mulative in effect. Some believed, and more
pretended to believe, that Turkey abounded in the elements and energies
of self-reform, and insisted that she should have the chance. Others
were moved by vague general sympathy with a weak power assailed by a
strong one, and that one, moreover, the same tyrannous strength that
held an iron heel on the neck of prostrate Poland; that only a few years
before had despatched her legions to help Austria against the rising for
freedom and national right in Hungary; that urged intolerable demands
upon the Sultan for the surrender of the Hungarian refugees. Others
again counted the power of Russia already exorbitant, and saw in its
extension peril to Europe, and mischief to the interests of England.
Russia on the Danube, they said, means Russia on the Indus. Russia at
Constantinople would mean a complete revolution in the balance of power
in the Mediterranean, and to an alarmed vision, a Russia that had only
crossed the Pruth was as menacing as if her Cossacks were already
encamped in permanence upon the shores of the Bosphorus.

Along with the anxieties of the Eastern question, ministers were divided
upon the subject of parliamentary reform. Some, including the prime
minister, went with Lord John Russell in desiring to push a Reform bill.
Others, especially Palmerston, were strongly adverse. Mr. Gladstone
mainly followed the head of the government, but he was still a
conservative, and still member for a tory constituency, and he followed
his leader rather mechanically and without enthusiasm. Lord Palmerston
was suspected by some of his colleagues of raising the war-cry in hopes
of drowning the demand for reform. In the middle of December (1853) he
resigned upon reform,[307] but nine days later he withdrew his
resignation and returned. In the interval news of the Russian attack on
the Turkish fleet at Sinope (November 30) had arrived--an attack
justified by precedent and the rule of war. But public feeling in
England had risen to fever; the French Emperor in exacting and
peremptory language had declared that if England did not take joint
action with him in the Black Sea, he would either act alone or else
bring his fleet home. The British cabinet yielded, and came to the
cardinal decision (Dec. 22) to enter the Black Sea. 'I was rather
stunned,' Gladstone wrote to Sidney Herbert next day, 'by yesterday's
cabinet. I have scarcely got my breath again. I told Lord Aberdeen that
I had had