water-gate to India. It was a bold stroke of Disraeli's also
which, at the close of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78,
compelled the victor to take his paw from the throat of his
victim and submit the treaty to a congress of the powers at
Berlin, where its terms were modified and England was admitted to
its benefits. The Second Afghan War (1878-80), and the Zulu War
(1878-79), and the Boer War, which brought little glory to
Britain, were the direct result of the Prime Minister's desire to
extend the empire and strengthen its frontiers. It may have been
theatrical, but it was certainly impressive to the assembled
princes of India when Lord Lytton, the Viceroy, proclaimed
Victoria Empress of India in Delhi, the old capital of the
Moguls, on January 1, 1877. And though Disraeli (raised to the
peerage as Lord Beaconsfield) was in his grave, his spirit
dominated the pageantry of 1887 and 1897, when every nation and
tribe and kindred and people of the Greater Britain sent
representatives to London to celebrate the jubilee and diamond
jubilee of the Empress-Queen, to whose aggrandizement he had
contributed so effectively.


AFTER A HUNDRED YEARS


The century closes upon another England than that which was
struggling against Napoleon at its dawn. Instead of the "right
little tight little island," a compact and self-contained nation,
it is now the head of an empire comparable in extent and
population with no other since the Rome of Augustus. Canada,
Federal Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa form a Greater