measures of national
defence by the vigor with which he carried out the recommendations of a
royal commission which had been appointed by the preceding ministry to
investigate the condition of our national defences. Its report had
pointed out the absolute necessity of an improved system of protection
for our great dockyards and arsenals, which, from their position on the
coast, were more liable to attack than inland fortresses would have
been, had we had such. And, in accordance with that warning, in the
summer of 1860, Lord Palmerston proposed the grant of a large sum of
money for the fortification of our chief dockyards. It was opposed on a
strange variety of grounds; some arguing that the proposed
fortifications were superfluous, because our navy was the defence to
which the nation was wont deservedly to trust; some that they were
needless, because no other nation was in a condition to attack us;
others that they were disgraceful, because it was un-English and mean to
skulk behind stone walls, and because Lycurgus had refused to trust to
stone walls for the safety of Sparta; and one member, the chief
spokesman of a new and small party, commonly known as the
"peace-at-any-price party," boldly denounced the members of the
commission as a set of "lunatics" for framing such a report, and the
ministers as guilty of "contemptible cowardice" for suggesting to the
nation that there was any danger in being undefended. But the ministry
prevailed by a large majority;[310] the money was voted, and the nation
in general warmly approved of the measure. As Lord Palmerston
subsequently expressed it, "the government, the Parliament, and the
nation acted in harmonious concert"[311] on the subject.

One of the arguments against it which the objectors had brought forward
was, that the ministry was not unanimous in the conviction of the
necessity; and we learn from the "Life of the Prince Consort"[312] that
Mr. Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was vehement in his
resistance to it, threatening even to carry his opposition so far as to
resign his office, if it were persevered in. And, as has been intimated
on a previous page, this was not the only question on which in the
course of this year the Prime-minister did in his heart differ from his
Chancellor of the Exchequer, though he did not think it expedient to
refuse his sanction to his proposals on a matter belonging to his own
department, the Exchequer. The subject on which h