which was to occupy the last decade of his life. Until very near the end, he may be said to have upheld firmly the high responsibilities of the office. Hardly suspected to be seriously ill by the public, he died October 18, 1865, within two days of his eighty-first year, of gout, the statesman’s disease. The career of Lord Palmerston is typically an English and an aristocratic one. Nothing could be farther removed from the democratic ideal of the “self-made man.” Palmerston, so to speak, was born into success; and he was able to retain and to extend his birthright. In democracies like the United States, and in constitutional monarchies like England, it is not always that the man showered with fortune’s gifts makes public life at once his amusement and his profession. In the former state, such an one is the least likely of persons to raise an influential voice in Congress; in the latter, the man often drifts into the channels of sport or society. That the higher path has been essayed by so many well-born Englishmen is more than creditable: this fact lies close at the foundations of the British Empire. We have said that through all the ramifications of the higher English life and politics Lord Palmerston was ever a pervasive figure. He could remember games of chess he had played, as a young man, with the unfortunate Queen Caroline: the year Byron published his first poems was the year of his entrance to Parliament; and he died as the American Confederacy flickered out in ashes. Through all these years, as a statesman he had preserved much the same character. Foreign Affairs were his chief interest: his conception of their administration practically never swerved from the theory of a militant, unsleeping England--an England at times, perhaps, apt to be blustering and overbearing, but an England frankly devoted to its higher self-interests and to what, from an English point of view, was indubitably the good of the world. His position toward home affairs is hard to describe. So far as he was identified with local divisions he was a Conservative with a strong tinge of Liberal doctrine. Abroad, the tinge of Liberalism and the sympathies with Continental rebellions against absolute monarchy due to it, caused Palmerston to be regarded as almost a revolutionary. In truth, so far as England was concerned, he was profoundly in love with the _status quo_: the uprisings abroad, he considered, were only the restless gropings of the peoples towards a realization of the English system of government. In hardly any sense was his policy constructive. As Mr. McCarthy remarks, in his brilliant estimate, great national crises he was at no time--perhaps happily--called on to meet. It was ever his way to follow, not direct the great impulses of public opinion that swept through Parliament. The same authority neatly sums him up in saying, “His policy was necessarily shifting, uncertain, and inconsistent; for he moulded it