make it the basis of an alliance including constitutionally-governed Portugal and Spain, and directed against the Absolutist Powers, Prussia, Russia, and Austria. Baron Stockmar was quite right when he wrote that a fundamental principle of Lord Palmerston's policy was never to employ Eugland's political influence in foreign countries for the oppression of the governed by the Government.* Still British interests were with him supreme, and the moment they clashed with the French course of action he threw Louis Philippe and his ministers overboard without the smallest scruple, and entered into new combinations. The firm was to be England and France, not France and England. Perhaps the best description of the Palmerstonian ideal of foreign policy is to be found in a speech which he made in 1848, in answer to one of Mr. Urquhart's attacks :

As long as [England] sympathises with right and justice, she will never find herself alone. She is sure to find some other State of sufficient power, influence, and weight to support and aid her in the course she may think fit to pursue. Therefore, I say that it is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow. And if I might be allowed to express in one sentence the principle which I think ought to guide an English minister, I would adopt the expression of Canning, and say that with every British minister the interests of England ought to be the shibboleth of policy.

In other words, while ardently sympathising with constitutionalism-or, as Prince Metternich called it, the revolutionary principle, he allowed for the working of chance in human affairs, and cared little for consistency in comparison with success, for means in com

* Stockmar's Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 364 (English translation).

parison with ends. That may not be the highest ideal of statesmanship, but is the only statesmanship which has accomplished great things for nations. By it Cavour freed Italy, and Bismarck united Germany. All such men are necessarily Opportunists, as it is now the fashion to call the type; they claim to be judged only by results, by poising the gains against the losses. It would probably be extremely difficult to make out from Lord Palmerston's despatches and public utterances any more definite system of action than an inflexible determination that his country should get the better of whatever struggle she might happen to have encountered or provoked. He loved her ardently, and believed in his fellow Englishmen as firmly as his fellow Englishmen believed in him. To serve what he honestly believed to be their interests, he was at one time an ally of France, at another of Russia; he abetted the revolution in Italy, he discouraged it in Hungary. The truth would appear to be that rigid systems are incompatible with creative Foreign Statesmanship, which has to build with whatever materials it may find to hand; it is not by systems that a working alliance between Russia and the Porte can be kept together, as Lord Palmerston kept it together in 1840. They can be adopted by financiers, by reformers of national codes, but not by diplomatists, who frequently have to act under conditions in which unknown plays the major part, and when they have to trust entirely to the impulse of the moment. Metternich is at good example of a Foreign Minister who set a fixed course of action before him; he outlived the time when pure Conservatism was a benefit to Europe, and was doomed to see his own intellectual bankruptcy, and the almost complete overthrow of his country under the stress of

reaction. Against him stood Palmerston-except during the truce between them created by the Syrian question -in the double capacity of the representative of the greatest of the constitutional Powers and of a man personally disposed to anticipate revolution by reform. The contest between the two men was one of principle, and never extended to the battle-field; but it was none the less acute. It terminated, as far as Metternich was concerned, with the revolution of 1848; but he left to his successors in the direction of Austrian and German politics a legacy of somewhat unreasonable Anglophobia, which pursued Lord Palmerston to the end of his life, and was doubtless in part the cause of his failure to bring the Schleswig-Holstein question to a successful issue. But on the whole Lord Palmerston may be considered to have triumphed completely over his great rival for the leadership of European politics; though less perhaps in the creation of independent Belgium, than in the constitutionalizing of Spain and Portugal, for to the first the Austrian Chancellor entertained no deep-rooted objection.

Lord Palmerston's foreign policy found its best expression, from the humanitarian point of view, in his efforts to suppress the slave trade; and from the practical, in the numerous commercial treaties concluded while he was Foreign Secretary. The chief objections. to it were, as the statesmen of the Cobden school pointed out with vigorous logic during the later part of his career, that by continually keeping England on the brink of war, it necessitated huge armaments and a heavy burden of taxation. To which Palmerston would have replied that war was more likely to be avoided by a bold than by a timid policy, and that large armaments were a necessity in any case, considering

that British interests were world-wide, and the huge Empire extremely vulnerable. On the latter point he once pointed out, in a remarkable letter to Mr. Gladstone, that

We have on the other side of the Channel a people who, say what they may, hate us as a nation from the bottom of their hearts, and would make any sacrifice to inflict a deep humiliation on England. It is natural that this should be. They are eminently vain, and their passion is glory in war. They cannot forget or forgive Aboukir, Trafalgar, the Peninsula, Waterloo, and St. Helena. Give [the rulers of France] a cause of quarrel, which any foreign Power may at any time invent or create, if so minded: give him the command of the Channel, which personal or accidental naval superiority might afford him, and then calculate if you can-for it would pass my reckoning power to do so-the disastrous consequences to the British nation which a landing of an army of from one to two hundred thousand men would bring with it. Surely even a large yearly expenditure for army and navy is an economical insurance against such a catastrophe.

The passage was written under somewhat abnormal circumstances, when France was "spoiling for a fight," as the Irish say, and it seemed to be quite uncertain with which of her neighbours she proposed to pick a quarrel. But it is capable of general application as well; and, mutatis mutandis, embodies Lord Palmerston's views of the true attitude to be adopted towards Russia, the other Power with whom England is inevitably at variance in nine European crises out of ten, and whose inevitable advance towards the frontier of India he foretold as far back as 1847.

Even those who object to his policy on the ground of its expensiveness, must be willing to acknowledge its honesty and success. He, quite as much as Prince Bismarck, was a believer in the principle of do ut des, and he had little confidence in sentiment as a permanent bond of union between nation and nation. Les peuples n'ont

pas des cousins, was one of his favourite maxims; he held that hope and fear were the mainsprings of diplomatic action, not a Utopian belief in the perfectibility of the species, that arguments of the prophet and the divine. were out of place in despatches addressed to Metternich or Nesselrode. As to its success, it is enough to remark, without discussing "might-have-beens," that as long as Lord Palmerston directed foreign affairs, either as Foreign Secretary or Prime Minister, England avoided war, and played a prominent and creditable part in nearly every crisis. There was something in that, whatever the Cobdenites might say.

In his latter days Lord Palmerston was accustomed to say that of all his achievements, the one of which he was most proud, was his treaty with Brazil for the suppression of the slave-trade. But the suppression of Brazilian slavery must have come sooner or later, and it is to independent Belgium that we must look for the most conspicuous and artistic monument of his diplomatic genius. The revolt of Belgium from Holland, which had taken place during the last days of the Wellington ministry, was obviously completely destructive of one of the most carefully planned of the arrangements of 1815. It was the object of the statesmen assembled at Vienna, as it had been the object of Mr. Pitt before them, to create a strong monarchy on the northern frontier of France, as a barrier to French aggression. Belgium and Holland were therefore united under the sovereignty of the House of Orange, and an impregnable line of fortresses was constructed along the southern frontier of the kingdom of the Netherlands, at the cost of the Allies, and under the superintendence of Wellington. Unfortunately the union proved one of hands, not of hearts. The Belgians