Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 1.djvu/54

 12 ORIGIN OF THE WAR OF 1853 chap, measure definitively approved by the Cabinet L could be persistently maintained ; but supposing the Royal objections to be sound or even plausible, there was always of course a probability that they might be supported by some of our public men ; and upon the whole it may be said that, even al- though exerted no further, the power of the Crown to enforce a deliberate reconsideration of every great question arising was of itself a weighty pre- rogative. This prerogative through the Prince Consort was diligently asserted and exercised during those very years — the first years of this half- century — which were pregnant with the question of peace or war for Europe, and it would seem that the conditions were exactly those under which princely warnings, if wise and well suited to English methods of action, might have been advantageously addressed to a ' drifting ' minis- try. The Consort seems to have imagined that his ceaseless endeavours to understand, to check and control the torrent of public business which rushed in those days through the Foreign Office, were labours of no small moment; * and it there- fore may be fairly conjectured that a renewed sur- vey of his political life will show him perceiving each error of the Government, protesting against without seeing that the Prince had that impression on his mind. With respect to what I have called the 'torrent' of business passing through the Foreign Office, I may cite the statement made in Mr Martin's second volume — i.e., that in 1848 the number of despatches there arriving or thence sent out was about 28.000.
 * No one, I think, ran read Mr Theodore Martin's work