have, none to stand on. Buffeted by their antagonists,
and often by their supporters in Parliament, despised by the
country at large, clinging to office merely to gratify the Queen,
while they are just sufficiently supported in the House of
Commons to keep their places, and not enough to carry their
measures; for so meagre are their majorities, and so little do
the public care for those majorities, or for the Ministers or
their measures, that the Lords do not scruple to treat the
Ministerial Bills with undisguised contempt. At the beginning of
this Session, the weakness of the Government, and the
impossibility of their going on, were so obvious, that the more
wise and moderate of them began to prepare for their retirement,
and Lord John Russell, by the publication of his Stroud letter,
and the expression of those opinions which I was the means of
conveying to Peel, evinced his determination to make the
dissolution of the Government ancillary to the ascendency of true
Conservative principles. The break-up came sooner than had been
expected, and when Ministers resigned, on the majority of five on
the Jamaica Bill (which they need not have done), they acted
wisely, for they were enabled to retire with dignity, Peel and
the Opposition having been clearly and flagrantly in the wrong
upon this particular measure--so wrong, that it has been, and
still is, matter of astonishment to me why they gave battle upon
it, and I suspect that Peel was by no means elated at his own
success on that occasion. However, out they went upon the Jamaica
question, and though they fancy Peel did not really wish to form
a Government, and that the difficulties he made were only a
pretext for escaping from his position, this is not the case; he
had no misgivings or fears, and was quite ready to undertake the
task. However, _Diis aliter visum_: the Queen kept Lord
Melbourne, and they came back to accumulated difficulties, and
without any augmentation of parliamentary strength or popular
sympathy to sustain them. They made one miserable effort, and
tossed a sop to the Radicals, by making the Ballot an open
question, the grace and utility of which were entirely marred by
Lord Howick's speech, so that they got all the discredit of this
concession without any compensatory advantage. They had begun the
campaign by the abrupt expulsion of Glenelg (nobody has ever made
out exactly why) and by bringing over Normanby in breathless
haste to supersede him, wit