conclusion, he was inconsistent, to say the least, in
deserting his colleagues at a juncture which made their defeat inevitable.
But the inconsistency is only superficial; when he once had lost hope that
the Government could be got to alter their methods of conducting the war,
their defeat and dissolution, which he had previously striven to prevent,
became the lesser of two evils. It was not an evil at all, as it turned
out, for the dissolution brought the right man--Palmerston--into power.
Lord John's mistake was in thinking that his long-suffering support of a
loose-jointed, ill-working Ministry, like the Aberdeen Ministry, could have
ever transformed it into a strong one.

Lord Wriothesley Russell, [45] whom Lady John wrote of years before as "the
mildest and best of men," sent her a letter on February 8, 1855, containing
the following passages:

It is impossible to hear all these abominable attacks in silence.
It makes me sad as well as indignant to hear the world speaking as
if straight-forward honesty were a thing incredible--impossible. A
man, and above all a man to whom truth is no new thing, says simply
that he cannot assent to what he believes to be false, and the
whole world says, What can he mean by it--treachery, trickery,
cowardice, ambition, what is it? My hope is that our statesmen may
learn from John's dignified conduct a lesson which does not appear
hitherto to have occurred to them--that even the fate of a Ministry
will not justify a lie. We all admire in fiction the stern
uprightness of Jeanie Deans: "One word would have saved me, and she
would not speak it." ... Whether that word would have saved them is
a question--it was their only chance--and he would not speak it;
that word revolted his conscience, it would have been false. I know
nothing grander than the sublime simplicity of that refusal.

[45] Lord John's stepbrother.

Nearly two years later, Lord John Russell, in a letter to his brother, the
Duke of Bedford, said:

... The question with me was how to resist Roebuck's motion. I do
not think I was wrong in substance, but in form I was. I ought to
have gone to the Cabinet and have explained that I could not vote
against inquiry, and only have resigned if I had not carried the
Cabinet with me. I could not have taken Palmerston's line of making
a feeble defence.

How absurd it is to suppose that cowardice co