as he believed, given financial
pledges to the country. These pledges were by the present ministers in
danger of being forgotten. They were incompatible with Palmerston's
spirit of foreign policy. His duty, then, was to oppose that policy, and
to labour as hard as he could for the redemption of his pledges. Yet
isolated as he was, he had little power over either one of these aims or
the other. The liberal party was determined to support the reigning
foreign policy, and this made financial improvement desperate. Of Lord
Derby's friends he was not hopeful, but they were not committed to so
dangerous a leader.[354] As he put it to Elwin, the editor of the
_Quarterly_: There is a policy going a begging; the general policy that
Sir Robert Peel in 1841 took office to support--the policy of peace
abroad, of economy, of financial equilibrium, of steady resistance to
abuses, and promotion of practical improvements at home, with a
disinclination to questions of reform, gratuitously raised.[355]

His whole mind beset, possessed, and on fire with ideals of this kind,
and with sanguine visions of the road by which they might be
realised--it was not in the temperament of this born warrior to count
the lions in his path. He was only too much in the right, as his
tribulations of a later date so amply proved, in his perception that
neither Palmerston nor Palmerstonian liberals would take up the broken
clue of Peel. The importunate presence of Mr. Disraeli was not any
sharper obstacle to a definite junction with conservatives, than was the
personality of Lord Palmerston to a junction with liberals. As he had
said to Graham in November 1856, 'the pain and strain of public duty is
multiplied tenfold by the want of a clear and firm ground from which
visibly to act.' In rougher phrase, a man must have a platform and work
with a party. This indeed is for sensible men one of the rudiments of
practical politics.

Of a certain kind of cant about public life and office Mr. Gladstone was
always accustomed to make short work. The repudiation of desire for
official power, he at this time and always roundly denounced as
'sentimental and maudlin.' One of the not too many things that he
admired in Lord Palmerston was 'the manly frankness of his habitual
declarations that office is the natural and proper sphere of a public
man's ambition, as that in which he can most freely use his powers for
the common advantage of his country.' 'The desire for office