Only one cloud shadowed the Foreign policy of the Cabinet during this uneventful year. The contest between Prince Bismarck and the Roman Catholic Church was raging in Germany, and the personal rivalry of the German Chancellor and Count Harry Arnim--who had been German Ambassador at Paris--had ended in the arrest of the latter on the charge of embezzling State documents. This arrest had been effected after Count Harry Arnim’s house had been ransacked by the police, and the Continent rang with the scandal. Mr. Disraeli, at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, on the 9th of November, congratulated the country on the Conservatism of the British working classes, who, he said, enjoyed so many liberties that they were naturally loyal to the institutions under which their freedom was safeguarded. “They are not,” said he, “afraid of political arrests or domiciliary visits.” The Queen was somewhat pained at an utterance which the German Government regarded as an impertinent interference with its domestic affairs, but a few days afterwards the wrath of Prince Bismarck was appeased by an official explanation in the Times to the effect that Mr. Disraeli had not meant to refer to the affairs of Germany, or to the arbitrary conduct of the Berlin police. In this unfortunate speech Mr. Disraeli, however, struck a popular note when he referred to the extension of the Empire by the annexation of the Fiji islands, in terms that foreshadowed a policy of Colonial expansion. As for the Opposition, it remained in a state of disorganisation, under Mr. Gladstone’s desultory leadership. Its prospects were not improved by his publication of two pamphlets, in which he attacked what he called “Vaticanism,” and attempted to prove that good Catholics, who were mostly Liberals, must be incapable of reasoning, if they were not traitors. That was the sum and substance of his amazing tirades against the extravagant pretensions of the Papacy under Pius IX.