ment that is hard to agitate, but easy to
nettle. So polemical a reading of former whig pranks nettled him
considerably. Why, he asked, should he not say just as reasonably that
Mr. Gladstone held up the whigs to odium in 1841 for stripping the
farmer of adequate protection; worked the corn law of 1842 as long as it
suited him; and then turned round and cast the corn law to the winds? If
he gave credit to Mr. Gladstone for being sincere in 1841, 1842, and
1846, why should not Mr. Gladstone give the same credit to him? As to
the principle of appropriation, he and Althorp had opposed four of their
colleagues in the Grey cabinet; how could he concede to Peel what he had
refused to them? As for the Irish bill on which he had turned Peel out,
it was one of the worst of all coercion bills; Peel with 117 followers
evidently could not carry on the government; and what sense could there
have been in voting for a bad bill, in order to retain in office an
impossible ministry? This smart apologia of Lord John's was hardly even
plausible, much less did it cover the ground. The charge against the
whigs is not that they took up appropriation, but that having taken it
up they dropped it for the sake of office. Nor was it a charge that they
resisted an Irish coercion bill, but that having supported it on the
first reading ('worst of all coercion bills' as it was, even in the eyes
of men who had passed the reckless act of 1833), they voted against it
when they found that both Bentinck and the Manchester men were going to
do the same, thus enabling them to turn Peel out.

CONFUSIONS OF PARTY

Sharp sallies into the past, however, did not ease the present. It was
an extraordinary situation only to be described in negatives. A majority
could not be found to beat the government upon a vote of want of
confidence. Nobody knew who could take their places. Lord John Russell
as head of a government was impossible, for his maladroit handling of
papal aggression had alienated the Irish; his dealings with Palmerston
had offended one powerful section of the English whigs; the Scottish
whigs hated him as too much managed by the lights of the free church;
and the radicals proscribed him as the chief of a patrician clique. Yet
though he was impossible, he sometimes used language to the effect that
for him to take any place save the first would be a personal degradation
that would lower him to the level of Sidmouth or Goderich.