Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 2.djvu/126

 9G CAUSES INVOLVIXa rUAXCE AND ENGLAND CHAP, eve of the conniion observer that for the time he IX. . '- — was annulled ; and the humorous stories which floated about "Whitehall went to show that the deposed Lord of Foreign Affairs had consented to forget his former greatness and to accept his Home Office duties in a spirit of half-cynical, half-joyous disdain, but without the least discontent. And, in truth, lie had no ground for ill-humour. In poli- tics, lie was without vanity. What he cared for was power, and power he had. Indeed, circumstanced as be was, at the time when he chose to accept the Home Office, he must have known that one of the main conditions of his ascendant in foreign affairs was the general belief that he had none. The light of the past makes it easy to see that the expedient of trying to tether him down in the Home Office would alleviate his responsibil- ity and increase his real power. To those who know anything of Lord ralmerston's intellectual strength, of his boldness, his vast and concen- trated energy, his instinct for understanding the collective mind of a body of men and of a whole nation, and, above all, his firm robust will ; nay, even to those who only know of his daring achievements — achievements half peaceful, half warlike, half righteous, half violent, in many lands and on many a sea — the notion of causing him to be subordinated to Lord Aberdeen in Foreign Affairs seems hardly more sound than a scheme providing that the greater shall be contained in the less. Statesmen on the Continent would easily understand this, for they had lived for