The Lord Mayor entertained her Majesty's Ministers at the Mansion
House on Wednesday. Lord Northbrook and Mr. Childers, in returning thanks for the Army and Navy, alluded with some pride to the promptitude with which " England the Unready" had equipped and sent out so considerable an expedition ; and in this the nation will heartily concur, though Indian statesmen may doubt whether greater rapidity and less careful all-round completeness might not have answered the purpose in Egypt even better. Mr. Gladstone's speech was, of course, the speech of the evening. He spoke of the danger of a conflict with the Lords as virtually over, remarked that the interests in defence of which we had gone to Egypt, though they might be ours, were "not ours alone, but interests common to us with every State in Europe, nay, with the whole of the civilised world." Egypt had become the great gate between the Eastern and Western hemispheres ; the interests of mankind demanded that that gate should be open, "and in order that it may be open, it is not less essential that the country in which it is set should be a country under a peaceful, orderly, and legal government." " We do not go to make war on the people of Egypt, but to rescue them from the oppression of a military tyranny, which at present extinguishes every free voice, and chains every arm of the people of that country." We are not going to attack Mahomedanism, nor to assail Egyptian liber- ties ; on the contrary, we go to protect the former, and to enlarge the latter. Further, we go with no secret intentions, " with nothing to conceal from the other nations of the earth, but, on the contrary, with aims to the fullest extent avowed," and with the consciousness that we deserve the trust of the other Powers, and that they give us that trust.
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