with Mr.
Gladstone at the table of the Queen, and they talked of Milner Gibson's
motion censuring ministers for losing the opportunity of the Vienna
conferences to make a sound and satisfactory peace. Mr. Gladstone said
to him that he should undertake the grave responsibility of supporting
this motion, 'because in his opinion the concessions promised by Russia
contain sufficient guarantees. Those very concessions will tear to
pieces all the ancient treaties which gave an excuse to Russia for
interfering in the internal affairs of Turkey.'[351]

At all times stimulated rather than checked by a difficult situation,
Mr. Gladstone argued the case for peace to the House during the session
of 1855 in two speeches of extraordinary power of every kind. His
position was perfectly tenable, and he defended it with unsurpassed
force. For the hour unfortunately his influence was gone. Great
newspapers thought themselves safe in describing one of these
performances as something between the rant of the fanatic and the trick
of the stage actor; a mixture of pious grimace and vindictive howl, of
savage curses and dolorous forebodings; the most unpatriotic speech ever
heard within the walls of parliament. In sober fact, it was one of the
three or four most masterly deliverances evoked by the Crimean war. At
the very same time Lord John Russell was still sitting in the cabinet,
though he had held the opinion that at the beginning of May the Austrian
proposal ought to have ended the war and led to an honourable peace. The
scandal of a minister remaining in a government that persisted in a war
condemned by him as unnecessary was intolerable, and Lord John resigned
(July 16).

The hopes of the speedy fall of Sebastopol brightened in the summer of
1855, but this brought new alarms to Lord Palmerston. 'Our danger,' he
said in remarkable words, 'will then begin--a danger of peace and not a
danger of war.' To drive the Russians out of the Crimea was to be no
more than a preliminary. England would go on by herself, if conditions
deemed by her essential were not secured. 'The British nation is
unanimous, for I cannot reckon Cobden, Bright, and Co. for
anything.'[352] His account of the public mind was indubitably true.
Well might Aberdeen recall to his friends that, with a single exception,
every treaty concluded at the termination of our great wars had been
stigmatised as humiliating and degrading, ignominious, hollow and
unsafe. He cited the