the House of Lords, after a long term of foreign service, during which he had necessarily held aloof from home politics, he thought it advisable, for the present at least, to remain independent.  He found, however, ample and congenial occupation for his time in the peaceful but industrious discharge of home duties at Broomhall.  Still his thoughts were constantly with the distant Provinces in which he had laboured so long.

Whenever he appeared in public, whether at a dinner given in his honour at Dunfermline, or on occasion of receiving the freedom of the city of Glasgow, or in delivering a lecture at the annual opening of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institute—­it was with the same desire of turning to account the knowledge gained abroad, for the advantage of the Colonies, or of the mother-country, or for the mutual benefit of both; with the same hope of drawing closer the bonds of union between them, and dispelling something of that cloud of ignorance and indifference which has often made the public opinion of Great Britain a hindrance rather than a support to the best interests of her dependencies.

[Sidenote:  In the House of Lords.]

It was only very rarely that he took any part in the business of legislation; and of the two occasions on which he was induced to break silence, one was when the interests of Canada appeared to him to be imperilled by the rumoured intention of Government to send thither large bodies of troops that had just returned from the Crimea.  He thought it his duty to protest earnestly against any such proceeding, as likely, in the first place, to complicate the relations of Canada with the United States, and, in the second place, to arrest her progress in self-dependence.

[Sidenote:  Crimean War.]

The other occasion of his speaking was in May 1855, when Lord Ellenborough had moved an Address to the Crown, condemnatory of the manner in which the Crimean War had been and was being conducted.  Having been out of England when hostilities were begun, he had not to consider the question whether it was a glorious, or even a necessary, war in which we were engaged; and his one feeling on the subject was that which he had previously expressed to the citizens of Glasgow.

My opinion (he then said) [on the question of the war] I can easily state, and I have no hesitation in avowing it.  I say that now we are in the war, we must fight it out like men.  I don’t say, throw away the scabbard; in the first place, because I dislike all violent metaphors; and, in the second place, because the scabbard is a very useful instrument, and the sooner we can use it the better.  But I do say, having drawn the sword, don’t sheathe it until the purpose for which it was drawn is accomplished.

In the same spirit he now defended the Ministry against Lord Ellenborough’s attack; not on party grounds, which he took pains to repudiate, but on what he conceived to be the true patriotic principle—­viz. to strengthen, at such a time, the hands of the existing Government, unless there be a distinct prospect of replacing it by a stronger.