64 CAUSES INVOLVING FRANCE AND ENGLAND CHAP, would have joyfully resigned office, and for his ■ deliverance would have offered up thanksgiving to Heaven, But his intellect, though not without high quality in it, was deficient in clearness and force. In troubled times it did not yield him light enough to walk by, and it had not the pro- pelling power which was needed for pushing him into opportune action. In politics, though not in matters of faith, he wanted the sacred impulse which his Kirk is accustomed to call ' the word ' of quickening.'* Lord Clarendon's polished de- spatches £0 forced his approval that he could never lay his hand upon one of them and make it the subject of a ministerial crisis. Yet day by day, without knowing it, the Prime Minister was assenting to a course of policy destined to end in a rupture. Lord Clarendon's pithy phrase was less applicable to the country at large than to the Prime Minister. It was strictly true that Lord Aljerdeen drifted.-f He steadfastly faced towards peace, and was always being carried towards war.
- In the course of the ceaseless consultations about poor dear
England which were cairicd on between the two intelligent Ger- mans, the Prince Consort and Baron Stockniar, Stockmarlaysit down that the Queen's Prime Minister, LordAberdcen, was want- ing in ' the productive energy which can develop a great lumin- ' ous thought.' — ' Life of the Prince Consort,' vol. ii. p. 543. t Mr Gladstone, this year (1876), made a speech showing that Lord Clarendon's famous expression was applied by him only to the latter — and almost formal — stages by which the country passed into a state of war ; but I do not think that people have ungenerously sought to use Lord Clarendon's ](hrase as a con- fps.iion. The truth is that, in reference to much of what is nar- rated in this History, the verb ' to drift ' is so closely apt that —having once been uttered— it could not but fasten.
