better to interfere by anticipation, and prevent, if possible, the federal execution ever taking place.  The consequence of that extreme activity on the part of Her Majesty’s Ministers is a mass of correspondence which has been placed on the table, and with which, I doubt not, many gentlemen have some acquaintance, though they may have been more attracted and absorbed by the interest of the more modern correspondence which has, within the year, been presented to the House.  Sir, I should not be doing justice to the Secretary of State if I did not bear testimony to the perseverance and extreme ingenuity with which he conducted that correspondence.  The noble lord the Secretary of State found in that business, no doubt, a subject genial to his nature—­namely, drawing up constitutions for the government of communities.  The noble lord, we know, is almost as celebrated as a statesman who flourished at the end of the last century for this peculiar talent.  I will not criticize any of the lucubrations of the noble lord at that time.  I think his labours are well described in a passage in one of the dispatches of a distinguished Swedish statesman—­the present Prime Minister, if I am not mistaken—­who, when he was called upon to consider a scheme of the English Government for the administration of Schleswig, which entered into minute details with a power and prolixity which could have been acquired only by a constitutional Minister who had long served an apprenticeship in the House of Commons, said: 

Generally speaking, the monarchs of Europe have found it difficult to manage one Parliament, but I observe, to my surprise, that Lord Russell is of opinion that the King of Denmark will be able to manage four.

The only remark I shall make on this folio volume of between 300 and 400 pages relating to the affairs of Schleswig and Holstein is this—­I observe that the other Powers of Europe, who were equally interested in the matter, and equally bound to interfere—­if being signatories to the treaty of 1852 justified interference—­did not interpose as the English Government did.  That they disapproved the course taken by us I by no means assert.  When we make a suggestion on the subject, they receive it with cold politeness; they have no objection to the course we announce we are going to follow, but confine themselves, with scarcely an exception, to this conduct on their part.  The noble lord acted differently.  But it is really unnecessary for me to dwell on this part of the question—­we may dismiss it from our minds, and I have touched on it only to complete the picture which I am bound to place before the House—­in consequence of events which very speedily occurred.