the lurch again, as he thought that he had been left
before in his attempts for Poland. Your intervention, he said to England,
will be naval; but we may have to fight a people of forty millions on
land, and we will not intervene unless you engage to send troops.(91) The
dismemberment of Denmark was thought an odious feat, but the localisation
of the war was at least a restriction of the evils attending it.

(M34) A high parliamentary debate followed (July 4) on a motion made by
Mr. Disraeli, "to express to Her Majesty our great regret that while the
course pursued by the government had failed to maintain their avowed
policy of upholding the independence and integrity of Denmark, it has
lowered the just influence of this country in the councils of Europe, and
thereby diminished the securities for peace."(92) Cobden taunted both
front benches pretty impartially with the equivocal and most dishonourable
position into which their policy had brought the country, by encouraging a
small power to fight two great ones and then straightway leaving her to
get out as best she might. The government was only saved by Palmerston's
appeal to its financial triumphs--the very triumphs that he had himself
made most difficult to achieve. The appeal was irrelevant, but it was
decisive, and ministers escaped a condemnation by no means unmerited on
the special issue, by a majority of eighteen. The Manchester men agreed to
help in the result, because in Cobden's words they were convinced that a
revolution had been at last wrought in the mischievous policy of incessant
intervention. Mr. Disraeli's case was easy, but to propound an easy case
when its exposition demands much selection from voluminous blue-books is
often hard, and the orator was long and over-elaborate. The excitement of
an audience, aware all the time that actual danger hovered over the
ministry, revived afresh when Disraeli sat down and Gladstone rose. The
personal emulation of powerful rivals lends dramatic elements to
disputation. Lord Palmerston had written to Mr. Gladstone beforehand--"We
shall want a great gun to follow Disraeli. Would you be ready to follow
him?"

_July 3._--I was happy enough, aided by force of habit, to drive
bodily out of my head for the whole day everything Dano-German.
But not out of my nerves. I delivered during the night a speech in
parliament on the Roman question.

_July 4._--H. of C. Replied to Disraeli. It took an hour an