government, Lord John notwithstanding, agreed to stand fire. Mr.
Gladstone proceeds:--

Lord John's explanation, which was very untrue in its general
effect, though I believe kindly conceived in feeling as well as
tempered with some grains of policy and a contemplation of another
possible premiership, carried the House with him, as Herbert
observed while he was speaking. Palmerston's reply to him was
wretched. It produced in the House (that is, in so much of the
House as would otherwise have been favourable), a flatness and
deadness of spirit towards the government which was indescribable;
and Charles Wood with a marked expression of face said while it was
going on, 'And this is to be our leader!' I was myself so painfully
full of the scene, that when Palmerston himself sat down I was on
the very point of saying to him unconsciously, 'Can anything more
be said?' But no one would rise in the adverse sense, and therefore
there was no opening for a minister. Palmerston [now become leader
in the Commons] had written to ask me to follow Lord John on
account of his being _a party_. But it was justly thought in the
cabinet that there were good reasons against my taking this part
upon me, and so the arrangement was changed.

Roebuck brought forward his motion. Mr. Gladstone resisted it on behalf
of the government with immense argumentative force, and he put the point
against Lord John which explains the word 'untrue' in the passage just
quoted, namely, that though he desired in November the substitution of
Palmerston for Newcastle as war minister, he had given it up in
December, and yet this vital fact was omitted.[340] It was not for the
government, he said, either to attempt to make terms with the House by
reconstruction of a cabinet, or to shrink from any judgment of the House
upon their acts. If they had so shrunk, he exclaimed, this is the sort
of epitaph that he would expect to have written over their remains:
'Here lie the dishonoured ashes of a ministry that found England in
peace and left in it war, that was content to enjoy the emoluments of
office and to wield the sceptre of power, so long as no man had the
courage to question their existence: they saw the storm gathering over
the country; they heard the agonising accounts that were almost daily
received of the sick and wounded in the East. These things did not move
them, but s