original one had been suspended in October, and cancelled in November.