Tus state of feeling with regard to the Ashantee war seems to indicate some return to more practical thoughts in England. It is allowed by all that the war was the result of mismanagement, and it is felt that if we are to have a war it is very unsatisfactory that the West Coast of Africa should be the spot. Except from Mr. Gladstone and some of Mr. Giadstone's more particular friends, we however fail to hear the diatribes against war in general and petty wars in particular which have been dinned into our ears for some five years back. Doubtless war is one of the greatest of evils, but till we are in a position to do away with the neces sity for it, it is nob an unmixed evil that we should continue to keep our hands in. At the present moment, and looking back at the state of disorganisation into which the British army, under a reforming Grovernment, was rapidly falling, good is to be hoped for from the little war which official incapacity has caused to break out in West Africa. Had the lessons of the Abyssinian war been practically applied in the British Army, instead of a series of theoretic reforms, it is not likely that the latter would have fallen into its present condition, That there should be any trouble in organising so petty an expedition as the present, affords strong proof of the want of real, as opposed to theoretic, perfection, Formerly the Army would work as one man; now it is divided into classes, each one of which has its own grievances to redress, and seems bent on doing this even at the risk of the efficiency of the whole. If the Ashantee war affords some means of extrication from this position of affairs, for once the blundering of ministers may result in a permanent benefit to the State. Meanwhile, in other quarters the signs of future troubles seem looming in the distance. The Baron von Maltzan, according to the Pall Mall Gazette, gives an indication of the state of feeling among the Arabs in the Red Sea. What the Baron says is not very new or very startling, but a little adroit treating with the natives on the part of some intermeddler would probably result in another petty war, A war might easily be got up, if required, on the East Coast of Africa, not to speak of border wars in India or Burma. Where so many interests in so many parts of the world are concentrated, as in Great Britain at the present moment,: it would be at once more dignified, and in the end less inconvenient, to be always prepared for some such even-triality as has recently occurred, Instead of this, when, after mistakes of one sort or other, the Government of Great Britain at last found it could not get out of its Ashantee trouble, it finds itself compelled to enter on it as if a petty war were something out of the common run, and hitherto unheard of. The resources of the country are taxed to send an insignificant force to a most unhealthy climate, and visions of an increased bill to go before the country almost drive an economic Chancellor of the Exchequer to despair. Yet if one thing be true above another, it is that within the last twenty years the resources of Great Britain to meet asudden call have enormously increased. Wealth has been accumulating beyond former precedent, and this not amongst the upper and middle classes only, but throughout the entire population. If there were a time when paltriness should be deprecated, the present is the moment; yet paltriness, in place of diminishing seems, at least in head quarters, to be the ruling sentiment. We hear little of the probable suffering of the troops in the pestilential swamps of West Africa, but much of the million or so sterling likely to be called for from the taxpayer.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.