4 1 APPENDIX. Both the sleep of those who slept, and the dead acqui- escence of those fewer members of the Cabinet who did not fall into a state of unconsciousness, may be partly, as I now think, accounted for, when one hears of the foregone conclusion at winch they had arrived by mistake at the Cabinet of the previous day. Having there well weighed and adopted the proposal then submitted for approval, and having also, I believe, heard there read to them a draft of the Duke's private letter, they, some of them, if not all, imagined that they had already approved the substance of the instructions which were to be sent out to Lord Raglan, and accordingly took it for granted that the new, lengthy draft of Despatch which the Duke brought down to Pem- broke Lodge was virtually a mere repetition (in expanded official form) of the private letter of the 28th — a paper lead out to them fur form's sake, but not seriously de- manding a renewal of that anxious care and attention that tiiey had bestowed upon the subject, in Cabinet, on the pre- vious day. I have a letter before me from one who was a 111 ember of Lord Aberdeen's Government, and present at the Cabinet of the 27th in Downing Street, as well as at the Cabinet meeting of the following day at Pembroke liodge, in which the writer insists upon the completeness of the deliberation on the first of those days as sufhciently accounting for the inattention of the niembei-s of the (jabiiiet on the day following, and for the actual sleep to which most of them yielded. Of the soundness of the view thus insisted ujion, all who handle this volume can judge. If they think that the Duke of Newcastle's private letter of the 28th (with the substitution of ' IMy Lord ' for the words * My dear
- Lord Eaglan ') would alone have sufliced to make Lord
llaglan undertake the expedition against the dictates of Ids own judgment, they may consistently go on to say that the phenomenon of the sleeping Cabinet, however
