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CHAPTER IX.

GOES TO THE HOME OFFICE IN THE ABERDEEN ADMINISTRATION— WORK AT HOME OFFICE-TEMPORARY RESIGNATION.

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LORD ABERDEEN was charged with the formation of a new Government. He at once sought the co-operation of Lord Palmerston, who, at first, withheld it, being unwilling to share the responsibility of a Cabinet whose foreign policy, he anticipated, would be of a character to merit his disapproval. But he was indispensable. general though undefined feeling among the public had already marked him out as the coming man. Lord Lansdowne therefore renewed Lord Aberdeen's solicitations, and induced Lord Palmerston to reconsider his decision. He selected the Home Office as his department, and gives to his brother the following account of his feelings and motives:

C. G.: December 22, 1852.

I have accepted the Home Office in the new Government. When first Lansdowne and Aberdeen asked me to join the new Government I declined, giving as my reason that Aberdeen and I had differed so widely for twenty-five years on all questions of foreign policy that my joining an Administration of which he was to be the head would be liable to misconstruction both at home and abroad. But the next day Lansdowne came again and urged me strongly, and I found that the Foreign Office, which I had determined not myself in any case to take, would be held either by Clarendon or John Russell, whose well-established reputations for liberality would give a security in regard to our foreign relations.

Lansdowne's representations of the great importance, in the present state of things at home and abroad, that the new Government should be as strong in its fabric as the materials available

ACCEPTANCE OF HOME OFFICE, AND REASONS.

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for the purpose can make it, determined me to yield to his advice and to accept the Home Office; and the more I have thought the matter over, the better satisfied I have felt that I have acted right. The Foreign Office will be taken by John Russell, but if he finds the business too much for him, in addition to his employment as leader in the House of Commons, he will then give it up to Clarendon. The Home Office was my own choice; I had long settled in my own mind that I would not go back to the Foreign Office, and that if I ever took any office it should be the Home. It does not do for a man to pass his whole life in one department, and the Home Office deals with the concerns of the country internally, and brings one in contact with one's fellow-countrymen, besides which it gives one more influence in regard to the militia and the defences of the country.

This Government will combine almost all the men of talent and experience in the House of Commons except Disraeli; but the Opposition will be numerically strong, as they reckon about 310. A good many of these, however, will probably be disposed to give the new Government a fair trial.

And to Mr. Sulivan, his brother-in-law, he writes:

Carlton Gardens: December 24, 1852.

On Tuesday I positively declined joining the new Government, first to Lansdowne, who was nearly an hour talking to me, and afterwards to Aberdeen, who came and offered me carte blanche as to departments; but on Wednesday morning Clarendon came to tell me he had had the Foreign Office offered him, and that he was disposed to accept it. That removed much of the objection which I had felt. When he left me, Lansdowne came again earnestly to press me to take office; and I at last consented to take the Home Office, the department which I had mentioned as the one I should have preferred if I had been willing to join the new regiment. Reflection has satisfied me that I have acted rightly. The state of the country in all its interests, foreign and domestic, requires a Government as strong as there are elements for making it; and if my aid is thought by Lansdowne and others likely to be useful, I ought not to let personal feelings stand in the way. As regards myself individually, it must be borne in mind that when the Whigs and Peelites unite to form a Government and to support it, I should, if I had persisted in standing aloof, have been left in a little agreeable political solitude. I am glad, therefore, that I have not adhered to my first determination; and I am sure

that the course which, on second thoughts, I have pursued is the best for the public interest and for my own comfort.

There was a large body of men, however, who would have been only too glad to relieve Lord Palmerston from the political solitude,' which he here mentions as the alternative to joining Lord Aberdeen's Government.

The Tories were discontented with their House of Commons leader. They further had been so demoralised by recent party circumstances as to have come to doubt all political morality, and to regard statesmen as mere party swordsmen; when, therefore, at the outset of the year they saw the Foreign Secretary summarily turned adrift by the Whig leader they began looking towards him with the same anxiety and yearning with which an Italian little state in the Middle Ages would have looked for some condottiere of good repute who was about to be out of employment. They would gladly have hailed him as their new chief had he been minded to join them. But between these three hundred and odd gentlemen and Lord Palmerston there was little common political creed; and the members of the Opposition who indulged in such a dream as this only showed thereby how completely they misunderstood his position, his character, and his political principles.

