s unavoidably hampered by Oxford. 'Were I either of
opinion,' he told Lord Aberdeen (Aug. 5), 'that Lord John Russell ought
to succeed Lord Derby, or prepared without any further development of
the plans of the government to take my stand as one of the party opposed
to them, the first step which, as a man of honour, I ought to adopt,
should be to resign my seat.' 'I do not mean hereby,' he adds in words
that were soon to derive forcible significance from the march of events,
'that I am unconditionally committed against any alliance or fusion, but
that any such alliance or fusion, to be lawful for me, must grow out of
some failure of the government in carrying on public affairs, or a
disapproval of its measures when they shall have been proposed.' He
still, in spite of all the misdeeds of ministers during the elections,
could not think so ill of them as did Lord Aberdeen.

'Protection and religious liberty,' he wrote to Lord Aberdeen (Aug.
5),'are the subjects on which my main complaints would turn; shuffling
as to the former, trading on bigotry as to the latter. The shifting and
shuffling that I complain of have been due partly to a miserably false
position and the giddy prominence of inferior men; partly to the (surely
not unexpected) unscrupulousness and second motives of Mr. Disraeli, at
once the necessity of Lord Derby and his curse. I do not mean that this
justifies what has been said and done; I only think it brings the case
within the common limits of political misconduct. As for religious
bigotry,' he continues, 'I condemn the proceedings of the present
government; yet much less strongly than the unheard-of course pursued by
Lord John Russell in 1850-1, the person to whom I am now invited to
transfer my confidence.' Even on the superficial conversion of the
Derbyites to free trade, Mr. Gladstone found a _tu quoque_ against the
whigs. 'It is, when strictly judged, an act of public immorality to form
and lead an opposition on a certain plea, to succeed, and then in office
to abandon it.... But in this view, the conduct of the present
administration is the counterpart and copy of that of the whigs
themselves in 1835, who ran Sir Robert Peel to ground upon the
appropriation clause, worked it just while it suited them, and then cast
it to the winds; to say nothing of their conduct on the Irish
Assassination bill of 1846.'

This letter was forwarded by Aberdeen to Lord John Russell. Lord John
had the peculiar tempera