work on the 26th of July, and though there was not a single bar of iron or pane of glass prepared at that date, they handed the completed building over to the Commissioners, ready for painting and fitting, on the last day of the year. CHAPTER XXV. FALL OF THE WHIG CABINET. Debates on “No Popery”--Mutiny of the Irish Brigade--Defeat of Lord John Russell--Lord Stanley “sent for”--Timid Tories--Lord Stanley’s Interviews with the Queen--A Statesman’s “Domestic Duties”--Is Coalition Possible?--The Queen’s Mistake--The Duke of Wellington’s Advice--Return of the Whigs to Office--The Queen’s Aversions--The “No Popery” Bill Reduced to a Nullity--Another Bungled Budget--The Income Tax Controversy--The Pillar of Free Trade--The Window Tax and the House Duty--The Radicals and the Slave Trade--King “Bomba” and Mr. Gladstone--Cobden on General Disarmament--Palmerston in a Millennial Mood--The Whig-Peelite Intrigue--The Queen and the Kossuth Demonstrations--Another Quarrel with Palmerston--A Merry Council of State. On the 4th of February, 1851, Parliament assembled with the din of the agitation over Papal aggression ringing in its ears. Men talked of nothing save the legislation that might be necessary to check the encroachments of Rome. But it was not supposed that the course of the Government would be other than smooth, for not only was the Prime Minister in full accord with the popular feeling against Papal aggression, but the great International Exhibition dwarfed public interest in purely party questions. We shall see how these anticipations were falsified by events, and how the Whig Government was hurried to its doom. One of the politicians behind the scenes, who forecast the fall of the Cabinet more accurately than the public, was Mr. Cobden. “I expect,” he writes on the 19th of February in one of his letters, “that this ‘No Popery’ cry will prove fatal to the Ministry. It is generally thought that the Government will be in a minority on some important question, probably the Income Tax, in less than a fortnight. The Irish Catholic members are determined to do everything to turn out Lord John. Indeed, Ireland is in such a state of exasperation with the Whigs, that no Irish member having a Catholic constituency will have a chance of being elected again unless he votes through thick and thin to upset the Ministry.”[30]