help seeing, that from the time a child begins to go to church, the truth and candour of its religion are apt to suffer....  Oh, how far we still are from the religion of Christ!  How unwilling to believe that God’s ways are not our ways, nor His thoughts our thoughts!  How willing to bring them down to suit not what is divine, but what is earthly, in ourselves!  Yet, happily, we do not feel or act in consistency with all that we repeat as a lesson upon the subject of our faith—­for man cannot altogether crush the growth of the soul given by God—­and I trust and believe a better time is coming, when freedom of thought and of word will be as common as they are now uncommon.

In May Lady John writes of a dinner-party in London where she had a long conversation with the Russian Ambassador (Baron Brunow) on the Governments of Russia and England; she ended by hoping for a time “when Russia will be more like this country than it is now, to which he answered with a start, and lifting up his hands, ’God forbid!  May I never live to see Russia more like this country!  God forbid, my dear Lady Joan!’"

To follow the events which led to the fall of the Ministry it is necessary to look abroad.  The power of the Whigs in the House of Commons, such as it was, was the result of inability of Tories to combine, owing to their differences concerning Free Trade.  The strength of Lord John’s Ministry in the country depended largely upon the foreign policy of Palmerston, who was disliked and mistrusted by the Court.  While Palmerston was defending his abrupt, highhanded policy towards Greece in the speech which made him the hero of the hour, a war was going on between Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein, in which the Prince Consort himself was much interested.  It was a question as to whether Schleswig-Holstein should be permitted to join the German Federation.  Holstein was a German fief, Schleswig was a Danish fief; unfortunately an old law linked them together in some mysterious fashion, as indissolubly as Siamese twins.  Both wanted to join the Federation.  Holstein had a good legal claim to do as it liked in this respect, Schleswig a bad one; but the law declared that both must be under the same government.  Prussia interfered on behalf of the duchies; England, Austria, France, and the Baltic Powers joined in declaring that the Danish monarchy should not be divided.

The Prince Consort had Prussian sympathies, and he therefore disapproved of the strong line which Palmerston took up in this matter.  It was not only Palmerston’s policy, however, but the independence with which he was accustomed to carry it out, which annoyed the Court.  He was a bad courtier; he domineered over princelings and kings abroad, and his behaviour to his own Sovereign did not in any way resemble Disraeli’s.  He not only “never contradicted, only sometimes forgot”; on the contrary, he often omitted to tell the Queen what he was doing, and consequently she found herself in a false position.