England had neither forgotten nor forgiven the hostile duplicity of Louis-Philippe’s foreign policy, and even Prince Albert had to beg her Majesty--whose heart has always been easily touched by the spectacle of sorrow or misfortune--to moderate her expression of sympathy for the dethroned monarch. In the House of Commons some of the Radicals, alarmed at the Ministerial proposals to increase the military expenditure of the country, professed to see in these courtly demonstrations of compassion additional proofs of hostile designs, on the part of England, against the French Republic. Cobden, in a letter to his friend, Mr. George Combe, of Edinburgh, said he dreaded the revival of the Treaty of Vienna, for he suspected that the Court and the aristocracy were eager to make war on the Republic. So far as Prince Albert was concerned this, as we have seen, was an unjust suspicion. But it was equally unjust to the Queen. “We do everything we can for the poor family,” she wrote to King Leopold, “who are indeed sorely to be pitied. But you will naturally understand that we cannot make common cause with them, and cannot take a hostile position to the new state of things in France.”[89] In truth, Louis Philippe--who complained to the Queen that Palmerston’s intrigues with the Liberals in France had upset his Government--deserved his fate. The outbreak which followed the foolish prohibition of the Reform banquet was only that of a turbulent mob. The King had a large and loyal army at his back, and the proverbial “whiff of grapeshot” would at the outset have quelled the rising. Louis Philippe, however, lacked the courage to defend his crown, and his flight transformed a riot into a revolution. At the same time the French people acquiesced in the Revolution of ’48 for various reasons, which have been very fairly stated by two of the shrewdest observers of the day, Sir Robert Peel and M. Alexis de Tocqueville. When Mr. Hume crossed the floor of the House of Commons one evening, and carried the news of Louis Philippe’s fall to Peel, the latter whispered to Hume:--“This comes of trying to govern the country through a narrow representation in Parliament, without regarding the wishes of those outside. It is what the Party behind me wanted me to do in the matter of the Corn Laws, and I would not do it.”[90] M. de Tocqueville, three weeks before the Revolution, predicted the catastrophe in a speech in the Chamber, in which he warned the Government that it was trembling on a volcano of Socialism.[91] In a letter to Mr. Senior he says that the real cause of the Revolution was “the detestable spirit which animated the Government during this long reign; a spirit of trickery, of baseness, and of bribery, which has enervated and degraded the middle classes, destroyed their public spirit, and filled them with a selfishness so blind as to induce them to separate their interests entirely from those of the lower