persons who thought otherwise upon this subject, but many of them were
men whose views had become warped and deranged in such out-of-the-way
places as Southern Russia, Eastern China, Central Hindoostan, Southern
Africa, and Northern America military men, who, in fact, could not be
expected to understand questions of grave political economy, astute
matters of place.-and party, upon which the very existence of the
parliamentary system depended; and who, from the ignorance of these nice
distinctions of liberal-conservative and conservative-liberal, had
imagined that the strength and power of the empire was not of secondary
importance to the strength and power of a party. But the year 1869 did
not pass altogether into the bygone without giving a faint echo of
disturbance in one far-away region of the earth. It is true, that not the
smallest breathing of that strife which was to make: the succeeding year
crimson through the centuries had yet sounded on the continent of Europe.
No; all was as quiet there as befits the mighty hush which precedes
colossal conflicts. But far away in the very farthest West, so far that
not one man in fifty could tell its whereabouts, up somewhere between the
Rocky Mountains, Hudson Bay, and Lake Superior, along a river called the
Red River of the North, a people, of whom nobody could tell who or what
they were, had risen in insurrection. Well-informed persons said these
insurgents were only Indians; others, who had relations in America,
averreed that they were Scotchmen, and one journal, well-known for its
clearness upon all subjects connected with the American Continent,
asserted that they were Frenchmen. Amongst so much conflicting testimony,
it was only natural that the average Englishman should possess no very
decided opinions upon the matter; in fact, it came to pass that the
average Englishman, having heard that somebody was rebelling against him
somewhere or other, looked to his atlas and his journal for information
on the subject, and having failed in obtaining any from either source,
naturally concluded that the whole thing was something which no fellow