ar-time is supreme. Mr. Gladstone's trenchant
dialectic had no more chance than Bright's glowing appeals. Shrewd and
not unfriendly onlookers thought that Graham and Gladstone were
grievously mistaken in making common cause with the peace party,
immediately after quitting a war government, and quitting it, besides,
not on the issues of the war. Herbert was vehement in his remonstrances.
The whole advantage of co-operation with the Manchester men, he cried,
would be derived by them, and all the disrepute reaped by us. 'For the
purposes of peace, they were the very men we ought to avoid. As
advocates for ending the war, they were out of court, for they were
against beginning it.'[349] If Gladstone and Graham had gone slower,
their friends said, they might have preached moderation to ministers and
given reasonable advice to people out of doors. As it was, they threw
the game into the hands of Lord Palmerston. They were stamped as
doctrinaires, and what was worse, doctrinaires suspected of a spice of
personal animus against old friends. Herbert insisted that the
Manchester school 'forgot that the people have flesh and blood, and
propounded theories to men swayed by national feeling.' As a matter of
fact, this was wholly untrue. Cobden and Bright, as everybody nowadays
admits, had a far truer perception of the underlying realities of the
Eastern question in 1854, than either the Aberdeen or the Palmerston
cabinet, or both of them put together. What was undeniable was that the
public, with its habits of rough and ready judgment, did not understand,
and could not be expected to understand, the new union of the Peelites
with a peace party, in direct opposition to whose strongest views and
gravest warnings they had originally begun the war. 'In Gladstone,'
Cornewall Lewis said, 'people ascribe to faction, or ambition, or
vanity, conduct which I believe to be the result of a conscientious,
scrupulous, ingenuous, undecided mind, always looking on each side of a
question and magnifying the objections which belong to almost every
course of action.'[350]

ADVOCATES OF PEACE

A foreign envoy then resident in England was struck by the general
ignorance of facts even among leading politicians. Of the friends of
peace, he says, only Lord Grey and Gladstone seemed to have mastered the
Vienna protocols: the rest were quite astonished when the extent of the
Russian concessions was pointed out to them. The envoy dined