upture, did the Emperor not stir at the moment of the great
Mutiny, when every available man we had was sent to India, and when he had
what might have passed for a plausible excuse in the Orsini conspiracy,
and in the deliberate and pointed refusal of parliament to deal with it?
With emphasis, he insists that we have no adequate idea of the
predisposing power which an immense series of measures of preparation for
war on our own part, have in actually begetting war. They familiarise
ideas which when familiar lose their horror, and they light an inward
flame of excitement of which, when it is habitually fed, we lose the
consciousness.

This application of cool and reasoned common sense to actual probabilities
seldom avails against imaginations excited by random possibilities; and he
made little way. Lord Palmerston advanced into the field, in high anxiety
that the cabinet should promptly adopt Herbert's proposal.(29) They soon
came to a smart encounter, and Mr. Gladstone writes to the prime minister
(Feb. 7, 1860): "There are, I fear, the most serious differences among us
with respect to a loan for fortifications.... My mind is made up, and to
propose any loan for fortifications would be, on my part, with the views I
entertain, a betrayal of my public duty." A vigorous correspondence
between Mr. Gladstone and Herbert upon military charges followed, and the
tension seemed likely to snap the cord.

(M14) If I may judge from the minutes of the members of the cabinet on the
papers circulated, most of them stood with their chief, and not one of
them, not even Milner Gibson nor Villiers, was ready to proceed onward
from a sort of general leaning towards Mr. Gladstone's view to the further
stage of making a strong stand-up fight for it. The controversy between
him and his colleagues still raged at red heat over the whole ground of
military estimates, the handling of the militia, and the construction of
fortifications. He wrote memorandum upon memorandum with untiring energy,
pressing the cabinet with the enormous rate in the increase of charge;
with the slight grounds on which increase of charge was now ordinarily
proposed and entertained; and, most of all, with the absence of all
attempt to compensate for new and necessary expenditure by retrenchment in
quarters where the scale of outlay had either always been, or had become
unnecessary. He was too sound a master of the conditions of public
business to pretend to take away from