It was an arrangement which secured the Prime-minister the co-operation of Lord Castlereagh himself, and eventually of Mr. Canning; but it failed to propitiate the Opposition, the leader of which in the House of Commons, Mr. Ponsonby, turned it into open ridicule, affirming that “nothing could be more absurd than a cabinet professing to have no opinion on such an important subject.”  And it must be confessed that Mr. Ponsonby’s language on the subject seems the language of common-sense.  So far from the importance of a question justifying such an arrangement, that importance appears rather to increase, if possible, the necessity for absolute unanimity in the administration than to diminish it; and on a grave and momentous subject to leave each member of a ministry free to pronounce a separate and different judgment, so that one may resist what his colleague advocates, is to abdicate the functions of government altogether.  To permit such liberty was either a proof that the ministry was weak altogether—­which it was not—­or that its conduct on this question was weak.  In either case, it was a mischievous precedent that was thus set;[174] and the fact that it has since been followed in more than one instance, is so far from being any justification of it, that it rather supplies an additional reason for condemning it, as being the cause of wider mischief than if it had been confined to one single question, or had influenced the conduct of one cabinet only.  It has often been said that the name “cabinet” is unknown to the law, and that what we call the cabinet is, in fact, only a committee of the Privy Council.  As a statement of law the assertion may be correct, but it is certain that for more than a century and a half the constitution has adopted the principle that the cabinet consists of the holders of a certain, to some extent a fluctuating, number of the principal state officers; and, recognizing the responsibility of all for the actions of each member of it, does by that recognition sanction an expectation that on all questions, or at all events on all but those of the most trivial character, they will speak and act with that unanimity which is indispensable, not only to the strength of the government itself, but to its being held in respect by the people; such respect being, indeed, among the most essential elements of its strength.

The incidents of the war itself do not belong to a work such as this; but, tantalizing as it must be to an historian of any class to pass over the brilliant series of achievements which gave Britain the glory of being twice[175] the principal agent in the deliverance of Continental Europe, the glories of Salamanca, Victoria, Orthes, and Waterloo must be left to other writers, who, it is not unpatriotic to hope, may never again have similar cause for exulting descriptions.  But out of the crowning triumph of Waterloo a difficulty arose which, though it may be difficult to characterize the principle on which it was settled, since it was