A little war with Ashantee, not too successful, a difficulty with
Japan, some more serious troubles with New Zealand, exhaust the list
of the warlike enterprises of England in the last years of
Palmerston. In a year or two after his death we were engaged in a
brief and entirely successful campaign against the barbaric King
Theodore of Abyssinia, "a compound of savage virtue and more than
savage ambition and cruelty," who, imagining himself wronged and
slighted by England, had seized a number of British subjects, held
them in hard captivity, and treated them with such capricious cruelty
as made it very manifest that their lives were not worth an hour's
purchase. It fell to the Ministry of Mr. Disraeli, Premier on the
resignation of his colleague Lord Derby, who had displaced Earl
Russell in that office, to bring this strange potentate to reason by
force of arms. Under Sir Robert Napier's management the work was done
with remarkable precision; no English life was lost; and but few of
our soldiers were wounded; Magdala, the mountain eyrie of King
Theodore, was stormed and destroyed, and the captives, having been
surrendered under dread of the British arms, were restored to freedom
and safety.
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