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Show ENGLISH POLITICS. The English, Blue Book" on the Afghan, question is published. The accounts given of the manner in which the Gladstone Ministry and the Salisbury Ministry dealt with that question are highly flattering to the Salisbury Ministry, as telegraphed. At one time the Afghan question threatened threat-ened to engage England and Russia in war, but happily that was avoided. The importance of the question now is the effect that its . final settlement is liable to have upon English politics. The course of Lord Salisbury was but a continuation of the policy of Mr. Gladstone, Glad-stone, and the tone of his dispatches, as given to the press, was in no way more decisive and firm than had been the tone of the dispatches of the Gladstone Government. Gov-ernment. To whom belongs the credit of having brought the negotiations between London and St. Petersburg to a sucess-ful sucess-ful close is a question for the English Eng-lish electors to decide so far as such negotiations affect the present campaign. cam-paign. England will eventually have to abandon her policy of universal protector, and confine her protectorate to her own possessions. In English politics to-day the most important questions are not of a foreign nature but of a domestic one, and in the discussion and treatment of such questions the Liberals have generally had the best of the argument. The masses of the English people are beginning to claim their political rights, and each extension ex-tension of the elective franchise is but a step .towards the adoption of universal suffrage without property qualification. The Liberals as having . more confidence in humanity than the Conservatives, are far more liable to recognize the claims of the people, and thereby increase their own strength. .There is also the question of reforming the House of Lords', and at some not far distant day this question must be met. How it will be met and how the House of Lords will be modified it is impossible to say; but the inevitable tendencies of the times are towards the curtailment of privileges and '. the extension of rights. There is . also the Irish question, a question around which there cluster the blunders and bigotry of three centuries. This is the most im-pertant im-pertant and pressing question of any with which England has had to deal, and neither Tory or Liberal has ever yet succeeded suc-ceeded in treating it successfully. Eng lish politics have an interest for Americans much greater than the politics of any other country, as the political genius of the English is much the same as the political genius' of the American people, and the English have been the most successful in the application of liberal lib-eral politics to the affairs of man. .,i . , |