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once alluded with telling sarcasm. Cobden during a debate had said that under certain conditions he would fight, or if he could not fight would work for the wounded in the hospitals. "Well," was Palmerston's retort, "there are many people in this country who think that the party to which he belongs should go immediately into a hospital of a different kind, and which I shall not mention."

This was no uncommon manner of treating the representations of Cobden among the war party outside the House of Commons. During the whole of the time during which the war was prosecuted with an enthusiasm that was afterwards followed by a demand for searching inquiry, he was spoken of with derision or dislike even among people who had once regarded him as their political leader. The newspapers were filled with abuse of "Cobden, Bright, & Co.," as Palmerston once designated them in a letter, and Mr. Bright was burned in effigy. At the best they were regarded as doctrinaires or fanatics. Neither of these men swerved from their first assertions, however. Cobden held precisely the same opinions when, four years later, Lord Palmerston invited him to become a member of the cabinet. His views on public questions had undergone little or no change. Both he and Mr. Bright had learned that though to offer what they deemed to be explanations, appeals, or exhortations during the time when the nation was urging or was urged in the direction of war might be followed by good results, such endeavours were useless amidst the tumult of the conflict. It increased their hatred of war to believe that it had the effect of making men reckless of such appeals. "It is no use to argue, said Cobden, when speaking some years afterwards of the war in America, "It is no use to argue as to what is the origin of the war, and no use whatever to advise the disputants. From the moment the first shot is fired or the first blow is struck in a dispute, then farewell to all reason and argument; you might as well reason with mad dogs as with men when they have begun to spill each other's blood in mortal combat. I was so convinced of the fact during the Crimean war, I was so convinced of the

utter uselessness of raising one's voice in opposition to war when it has once begun, that I made up my mind that so long as I was in political life, should a war again break out between England and a great power, I would never open my mouth upon the subject from the time the first gun was fired until the peace was made."

But by the time of the American war the principles which both Cobden and Bright had enunciated were much better understood. The peace party failed to make the Crimean invasion serve as an immediate illustration of their policy, but it is by no means certain that it did not assume to many minds the force of an example of the value of their principles. At any rate there began the development of a feeling that armed intervention, and even the threat of it, should no longer be regarded as the foremost British influence in relation to European quarrels and supposed "British interests."

The mention of "British interests" may well give us occasion to hear Mr. Gladstone on the subject of the origin and reasons of the Crimean war. His words are perhaps even more worthy of attention from the fact that they were written in 1878, twenty-four years after the period to which they relate. They occur in a review of that Life of the Prince Consort by Mr. (afterwards Sir) Theodore Martin, already quoted in these pages.

Mr. Gladstone says it would be curious to ascertain the precise date at which the idea was first broached that British interests required the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire, and states his belief that it is later than 1828, when we were engaged in a policy of coercion against Turkey, out of which, just before, had grown the battle of Navarino. In that debate Lord Holland delivered a speech which appeared to show that we had ancient alliances with Russia, that we had no treaty at all with Turkey before 1799, that the treaty concluded was only for seven years, that it was simply part and parcel of our military measures against France, and that it began with these words:-"His Britannic majesty, connected already with his majesty the Em

GLADSTONE'S DEFENCE-INTERPOSITION AGAINST RUSSIA.

