From her own tranquil island the Queen, at the beginning of 1861, looked abroad upon a world that was strangely disturbed. It was a world in which men cried peace when there was no peace. In Europe, French agents were intriguing with the revolutionary parties in Poland, Hungary, and the Danubian Principalities. Italian conspirators were busy as usual in Venetia. The misgovernment of Turkey was again goading her Christian subjects to despair, and rousing the wrath of Panslavic fanaticism in Russia. Across the Atlantic the New Year brought with it the severance of South Carolina from the United States, and the pulse of the British aristocracy and their social parasites rose high as their golden youth congratulated each other on the “bursting of the bubble Republic.”[89] It is true that the harvest had been bad, and that the winter had been the coldest that had been experienced for half a century. But Free Trade made food cheap and wages high, so that there was no popular discontent to trouble the Government. The prospect of a cotton famine in Lancashire, as the result of a civil war in America, was not thought to be within the range of practical contingencies. As for political parties, they were, as Mr. Ashley says, “in a singular jumble at the period which we have now reached.”[90] The Tories were alarmed by Mr. Gladstone’s Budgets. These were supposed to be dangerously democratic, not only because his attack on the Paper Duty seemed designed to strengthen the power and position of a cheap press, but because in his financial speeches he seemed to justify the repeal of taxes solely by his desire to benefit the poor, and his imposition of new burdens by his desire to punish the rich for being wealthy. Absurd as this suspicion was, it is necessary to take it seriously, because it had much to do with creating the unexpected dictatorship of Lord Palmerston.