Along with the Coercion Bill the promised Arrears Bill was introduced, and read a second time before Whitsuntide. It applied to holdings under £30 of rental, and empowered the Land Courts to pay half the arrears of poor tenants out of the Irish Church Surplus--but no payment was to exceed a year’s rent, and all past arrears were to be cancelled. After prolonged opposition from the Conservatives and from the House of Lords, the measure was passed on the 10th of August. These Bills exhausted the legislative energies of the Government; indeed, Mr. Fawcett’s Bill establishing a Parcel Post, and Mr. Chamberlain’s Bill enabling corporations to adopt Electric Lighting by obtaining provisional orders from the Board of Trade, were the only measures that had not to be abandoned. The Budget estimated expenditure at £84,630,000 and revenue at £84,935,000, a reduction of between £900,000 and £800,000 respectively on the preceding year’s disbursements and receipts. The surplus was small. The revenue was stagnant, and there was no scope for fiscal changes. A Vote of Credit for the Egyptian Expedition had to be provided, which caused Mr. Gladstone to raise the Income Tax to 6¾d. in the pound. The Egyptian difficulty, in fact, during this Session, became acute. It was seized by the Fourth Party as a peg on which to hang an endless series of questions to the Government, of an embarrassing character. From questioning, Lord Randolph Churchill proceeded to wage an irregular guerilla warfare, most harassing to Ministers engaged in delicate diplomatic negotiations on which depended the issues of peace and war. In this unusual course he and his friends were supported by Mr. Chaplin and Lord Percy, and aided by many fiery assaults made by Lord Salisbury. Sir Stafford Northcote and the majority of the ex-Ministers in the House of Commons disapproved, at first, of tactics which seemed to them an unprecedented violation of the decencies of English party warfare. But Sir Stafford’s reserve and prudence, though appreciated by the country, were so distasteful to his followers that ere the Session ended he found he had to submit to be their instrument in using the foreign complications of the nation for the interests of faction. Had he refused, the combatant section of his followers would have rebelled against his authority. It was part of the irony of the situation that the Egyptian difficulty was one of the evil legacies which the Foreign Policy of the Tory Party in 1879-1880 left the country to deal with. In fact, the Egyptian crisis of 1882 was the logical consequence of the system of Dual Control with which Lord Salisbury had afflicted Egypt when he went into partnership with France in managing the finances of that country for the benefit of its usurious foreign creditors. It was in 1866 that Ismail Pasha took the first step that gradually led to his downfall. To use his own phrase, he “kissed the carpet” at Constantinople--in other words, bribed the