cessory. The passions
will often ally themselves with generosity, but they always tend to divert
from justice. The man who strongly loves justice must love it for its own
sake, and such a love makes of itself a character of a simple grandeur to
which it is hard to find an equal.

Next to Lord Aberdeen, I think Sir Robert Peel was the most just of the
just men I have had the happiness to know. During the years from 1841 to
1846, when they were respectively foreign secretary and prime minister, as
I was at the board of trade for much of the time, I had occasion to watch
the two in the conduct of several negotiations that involved commercial
interests, such as that on the Stade Dues and that on the project of a
commercial treaty with Portugal. Now and then Sir Robert Peel would show
some degree of unconscious regard to the mere flesh and blood, if I may so
speak, of Englishmen; Lord Aberdeen was invariably for putting the most
liberal construction upon both the conduct and the claims of the other
negotiating state.

There is perhaps no position in this country, in which the love of justice
that I have ascribed in such extraordinary measure to your father, can be
so severely tested, as that very position of foreign minister, with which
his name is so closely associated. Nowhere is a man so constantly and in
such myriad forms tempted to partiality; nowhere can he do more for
justice; but nowhere is it more clear that all human force is inadequate
for its end. A nation is rarely just to other nations. Perhaps it is never
truly just, though sometimes (like individuals) what may be called more
than just. There can be no difficulty in any country, least of all this,
in finding foreign ministers able and willing to assert the fair and
reasonable claims of their countrymen with courage and with firmness. The
difficulty is quite of another kind; it is to find the foreign minister,
first, who will himself view those claims in the dry light both of reason
and of prudence; secondly, and a far harder task, who will have the
courage to hazard, and if need be to sacrifice himself in keeping the mind
of his countrymen down to such claims as are strictly fair and reasonable.
Lord Aberdeen was most happy in being secretary of state for foreign
affairs in the time and in the political company of two such men as the
Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel. He was also happy in the general
prevalence of a spirit of great sobriety in the country