over the country, and indeed all over Europe and
the civilized world, there were those who proclaimed that the death of
such a man was a positive blessing to the human race. Wherever men were
struggling against despotism and suffering from tyranny, there were those
who felt and who declared that the departure of Castlereagh from this
world was a benefit to humanity at large.

[Sidenote: 1822--Canning as Foreign Secretary]

Yet the man himself had not a cruel or an ignoble nature. He had through
all his life friends who loved him, and whose love his private character
and conduct had well deserved. But he had made himself the English
representative of the policy of the Holy Alliance at a time when every
lover of liberty, and every believer in the development of free
institutions and the beneficent results of their working, must have felt
that even the excesses of the French Revolution gave no excuse for the
deliberate setting-up of the doctrine of combined despotism. Men of
liberal opinions were in an especially angry mood just then because
England seemed to have gone in deliberately for the policy which
authorized the "crowned conspirators," as Sydney Smith called them, to
impose their edicts {37} on the whole continent of Europe. This
condition of things may help to explain the cry of rejoicing with which
the news of Castlereagh's suicide was received in so many places. The
London crowd who followed the funeral procession to Westminster Abbey
greeted the removal of the coffin with yells of execration. Byron wrote
verses of savage bitterness about the dead man and his deed of
self-murder--wrote some verses which no English publisher now would put
into print.

The death of Castlereagh became a turning-point in the career of Canning.
The whole voice of Liberal public opinion at once proclaimed that Canning
was the only man left in the country who was capable of redeeming
England's foreign policy from the discredit and disgrace brought upon it
by Castlereagh's Administration. Even Lord Liverpool himself soon came
to see that there was no other course left to him than to recommend the
King to offer to Canning the place of Foreign Secretary. The King at
first fought hard against the advice of his Prime Minister. The letters
which passed between him and Lord Liverpool are a curiosity in their way.
George had evidently persuaded himself that Canning was a monster of
ingratitude, who had committed a positively unpar