While we have meetings perpetually held and innumerable writings put forth to promote education and raise the moral standard of the people, we are horrified and alarmed day after day by accounts of the most frightful murders, colossal frauds, and crimes of every description. War has ceased, though the Temple of Janus seems only to be ajar; but the world is still in commotion, in alarm, and visited by every sort of calamity, moral and material, in the midst of which it is difficult to discover any signs of the improvement of the human race, even of those portions of it which are supposed to be the most civilised and the most progressive.
_December 7th._--At Wrotham and at Ossington last week. The news of the day is that we are to have another 'Conference' at Paris, to settle the Bolgrad affair, our Government having given way to what Clarendon told me he certainly would not consent; but we had managed to get matters into such a fix, and it was so necessary to extricate all the several parties from the embarrassed positions in which they were placed by their own or by each other's faults, that no alternative remained. This arrangement, which is not very consistent with Palmerston's recent declarations at Manchester and in London, is proclaimed by the Government papers, and generally understood to be a means of enabling Russia to concede our demands with as little loss of dignity and credit as possible, and to terminate the difference between us and France by our making an apparent concession to France, while she makes a real one to us. Everything has evidently been carefully arranged for the playing out of this diplomatic farce, and Cowley, who is to be our sole representative, is to be accommodating and not quarrelsome; but _reste à savoir_ whether the manoeuvres of some of the others may not provoke his temper and bring about angry collisions. Between this matter and the _bévue_ we have made of our Neapolitan interference, never was there such a deplorable exhibition as our foreign policy displays; but nobody seems to care much about it, and though there will in all probability be a good deal of sparring, and taunts and sneers in Parliament, Palmerston's Government will incur no danger of any adverse vote, for everybody is conscious that in the actual state of parties and the dearth of parliamentary leaders, every man of sufficient ability being disqualified for one reason or another, no man but Palmerston can conduct a Government or command a majority in Parliament; nor does there appear in the distance any man likely to be able to fill his place in the event of his death or his breaking down, events which must be contemplated as not very remote when he is seventy-three years old, although his wonderful constitution and superhuman vigour of mind and body make everybody forget his age and regard the possibility of his demise with the sort of incredulity which made the courtier of Louis XIV. exclaim on the death of that monarch, _'Après la mort du Roi on peut tout croire.'_