Egypt furnished the Opposition with many opportunities for embarrassing the Ministry. Lord Hartington had seriously damaged the _prestige_ of the Government by his pusillanimous declaration at the opening of the Session that the English troops would be recalled from Egypt in six months. Though Mr. Gladstone, on his return from Cannes, was compelled to throw his colleague over and explain that this statement was purely conjectural, the distrust which Lord Hartington had inspired could not be completely eradicated. A more serious difficulty, however, arose out of the exorbitant tolls which the Suez Canal Company levied on the shipping trade. Yielding to the pressure of shipping and commercial interests, Mr. Gladstone sanctioned an agreement by which M. de Lesseps was to provide additional accommodation by digging a second canal. He was also to reduce the tolls gradually, and admit a few Englishmen to his Board of Management. In return the British Government were to procure him the concession of the land for the second canal, and enable him to raise a loan of £8,000,000 at 3¼ per cent. A storm of opposition was raised to this project, on the ground that it recognised M. de Lesseps’s monopoly to the canalisation of the Isthmus of Suez. The agreement, which was announced on the 28th of April, was abandoned on the 23rd of July. In South Africa the policy of the Government was attacked during the Session on the ground that it connived at the oppression of the native chiefs by the Boers, who were not carrying out the Transvaal Convention. The restoration and overthrow of Cetewayo also provoked criticism, but the verdict of the country was that the debates all ended in demonstrating one point, which was this: the existing tangle of affairs in South Africa was entirely due to the policy of the late Government, and the existing Government had not been able to discover any way of satisfactorily neutralising the blunders of their predecessors. But no question arising in British dependencies created so much strife as the Indian Criminal Procedure Amendment Bill, popularly called the Ilbert Bill. Lord Lytton had laid down a rule whereby every year one-sixth of the vacancies in the Indian Civil Service must be filled up by natives. As they advanced in the Magistracy and became eligible for service as District Magistrates and Sessions Judges, a difficulty arose. Either they must, like European officials of the same grades, be allowed to try Europeans as well as native offenders against the Criminal Law, or they must be virtually wasted. Moreover, an offensive slight must be put on the Indian servants of the Empress, by prohibiting them from exercising all the functions pertaining to their grade and rank. In Presidency towns no difficulty arose. There native magistrates of this grade were allowed to have jurisdiction over Europeans, the theory being that they acted under the moral censorship of a European press. But in country