tween the two countries, the sinister spell of the Irish question working upon each of them in its different way. And just when temper was at its highest on both sides, a fresh dispute about the Canadian Fisheries served to precipitate matters; Congress was hastily summoned, the action of the Foreign Minister was endorsed, and diplomatic relations with England were broken off with a suddenness and completeness implying a state of war. Our unfortunate Ministry would probably have stopped short of this madness, had they not reckoned without their host upon the allegiance and alliance of Canada. But here too they had been giving umbrage by their want of tact, and the upshot of their proceedings was that the Canadians engaged to observe neutrality, and left the Bunglers of England to face alone the struggle which they alone had provoked.
The costly and melancholy Soudan expedition, some dozen or fifteen years before, had pretty well disgusted the British public with their part in North African affairs. Since Egypt was not to be theirs out and out, taxpayers began to grumble at having to pose as head-nurse there, bolstering up the Khedive, tying on the Khedive’s bib, applying the Khedive’s pap-bottle, blowing the Khedive’s nose, wiping the Khedive’s tears, and so forth. The road now lay open, so far as the English public cared, to a renewal of French ascendancy in Egypt; but France, too, was no longer jealous or keen about it, and certainly the entente cordiale between the two neighbours would not have been disturbed on that account. But the same morbid condition of feeling which had already broken the peace in the East and in the West, gave rise to needless complications about matters in which British interests were even less concerned than in Egyptian affairs. For instance, the Bungling Coalition thought proper to interfere about a project which the French press had taken
