He discouraged Napoleon. Except Disraeli
none of the English statesmen were so cautious as he in talking
of America. Palmerston told no falsehoods; made no professions;
concealed no opinions; was detected in no double-dealing. The
most mortifying failure in Henry Adams's long education was that,
after forty years of confirmed dislike, distrust, and detraction
of Lord Palmerston, he was obliged at last to admit himself in
error, and to consent in spirit -- for by that time he was nearly
as dead as any of them -- to beg his pardon.
Gladstone was quite another story, but with him a student's
difficulties were less because they were shared by all the world
including Gladstone himself. He was the sum of contradictions.
The highest education could reach, in this analysis, only a
reduction to the absurd, but no absurdity that a young man could
reach in 1862 would have approached the level that Mr. Gladstone
admitted, avowed, proclaimed, in his confessions of 1896, which
brought all reason and all hope of education to a still-stand: --
I have yet to record an undoubted error, the most singular and
palpable, I may add the least excusable of them all, especially
since it was committed so late as in the year 1862 when I had
outlived half a century . . . I declared in the heat of the
American struggle that Jefferson Davis had made a nation.
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