Bright said they “savoured of what was generally called claptrap.” Anxious, however, to keep the Tories in power, lest Lord Palmerston and his followers might return to office, the Radicals refused to embarrass Mr. Disraeli[24] on this point, and urged the Government to reconsider it during the Easter recess. Most assiduously did Lady Palmerston endeavour to induce Lord John Russell to coalesce with Lord Palmerston during the recess for the purpose of defeating the Ministry on the India Bill; but her intrigues were in vain. On the contrary, Lord John determined to bring in a series of Resolutions on which the Ministry might base a Bill, and when Parliament re-assembled on the 12th of April he confidentially communicated them through Mr. Edward Horsman to Mr. Disraeli, who had himself resolved to adopt the same course. Mr. Disraeli was only too willing to be thus extricated from a difficulty by one of the leaders of the Opposition. But the House of Commons considered that as the India Bill was now removed from the arena of party strife, it would be wisest to let the Government prepare the Resolutions. This was done, and the debate on them began on the 30th of April, and went on favourably. The Budget, though it showed a deficit of £4,000,000, which was met by a tax on bankers’ cheques, and by equalising the Irish spirit duty, gave the Ministry no trouble. The acquittal of Dr. Bernard in April, who had been arrested by Lord Palmerston’s Government on a charge of conspiring with Orsini to murder the French Emperor, embarrassed Lord Malmesbury, for the jury who tried Bernard refused to convict in the teeth of clear evidence of guilt. But Napoleon III., recognising that the action of the jury was simply the “retort courteous” to Walewski’s maladroit demand that an English Government should alter English laws at the bidding of a foreign autocrat, wisely ignored the incident, and accepted Pélissier’s view of it, which was that “one must be callous to this sort of thing, and let the water run under the bridge.”[25] Then the tide of Ministerial success suddenly turned, and the Cabinet was nearly wrecked by the indiscretion of its most brilliant but erratic member, Lord Ellenborough, who had succeeded Mr. Vernon Smith at the Indian Board of Control. In 1857 Lord Canning had incurred the odium of panic-stricken Englishmen at Calcutta, because in his repressive measures he mingled justice with severity. In June, 1857, when he gagged the Native press, he gagged the English press as well. In August, when disarming Calcutta, he compelled [Illustration: THE QUEEN’S VISIT TO BIRMINGHAM: THE PROCESSION PASSING ALONG NEW STREET.]