peror of Russia by the ties of the strictest alliance, accedes by the present treaty to the defensive alliance which has just been concluded between his majesty the Ottoman emperor and the Emperor of Russia." The doctrine of upholding the Ottoman Empire for the sake of British interests was far from being generally recognized by statesmen of the last generation, and Mr. Gladstone distinctly says:-"It may be boldly affirmed that it was not the avowed doctrine of the British government in the proceedings immediately anterior to the Crimean war." He believes the idea "may probably be traced in the policy of 1840 and the armed assistance lent to the decrepit empire against its Egyptian vassal," and that it "grew with rapidity, fostered by the rather womanish suspicions and alarms on behalf of India of which Russia gradually became the object." It has, he says, "grown with greater rapidity since the Crimean war in proportion to the increased susceptibility of the country, which has almost learned to regard political alarm as standing in the first class of its luxuries-those, namely, which are daily and indispensable." Mr. Gladstone puts the case distinctly enough; and whatever may have been the necessity for actual hostilities, it is a vindication of the position assumed by England. At the outset the quarrel was one between Russia and France in regard to ecclesiastical privileges at the holy places. England was but an amicus curio, and in that capacity she thought Russia in the right. As, however, communications went on the czar unfortunately committed his case to a special envoy, Prince Menschikoff, whose demands upon the Porte appeared to the British government to render harmony in the Turkish Empire, if they should be accepted, thenceforth impossible. In the further stages of the correspondence, which had thus shifted its ground, we found ourselves in company with France, and not with France only but with Europe. At one particular point it must in fairness be allowed that Russia, with her single rapier, had all her antagonists at a disadvantage. They had collectively accepted, and they proposed to her a note known as the Vienna Note, which she also accepted; and

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they afterward receded from it upon objection being taken by Turkey. Russia, however, covered the miscarriage of her opponents by sustaining the Turkish interpretation of the words, and thus sheltered their retreat from the support of the document they themselves had framed. But it was not upon this miscarriage that the dispute came to a final issue. The broken threads of the negotiation were pieced together, and about the time when the year expired a new instrument of a moderate and conciliatory character was framed at Constantinople and approved by the cabinets of the five powers still in unbroken union. It was the rejection of this plan by the Emperor Nicholas, when it was presented to him in January, 1854, and not his refusal of Turkish amendments of the Vienna Note, that brought about the war in the following March. This; Mr. Gladstone affirms, vindicates the British policy against the accusation of selfishness. As against the charge of Quixotry he says:"If it is wholly unwise and unwarrantable for one power to constitute itself the judge and the avenger of European law, is it wholly wise and reasonable for two? So far as a question of this kind can be answered in the abstract, undoubtedly it is not. It is a precedent by no means free from danger: a couple of states cannot claim for themselves European authority. But this was not the enterprise on which France and England advisedly set out. They began their work say from the time of the Menschikoff mission in close association with Austria and with Prussia; and the four together were the only powers who, by established usage, could represent the concert of Europe in a case where the fifth, an only remaining power of the first order, was itself the panel in the dock. They pursued their work in harmony through the whole of the year 1853. With March, 1854, came the crisis. Austria urged the two leading states, England and France, to send in their ultimatum to Russia, and promised it her decided support. She redeemed the pledge, but only to the extent of a strong verbal advocacy. Without following out the subsequent detail of her proceedings, she rendered thereafter to the allies but equivocal and uncertain service; without,

however, disavowing their policy either in act or word. It was Prussia which, at the critical moment, to speak in homely language, bolted; the very policy which she had recommended, she declined unconditionally to sustain, from the first moment when it began to assume the character of a solid and stern reality. In fact, she broke up the European concert, by which it was that France and England had hoped, and had had a right to hope, to put down the stubbornness of the czar, and to repel his attack upon the public law of Europe. The question that these allies had now to determine was whether, armed as they had been all along with the panoply of moral authority, they would, upon this unfortunate and discreditable desertion, allow all their demands, their reasonings, their professions, to melt into thin air.

Would such a retreat by two such powers have been for the permanent advantage of European honour, or legality, or peace?"

We must now turn to the occurrences of which both parliamentary proceedings and expressions of public opinion were indications, and we shall have to look back a little in order to measure the progress of events. Probably the departure of our fleet for the Baltic was in the public eye the most significant of the preparations for an arduous struggle, and at the time it was made much of, although it was afterwards found to be of little practical importance so far as naval operations were concerned. There had already been a grand naval review at Spithead. The Grenadier and the Coldstream Guards had been cheered by an enthusiastic concourse as they departed from Waterloo Station for Southampton, the Fusiliers had marched from Wellington Barracks, and as they passed had been cheered by the queen and the royal family from a balcony at Buckingham Palace. On the 11th of March (1854) the Baltic fleet, under Admiral Sir Charles Napier, had left Spithead, having been visited by her majesty and (so to speak) led out to sea by the royal yacht, which kept its place at the head for some distance and then stopped till the great armada had swept by.

