saw its effects I had no notion how great a crime it is....  They [the absentee landowners] thought only of themselves and their own enjoyments, they left their people to grow up and multiply like brute beasts, they stifled in them by their tyranny all hope and independence and desire of advancement, they made them cowards and liars, and have now left them to die off from the face of the earth.  Neither can any one living at a distance have any notion of the utter absence of all public spirit among the upper classes....  Legislation can do nothing when there is nothing for it to act upon.  Parliament to Ireland is what a galvanic battery is to a dead body, and it is in vain to make laws when there is no machinery to work them.  A people must be worked up to a certain point in their dispositions and understandings before they can be affected by highly civilized legislation....  It is only individual exertions, and the personal superintendence of wise and good men, that can ever drill the Irish people into a legislatable state....  One or two things, however, seem to me pretty certain—­

    1.  That under proper management the Irish peasant can be made
    anything of.

    2.  That, generally speaking, the present class of proprietors must
    and will be swept from off the surface of the earth.

    3.  That in the extreme West the surface is overcrowded, but not at
    all so a few miles inland.

    4.  That reclaiming waste lands and bogs at present is to throw
    money away.

I begin to fear I have written a strange rigmarole, but still I will send it, for though Irish matters cannot interest you as they do me, yet still a letter is always a pleasant thing to receive, even only that one may have the satisfaction of looking at the Queen’s head and breaking the seal.

The next entry from Lady John’s Diary is dated October 9, 1849.

After tea John told me that he had informed the Cabinet of his plan for the extension of the suffrage—­to be proposed next session.  All looked grave.  Sir Charles Wood and Lord Lansdowne expressed some alarm....  To grant an increase of weight to the people of this country when revolutions are taking place on all sides, when a timid Ministry would rather seek to diminish that which they already have, is to show a noble trust in them, of which I believe they will nobly prove themselves worthy.

Lord John’s determination to carry through this measure himself, rather than to leave it in the hands of others, was afterwards the cause of the first defeat of the Whig Government.

    Lady John Russell to Lady Mary Abercromby

    LONDON, February 19, 1850

    The weeks are galloping past so much faster even than usual that
    there is no keeping pace with them.