When, therefore, on January 23rd, the Opposition demanded an inquiry, he was in a very awkward position.  He had either to bar the way to changes he had been urging himself all along, or he was obliged to admit openly that he agreed with the critics of the Government.  Had he chosen the first alternative he would have been untrue to his conviction that a change of method in conducting the war was absolutely essential to his country’s success; yet in choosing the second he was turning his back on his colleagues.  No doubt the custom of the Constitution asks either complete acceptance of common responsibility from individual Ministers or their immediate resignation.  Lord John had protested and protested, but he had not resigned; he was therefore responsible for what had been done while he was in the Cabinet.  He had not resigned because he thought it bad for the country that the Government should be weakened while the war was at its height, and he had hoped that by staying in the Cabinet he would be able to induce the Ministry to alter its methods of conducting the war.  When he discovered that, in spite of reiterated protests, he could not effect these all-important changes from within, and when the House of Commons began to clamour for them from without, he decided that no considerations of loyalty to colleagues ought to make him stand between the country and changes so urgently desirable.  It may be said that since he had acted all along on the ground that in keeping the strength of the Government intact lay the best chance of helping to bring the war to a successful and speedy 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