have gone mad here, the political world is quite crazy, and the Court is the only institution which does not lose its tranquil bearing”--thus wrote Prince Albert to the Dowager-Duchess of Coburg in the midst of the agitation caused by the second Ministerial crisis of 1855. Meantime much had been done by Lord Aberdeen, the Duke of Newcastle, and Prince Albert, to improve the condition of the army at the seat of war. The railway from Balaclava to the camp was being pushed on rapidly; reinforcements were pouring in steadily. On the 13th of March Sir J. Burgoyne writes that “the men are beginning to look tolerably hearty and cheerful again.” A Sanitary Commission, organised by Lord Shaftesbury, had been despatched to aid the medical staff, and there was little for the new Ministers to do but to follow the path which Aberdeen and Newcastle had, by their toil and self-sacrifice during the recess, smoothed for them. The Queen, like the Peelites, was of opinion that the Roebuck Commission could do very little good, and, by diverting the attention of the officials from the work in hand, might do a great deal of harm. It was the expression of an angry desire to punish somebody, and, as Prince Albert said, it could not hope to find the right person, “because he does not exist.”[206] If any one was to blame, it was the Duke of Wellington, who had left the country with a loose aggregate of battalions which was in no true sense an organised army--without leaders trained and practised in the duties of general officers; without a reserve, a general staff, field commissariat, ambulance, or baggage corps; without training in the combined use of infantry, cavalry, and artillery, with their various systems of supply and transport; in fact, without any effective instrument whatever for waging war at a distance from England. In vain did the Committee endeavour to fix the blame for the disasters in the Crimea on somebody. Mr. Roebuck soon found that an examination of the Duke of Newcastle would rather tend to clear than to damage his reputation, and then the inevitable scapegoat was sought in the Queen’s husband. When Mr. Roebuck consulted the Duke privately on the subject, his Grace told him that the only really valuable advice he and Lord Aberdeen got was from Prince Albert. He added that the Queen’s health had suffered dreadfully from her anxiety about the troops, and that it was therefore absurd to imagine that the Prince had been conspiring to wreck the expedition. The Sebastopol Committee was a failure. It did not succeed in saddling any one with a definite responsibility for the sufferings of the army; nay, the Chairman (Mr. Roebuck), in speaking to a resolution censuring the Aberdeen Ministry for their management of the war, freed the Duke of Newcastle, Mr. Sidney Herbert, and Sir J. Graham, the heads of the incriminated Departments, from blame.[207] The only severe censure was that passed on Lord Raglan for continuing Mr.