Session Of 1860

Extract from a Letter to the Duke of Argyll.

Penmaen., September 3, 1860.—The session has been one to make all of us thoughtful, and me perhaps most of all. It is indeed much before my mind, but my head has not ceased to whirl, so that I cannot get a clear view of what Seward would call my position. Two things I know, one is that it produced the greatest pleasures and the greatest pains I have ever known in politics; the other that 1 have had to take various decisions and perform acts that could neither be satisfactory to others, nor from the doubt attaching to one side or the other of the alternative, even to myself. To have been the occasion of the blow to the House of Commons, or as I call it the “gigantic innovation,” will be a grief to me as long as I live; if by wildness and rashness I have been its cause, it will be a much greater grief. Of that I am not [pg 637] yet able to judge. On the whole when I think of the cabinet, I always go back to Jacob and Esau fighting in their mother's womb; only here there have been many Jacobs and Esaus, by which I do not mean the sixteen members of the cabinet, but the many and very unhandy causes of division. Perhaps I should find it easiest in the work of confession to own my neighbour's faults, i.e. to dwell upon those strange sins of foreign policy which have happily for the most part been nipped in the bud almost à l'unanimité (yet with what exceptions!); but avoiding that task, I will make my own confession. I cannot justify the finance of the year as a whole.... As to the amount of the final demand [for the China war], what it really demonstrates is one among the follies and dangers of our high-handed policy, our want of control over proceedings at the other end of the world. But the weak point is the fortification plan; I do not now speak of its own merits or demerits, but I speak of it in relation to the budget.... It is a vile precedent to give away money by remission, and borrow to supply the void; and in the full and chief responsibility for having established this precedent I am involved, not by the budget of February but by the consent of July to the scheme which involved the borrowing. No doubt there are palliating circumstances; and lastly the grievous difficulty of choice between mischievous [illegible] and mischievous resignation. Still I must say, it is in retrospect, as the people and parliament have a right to judge it, a bad and unworkmanlike business, and under a skilful analysis of it in the House of Commons (which there is no one opposite fit to make, except it be Northcote, who perhaps scruples it) I should wince. All these things and others more inward than these, make sore places in the mind; but on the other hand, that I may close with a gleam of sunshine like that which is now casting its shadow on my paper from Penmaenmawr after a rough morning, I am thankful in the highest degree to have had a share in resisting the alarmist mania of the day by means of the French treaty, to which, if we escape collision, I think the escape will have been mainly due; and likewise in one at least negative service to the great Italian cause, which is not Italian merely but European.