the importance of the fact that the attention of our Government was specially called to a subject which might at any moment become – as it has become – one of great importance to our South African colonies, and that had the Ministers specially responsible been possessed of sufficient wisdom to have inquired into the actual condition of affairs and the feelings of the Cape Government, it is very probable that the "Angra Pequena" difficulty, which did not come into notice for nearly three years after, would never have existed at all. But, as usual, indolence or incapacity allowed the matter to sleep, and, as far as we have gone, the results of the policy of our Government may be summed up in the words of Lord Derby's apologetic despatch to Sir Hercules Robinson of December 4, 1884, in which he remarks that it is "too late for this country to take action as far as the Angra Pequena territory is concerned;" and that it only "remains to consider what should now be done to protect British colonial interests from any inconvenience which might possibly result from the presence of a foreign settlement on the frontier of the colony." "A lame and impotent conclusion" of a diplomatic correspondence, in which it is difficult to say whether Mr Gladstone's Foreign or Colonial Minister shows to most disadvantage.
Nor, indeed, is the reputation of Lord Granville exalted, if we turn our attention to other diplomatic performances during the past year. It will be borne in mind that when the miserably timid and vacillating policy of the present Government had led us into an expenditure upon the Upper Nile of which no man can yet calculate the amount, it was not long before it became apparent that the finances of Egypt were in a state within a measurable distance of bankruptcy. True to its fundamental principle of endeavouring to shift responsibility on to other shoulders, Mr Gladstone's Government proposed a Conference, which was to free them from all their difficulties. It will not be forgotten that, in order to secure the support of France to their proposals, our Government entered into a preliminary agreement with the French Government, by which such concessions were proposed to be made by England as awakened the indignation of the country, and threatened to place Mr Gladstone and his Cabinet in such a disagreeable position with even their own supporters, that the Prime Minister was actually obliged to come down to the House of Commons and announce, with an ill-concealed feeling of relief, that failure of the Conference which enabled him to get quit of the French agreement. It may be said, and of course truly said, that the whole Cabinet were responsible for both Conference and agreement; but had we been so fortunate as to have had a Palmerston at the Foreign Office, or indeed any statesman of vigour, capacity, and determination, such an agreement would never have been submitted to a British Cabinet. The cavalier dismissal of the Conference by Lord Granville – the mission of Lord Northbrook, and its somewhat ignominious failure – and the generally weak and equivocal policy of the Gladstone Government with regard to Egypt, – have naturally encouraged other European Powers to advance their own pretensions, and to slight those of Great Britain, so that, according to present appearances, the opportunities for wise and
