The obstinacy of the Danes, who seem to have built their hopes of English succour on Lord Palmerston’s marvellous power over a servile House of Commons, secured the triumph of Austria and Prussia--who up to this point were encumbered by their signatures to the Treaty of London. Lord Clarendon’s [Illustration: COUNT BEUST.] proposal marked the abandonment of that instrument by the only Power desirous of abiding by it. The Conference, by its abortive attempts at solving the Danish problem, therefore, extricated Austria and Prussia from their false position, for when it broke up the ill-starred Treaty of London was there and then consigned to what Carlyle calls “the limbo of dead dogs.” And the curious thing is that Palmerston and Russell seem to have almost courted a defeat, which shattered the diplomatic _prestige_ of England for more than a decade. “The Treaty of London,” writes Count Vitzthum, “might, perhaps, have been saved, had the British Minister acknowledged from the first that the value of a Treaty, intended to settle a _quæstio de futuro_, an eventuality of the future, depended on the circumstances under which that eventuality occurred. A very different importance attaches to treaties which, like those of 1815, deal with _faits accomplis_ and establish the final results of a war lasting over many years. Palmerston and Russell committed in their zeal a political blunder when they declared that to cancel the Treaty of London was tantamount to unsettling everything else. Had not Napoleon been then so seriously occupied in Mexico he would have taken the British Ministers at their word.[202] But be that as it may, the Treaty was now dead. The Conference had not only united Germany, but also served as a safety-valve against an explosion in Parliament. The saying that no change of Ministry is to be thought of after the Ascot Races was verified anew. The Ascot meeting was now over. Nevertheless, before the Session came to an end, the Ministers were doomed to suffer a humiliation without a parallel.”[203] What made this humiliation all the more mortifying to Palmerston, was that the punishment was to come from the hateful hand of Cobden.