On December 27 the new Government appeared in their places in Parliament, when Lord Aberdeen, in the House of Lords, gave a sketch of its intended policy. With regard to foreign affairs, he said that it would 'adhere to the principles which had been pursued for the last thirty years, and which consisted in respecting the rights of all independent states, while, at the same time, we asserted our own rights and interests; and above all, in an earnest desire to secure the general peace of Europe.'

Considering that Lord Palmerston had been at the Foreign Office during more than half the period named, Lord Aberdeen was paying an indirect tribute to his policy. As for Lord Palmerston himself, he quickly

OPINION OF NAPOLEON'S MARRIAGE.

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settled down to his new duties, and writes thus to his brother :

Carlton Gardens: January 31, 1853.

We (the Government) are now preparing for the renewal of the session on the 10th of this next month. We shall be strong on the Treasury bench, and I hope not weak in the division lobby. It is clear that if we were to be turned out, the only Government that could be put in our stead would be Derby's, and experience has proved that his Government could not stand. We may therefore expect that the moderate men who supported him will not be disinclined to give us a fair support, and it will be our business to deserve it. Though the Cabinet consists of men of various parties and shades of opinion, all having agreed to unite, will, I doubt not, unite to agree, and in that case we shall go on very well.

We are labouring to place the country in a state of defence, and our only limit is the purse of the Chancellor of the Exchequer; but whatever may be at the bottom of the secret thoughts of the French Emperor, into whose bosom no man can dive, yet I see no reason to apprehend an immediate or even an early rupture with France; and if we have two years more of preparation allowed us, we shall be in a good defensive position. In the meantime we do not allow that we are even now defenceless. The increase of navy, artillery, marines, and the organisation of the militia, have placed us in a very different condition from that in which we stood two or three years ago.

Napoleon's marriage seems to me a most sensible one. He 7 had no chance of a political alliance of any value, or of sufficient importance to counterbalance the annoyance of an ugly or epileptic wife whom he had never seen till she was presented to him as a bride; and he was quite right to take a wife whom he knew and liked. I admire the frankness with which he declares himself a parvenu, and the assertion of that truth, however it may shock the prejudices of Vienna and Petersburg, will endear him to the bulk of the French nation.

As Home Secretary Lord Palmerston astonished everybody except those who knew him well, by the vigilance, care, intelligence, and originality with which he discharged his duties. No details were too small if only they were important to those concerned. He paid a visit to Parkhurst Prison, and wrote a Memorandum on

the ventilation of the cells with just as much zeal and thoroughness as if he were conducting a Government measure in full view of the country. A standing monument of this period of his career is the system of granting tickets of leave to convicts. Hazardous as the experiment was at that time considered, it proved successful, and solved the difficulty which stared us in the face when the Colonies declined any longer to allow us to shoot our refuse on their shores. It devolved on him to find a substitute for transportation, which had become no longer available, and he carried through the House of Commons a Bill constituting the new system of secondary punishment, which, in its main features, is still in force.

Many other useful measures owed their birth to his activity during the two years that he was at the Home Office. The abatement of the smoke nuisance in the metropolis, whereby to a great extent its atmosphere was purified the cessation of intramural interments, of which people could only have been induced to tolerate the evils by the influence of long custom-the extension of the Factory Acts,' and the more general holding of winter assizes for the trial of prisoners awaiting gaol delivery, were among the most prominent of the undoubted boons which his practical mind devised for the benefit of the country.

He was especially happy in his manner of receiving those numerous deputations which always converge towards the Home Office. Deputation has been wittily defined as a noun of multitude which signifies many, but does not signify much.' However accurate this may be as a definition, it would be a grave error to undervalue the importance to a minister of possessing the art of listening patiently, and giving a straight

1 The ten and a half hours of work were by existing Acts to be between six a.m. and six p.m. This was a great guarantee against evasion of the law. It was found, however, that the wording of the Acts did not extend this limitation to children, but only to young persons. Lord Palmerston warmly took up the cause of the children when this was brought to his notice, and rectified the law.

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