Page:Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (IA lifeofhermajesty01fawc).pdf/128

 way of object lessons. Palmerston was also a great admirer of the free institutions of his country; but his way of recommending them to foreign governments was to write despatches from the Foreign Office in London to the English ambassadors in various capitals of Europe, with instructions that these documents were to be communicated to the respective governments to which the ambassadors were accredited, to say how vastly superior the English system of government was to that pursued by the benighted foreigner. To have the same end in view and to pursue it by diametrically opposite methods is an almost certain receipt for personal animosity; and it is not too much to say that Stockmar and Palmerston were actively hostile to each other all through the former's participation in English political life. Yet Palmerston, along with other English statesmen, cordially acknowledged Stockmar's absolute honesty and disinterestedness, and also his great political capacity. Palmerston spoke of Stockmar to Bunsen as the only perfectly disinterested character he had ever met with in the political world; and again on another occasion he said Stockmar had one of the best political heads he had ever met with. Stockmar did not return the compliment. He could not forgive Palmerston for pursuing good ends by wrong methods; he accused him of a narrow insularity, of being flippant and obstinate at the same time; one good quality he allowed him,—that he was not a Frenchman. The antagonism between these two opposing forces in the great world of politics had an important bearing on the personal history of the Queen and her husband, which will be the subject of a future chapter.