are again
dispersed, Palmerston reigns without let or hindrance at the
Foreign Office. No attempt is made to conciliate France; the war
on the coast of Syria will go on with redoubled vigour; Ponsonby
will urge matters to the last extremities at Constantinople; and
there is no longer a possibility of saying or doing any one
thing, for the whole question of reconciliation has been suffered
to rest upon the result of a communication which Brunnow
undertook to make to his Court, to which no answer can be
received for several weeks, and none definite will probably ever
be received at all. Palmerston's policy, therefore, will receive
a complete trial, and its full and unimpeded development, and
even those of his colleagues who are most opposed to it, and who
are destitute of all confidence in him, are compelled to go along
with him his whole length, share all his responsibility, and
will, after all, very likely be obliged to combat in Parliament
the very same arguments that they have employed in the Cabinet,
and _vice versa_.

Lord John has disappointed me; and when I contrast the vigour of
his original resolutions with the feebleness of his subsequent
efforts, the tameness with which he has submitted to be overruled
and thwarted, and to endure the treachery, and almost the insult
of Palmerston's newspaper tricks, I am bound to acknowledge that
he is not the man I took him for. The fact is, that his position
has been one of the greatest embarrassment--but of embarrassment
of his own making. He consented to the Treaty of July, without
due consideration of the consequences it was almost sure to
entail. When those consequences burst upon him in a very
dangerous and alarming shape, he seems suddenly to have awakened
from his dream of security, and to have bestirred himself to
avert the impending evils; but while the magnitude of the peril
pressed him on one side, on the other he was hampered by the
consciousness of his own inconsistency, and that he could not do
anything without giving Palmerston a good case against him. And
when at last he did resolve to take a decisive step, he never
calculated upon the means at his disposal to bring about the
change of policy which he advocated. He moved, accordingly, like
a man in chains. He distrusted Palmerston, and did not dare tell
him so; Melbourne would not help him; he dreaded a breach partly
official, partly domestic, with Palmerston, and only thought of
keeping the rickety machi