Khartoum, was perhaps the heaviest load that the Gladstonian
foreign policy ever had to bear.


DISRAELI AND IMPERIALISM


Foreign affairs were the field of Disraeli's most brilliant
exploits. "He had two ruling ideas," says the historian Oman,
"the first was the conception of England as an imperial world-
power, interested in European politics, but still more interested
in the maintenance and development of her vast colonial and
Indian empire. This is the notion which friends and enemies now
using the word in different senses call 'imperialism.' The second
ruling thought in Disraeli's mind was the conviction that the
Conservative party ought to step forward as rival to the Liberal
party in commanding the sympathies and allegiance of the masses."
In pursuance of this second idea he took the "leap in the dark,"
in 1867, carrying a reform bill which was but little short of
democratic in its extension of the right to vote. This was
followed up by legislation favoring the English tenant-farmers,
and improving the condition of workingmen in towns. Even after
Disraeli's death, Lord Salisbury continued his domestic policy,
instituting local government by means of county councils in 1888,
making the schools free in 1891, and refunding the national debt
in 1888.

It was a great day for the British empire when Disraeli's
telegram to the hard-pressed Khedive of Egypt, in 1875, bought
for England the controlling interest in the Suez canal, the