_all_ agree with me that in following the dictates of your
conscience you acted the part most worthy of your exalted name and
character.... We recognize the importance of the principle which
you yourself proclaimed, that there can be no sound politics
without sound morality." Mr. John Dillon wrote: "To have opposed
Mr. Roebuck's motion and then to have defended what you thought and
knew to have been indefensible would have been not a fault but a
crime."

Another wrote expressing the satisfaction and gratitude of the
great majority of the inhabitants of his district in regard to his
"efforts to cure the sad evils encompassing our brave countrymen;"
and another wrote: "The last act of your official life was one of
the most honourable of the sacrifices to duty which have so
eminently distinguished you both as a man and a Minister."

There was no doubt a common outcry against the act of resignation
at the time, but the outcry against certain Ministers of the
Peelite group was still louder, and their conduct, as Mr. Morley
relates, was pronounced to be "actually worse than Lord John's."
"Bad as Lord John's conduct was," wrote Lord Malmesbury on February
22, 1855, "this [of Graham, Gladstone, and Herbert] is a thousand
times worse."

The real question, however, is not what the public thought at the
time, but what a fuller knowledge of the facts will determine, and
I contend that my father's dissatisfaction with the manner in which
the war was conducted, and his failure to induce the Cabinet to
supply an effective remedy, justified if it did not compel his
resignation.

Mr. Roebuck's motion accelerated a resignation which the Prime
Minister knew had been imminent during the preceding ten weeks.

My father himself admitted that he made great mistakes, that for
the manner of his resignation he was justly blamed, and that he
ought never to have joined the Coalition Ministry. He had a deep
sense, I may here say, of Mr. Gladstone's great generosity towards
him on all occasions. At this distance of time the complication of
affairs and of opinions then partly hidden can be better estimated,
and the conduct of seceders from the Government cannot in fairness
be visited with the reprobation which was natural to
contemporaries. The floating reproaches of the period in regard to