ly blamed Canning, who
agreed with the Whigs about Catholic Emancipation, though he differed
from them about Reform. The former question, he said, was then by far
the more pressing, and if Canning had insisted on making it a
first-class ministerial question he would have carried it in conjunction
with the Whigs. "My pride in Irish measures," he once wrote to me, "is
in the Poor Law, which I designed, framed, and twice carried." Like
Peel, he strongly maintained that the priests ought to have been paid.
He would gladly have seen the principle of religious equality in Ireland
carried to its furthest consequences, and local government considerably
extended; but he told me that any statesman who proposed to repeal the
Union ought to be impeached, and in his "Recollections," and in one of
his published letters to the present Lord Carlingford, he has expressed
in the strongest terms his inflexible hostility to Home Rule.

[Sidenote: POLITICAL APPREHENSIONS]

'Though the steadiest of Whigs, Lord Russell was by no means an
uncompromising democrat. The great misfortune, he said, of America was
that the influence of Jefferson had eclipsed that of Washington. One of
her chief advantages was that the Western States furnished a wide and
harmless field for restless energy and ambition. In England he was very
anxious that progress should move on the lines of the past, and he was
under the impression that statesmen of the present generation studied
English history less than their predecessors. He was one of the earliest
advocates of the Minority Vote, and he certainly looked with very
considerable apprehension to the effects of the Democratic Reform Bill
of 1867. He said to me that he feared there was too much truth in the
saying of one of his friends that "the concessions of the Whigs were
once concessions to intelligence, but now concessions to ignorance."

'When the Education Act was carried, he was strongly in favour of the
introduction of the Bible, accompanied by purely undenominational
teaching. This was, I think, one of his last important declarations on
public policy. I recollect a scathing article in the "Saturday Review,"
demonstrating the absurdity of supposing that such teaching was
possible. But the people of England took a different view. The great
majority of the School Boards adopted the system which Lord Russell
recommended, and it prevailed with almost perfect harmony for more than
twenty years.

'In foreign po