"At our Cabinet on November 26 [1838]...Palmerston afterwards brought forward the question of augmenting the Navy. Our Chancellor of the Exchequer looked black at a proposal entailing a necessity for more money and new taxes; but Lord Melbourne said we must come to that some day or the other, and we should not be justified in exposing our shores and our arsenals to the insults and outrages of a Russian fleet. Such an attack might appear to be a mad project; but it was never safe to suppose men incapable of mad projects, and even the unopposed appearance of a Russian fleet in the narrow seas would degrade England in our own eyes and in the eyes of all the world... Lord Melbourne then assumed a tone not usual with him, and said he considered England to have been under the special protection of Providence at certain periods of her history, several of which he mentioned, from the dispersion of the Spanish Armada to the retirement of the French squadron in Bantry Bay; but Melbourne added that "no man ought to count upon such interposition of Divine favour, and use no human effort.""