From the bye-elections it was clear, when the New Year (1879) opened, that the _prestige_ of the Ministry was waning. The spangled robe and gaudy diadem of Asiatic Imperialism began to sit uneasily on Constitutional England. The Treaty of Berlin had not brought Englishmen much “honour.” But it had not even brought Europe “peace.” Austria had to make good her hold of Bosnia and Herzegovina by war. Albania was in the hands of a rebel League that executed “Jetdart justice” on Turkish Pashas of the highest rank. Bulgaria and Thrace were only saved from anarchy by the Russian army of occupation. Eastern Roumelia was the scene of daily conflicts between the Turkish troops, and the people of Greece were clamorous to know when Turkey would respond to the invitation of the Conference, and rectify the Hellenic frontier. The discovery that Cyprus was a poor pestilential island, infinitely less valuable than most of the Ionian group, which Englishmen had given to Greece as a gift, was a profound disappointment to popular hopes, and led to an undue and exaggerated depreciation of its value as a place of arms. The Anglo-Turkish Convention was already seen to be a farce. The Sultan, after the resources of diplomatic menace had been well-nigh exhausted, conceded to the agents of England in Asia Minor a few illusory rights of surveillance. But he set on foot no reforms, and he made it plain that he would resist to the death any attempt to “open up” his Asiatic provinces under a British Protectorate to the enterprise of the British projector and pioneer. The Afghan War was unpopular, and though victory did not prove, as was feared, inconstant to our arms, the people seemed convinced, from the history of the first and second Afghan Wars, that a triumph would be almost as disastrous in its cost to India as a defeat. It was impossible now to conceal the fact that when the Indian troops were brought to Malta, the country was placed in a position of far greater peril than had been imagined. While Ministers were wasting their energies in protecting more or less imaginary interests in Eastern Europe, they were apparently quite ignorant that their policy had exposed the vital interests of the Empire to attack in Asia. Nay, it was seen that their policy of irritating and menacing the Afghan Ameer, and of terrifying the Native Princes with enforced disarmament, had rendered it easy for Russia, without doing more than giving our enemies and discontented feudatories merely some unofficial support, to shake the fabric of Indian Empire to its very centre. To put the Imperial Crown of India down among the stakes in Lord Beaconsfield’s game with Russia in Europe was magnificent. But men of sense and prudence now began to suspect that it was not good business or good diplomacy. Never was England less restful or less easy in mind. Abroad Lord Beaconsfield, as was said, had created a situation which was neither peace with its security, nor war with its happy chances.