answers to such questions were all too obvious; and yet it is easy to imagine, also, what might have been Palmerston's jaunty comment. 'Ah! your Royal Highness is busy with fine schemes and beneficent calculations--exactly! Well, as for me, I must say I'm quite satisfied with my morning's work--I've had the iron hurdles taken out of the Green Park.' The exasperating man, however, preferred to make no comment, and to proceed in smiling silence on his inexcusable way. The process of 'brushing on one {164} side' very soon came into operation. Important Foreign Office despatches were either submitted to the Queen so late that there was no time to correct them, or they were not submitted to her at all; or, having been submitted, and some passage in them being objected to and an alteration suggested, they were after all sent off in their original form. The Queen complained; the Prince complained; both complained together. It was quite useless. Palmerston was most apologetic--could not understand how it had occurred--must give the clerks a wigging--certainly Her Majesty's wishes should be attended to, and such a thing should never happen again. But, of course, it very soon happened again, and the royal remonstrances redoubled. Victoria, her partisan passions thoroughly aroused, imported into her protests a personal vehemence which those of Albert lacked. Did Lord Palmerston forget that she was Queen of England? How could she tolerate a state of affairs in which despatches written in her name were sent abroad without her approval or even her knowledge? What could be more derogatory to her position than to be obliged to receive indignant letters from the crowned heads to whom those despatches were addressed--letters which she did not know how to answer, since she so thoroughly agreed with them? She addressed herself to the Prime Minister. 'No remonstrance has any effect with Lord Palmerston,' she said.[10] 'Lord Palmerston,' she told him on another occasion, 'has as usual pretended not to have had time to submit the draft to the Queen before he had sent it off.'[11] She summoned Lord John to her presence, poured out her indignation, and afterwards, on the advice of Albert, noted down what had passed in a memorandum: 'I said that I {165} thought that Lord Palmerston often endangered the honour of England by taking a very prejudiced and one-sided view of a question; that his writings were always as bitter as gall and did great harm, which Lord John entirely assented to, and that I often felt quite ill from anxiety.'[12] Then she turned to her uncle. 'The state of Germany,' she wrote in a comprehensive and despairing review of the European situation, 'is dreadful, and one does feel quite ashamed about that once really so peaceful and happy country. That there are still good people there I am sure, but they allow themselves to be worked upon in a frightful and shameful way. In France a crisis seems at hand.