“Yes, sir; he came about an hour ago.”
“Oh, very well. Say, I shall feel great pleasure in seeing him. Is he disengaged at present?”
“Yes, sir, he is quite alone.”
“Shew me his apartment, then.”
“So,” thought I, as I arose to seek the chamber, “this time they were nearer right than usual; for, if not an ‘English Prince,’ he has wielded more substantial power, and exerted a much wider sway over the destinies of the world, than ever a ‘foreign Prince’ from the Baltic to the Bosphorus.”
Strange enough, our last meeting was at Downing Street; he was then Minister. I waited upon him by appointment, as I was leaving England for the Prussian mission, and he desired to give me his own instructions before I sailed; and now, I visit him in a little Tyrol “Gasthaus,” he, destitute of power, and myself——
It would be presumptuous in one so humbly placed to hazard an opinion on the subject; but if I were to dare it, I should say that the statesmen of England possess a range of knowledge and a wider intimacy with the actual condition of the world as it is than any other class, in any country. I was greatly struck with this last evening. The topics wandered far a-field, varying from the Poor Laws to Hong Kong, from the Health of Towns to the state of the Peninsula: Austria, Ireland, Switzerland, the Navigation Laws, the policy of Louis Philippe, and the rot in the potatoes; and on each of these themes he not only spoke well, but he spoke with a degree of knowledge that smacked of a special study. “How comes it,” I asked myself, “that this man, with the weighty cares of a mighty empire on his brain, has time to hear and memory to retain little traits of various people in remote quarters of the world? How, for instance, did he hear, or why remember, these anecdotes of the present Landamman of Switzerland, Ochsenbein?” And yet there were good reasons perhaps, to remember them. The man who has personally shewn the white feather will scarcely be courageous as the head of a government, though there is great reason to suspect that he may exhibit all the rashness of cowardice—its worst, because its most dangerous, quality.
I had often suspected, but I never knew before, how completely this Minister had usurped every department of the Cabinet, and concentrated in himself the Home, the Foreign, and the Colonial Governments. The very patronage, too, he had assumed; so that, in fact, his colleagues were comparatively without influence or occupation. I confess that, on hearing him talk so unconcernedly of mighty events and portentous changes, of great interests and powerful states, that my heart beat strongly with an ambitious ardour, and a feverish throbbing of my temples suggested to me that the longing for rank, and station, and power, had not yet died away within me. Was it with serious intention that he spoke to me of again entering Parliament and taking office in some future arrangement, or was it merely from a sense of compassion that he ministered this meed of encouragement to the hopes of a sick man? Whatever the motive, the result has been an increased buoyancy, more of vitality about me, than I have known for some time—a secret wishing for life and strength to “do something” ere I die.
He rather appeared pleased with a suggestion I threw out for augmenting the elective franchise in Ireland, by making the qualification “an intellectual one,” and extending the right of voting to all who should take a certain degree or diploma in either the University of Dublin or any of the provincial colleges, all admitted as members of learned bodies, and all licentiates of law and physic. This would particularly suit the condition of Ireland, where property is a most inadequate and limited test, and at the same time, by an infusion of educated and thinking men into the mass, serve to counterbalance and even guide the opinions of those less capable of forming judgments. We are becoming more democratic every day. Let our trust be in well-informed, clearsighted democracy, and let the transition be from the aristocracy to the cultivated middle classes, and not to the rule of Feargus O’Connor and his Chartists.