The year 1881 confronted the Government with four difficulties. The Irish Question was growing more serious every day. With a heavy heart England not only saw herself committed to a war of reconquest in the Transvaal, but heard her most sanguine Imperialists admitting that Sir Bartle Frere’s scheme for a South African Confederation had utterly broken down. The Parliament of the Cape Colony would not even seriously discuss it, and Sir Bartle Frere had been recalled at the end of 1880. Victory had crowned British arms in Afghanistan, but Lord Beaconsfield’s policy of holding Candahar, and controlling the rest of the country by British Residents, was obviously impossible. Lord Lytton, who now called it an “experiment,” admitted that the murder of Cavagnari had proved it to be a failure. The claims of Greece to an increase of territory and a better frontier, had been admitted to be just by the Powers, but Turkey still refused to accept any compromise which Europe suggested, and Greece pressed her demands with growing impatience. The nation was therefore relieved to find that Parliament was to meet earlier than usual, and when it assembled on the 6th of January it was soon seen that the Session would be a stormy one. Among the upper and upper middle classes the Government was denounced with a bitterness that had no parallel, for permitting Ireland to fall into “anarchy” under the dominion of the Land League. In the debate on the Address in the House of Lords, Lord Beaconsfield, appealing to the prevailing sentiment of disappointment, sought to show that all these difficulties were due to Mr. Gladstone’s sudden reversal of the Conservative policy when he came into office. The speech was pitched in a strange, shrewish note of anger, and it failed to produce much effect. Men could not forget that only a few months before Lord Beaconsfield had taunted the Ministry with meekly and slavishly carrying out his policy. It was not easy to forget that Lord Beaconsfield had abandoned the Coercion Act and allowed the Land League to fix its grip on Ireland, that the troubles in Afghanistan were entirely due to his desire to govern that country without being at the expense of occupying it, that the alternative policy adopted by him after the murder of Cavagnari--that of detaching Candahar and putting it under a Wali, who was to be friendly and independent--ended in the fall of the Wali and the desertion of his troops to the enemy which produced the disaster of Maiwand. As for South Africa, even the _Times_, which had supported Lord Beaconsfield’s policy in that region, now wrote, “what a miserable business our whole connection with the annexation of the Transvaal has been from first to last. The original annexation of the country was a mistake, and it has been the parent of all the rest.” Knowing that Englishmen would never sanction a war for the conquest of a free European people who objected to come under