The sailing of the Baltic fleet had been heralded by a banquet given to its commander Admiral Sir Charles Napier at the Reform Club; Lord Palmerston presided and made an after-dinner speech, which has since been characterized as the kind of oration in which a jocular elderly gentleman would propose the bride and bridegroom at a wedding-breakfast. This is not an exact description of it; but it was not in the best of taste, considering that the occasion was one which was sufficiently serious to make grave statesmen anxious, and it came to be singularly out of tune with the results of Napier's expedition, about which the gallant admiral had six months afterwards a bitter dispute with Sir James Graham, who, as first lord of the admiralty, called his judgment and energy in question. The immediate result of Lord Palmerston's vivacity was a grave remonstrance by Mr. Bright in the House of Commons. It may be interesting to give a passage or two of what the home secretary really did say, or at all events of the portion which displeased others who were perhaps neither so earnest nor so serious as Mr. Bright. As an after-dinner speech it was doubtless amusing enough, and Lord Palmerston was perhaps not altogether inexcusable in resenting any public comment upon such a matter in the House of Commons; but his retort on Mr. Bright was even in worse form than the speech itself.

to

"There was," said his lordship when he rose

propose the toast of the evening, "a very remarkable entertainer of dinner company called Sir R. Preston, who lived in the city, and who, when he gave dinners at Greenwich, after gorging his guests with turtle, used to turn round to the waiters and say, 'Now bring dinner.' Gentlemen, we have had the toasts which correspond with the turtle, and now let's go to dinner. Now let us drink the toast which belongs to the real occasion of our assembling here. I give you 'The health of my gallant friend Sir Charles Napier,' who sits beside me. If, gentlemen, I were addressing a Hampshire audience consisting of country. gentlemen residing in that county, to which my gallant friend and myself belong, I should introduce him to your notice as an eminent agri

PALMERSTON'S SPEECH AT THE NAPIER BANQUET.

culturist. It has been my good fortune, when enjoying his hospitality at Merchistoun Hall, to receive most valuable instructions from him while walking over his farm about stall-feeding, growing turnips, wire-fencing, under-draining, and the like. My gallant friend is a match for everything, and whatever he turns his hand to he generally succeeds in it. However, gentlemen, he now, like Cincinnatus, leaves his plough, puts on his armour, and is prepared to do that good service to his country which he will always perform whenever an opportunity is afforded to him.

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friend Sir De Lacy Evans lent his powerful aid in the same cause, and with the same success. My gallant friend Sir Charles Napier, however, got the first turn of fortune, and it was mainly owing to that victory of his that the Queen of Portugal afterwards occupied the throne to which she was rightfully entitled, and the Portuguese nation obtained that constitution which they have ever since enjoyed. A noble friend of mine, now no more, whose loss I greatly lament, for he was equally distinguished as a man, as a soldier, and as a diplomatist, the late Lord William Russellan honour to his country as to his familytold me that one day he heard that my gallant friend Sir Charles Napier was in the neighbourhood of the fortress of Valenza, a Portuguese fortress some considerable distance from the squadron which he commanded. Lord W. Russell and Colonel Hare went to see my gallant friend, and Lord W. Russell told me that they met a man dressed in a very easy way, followed by a fellow with two mus

"I pass over those earlier exploits of his younger days which are well known to the members of his profession; but perhaps one of the most remarkable exploits of his life is that which he performed in the same cause of liberty and justice in which he is now about to be engaged. In the year 1833, when gallantly volunteering to serve the cause of the Queen of Portugal against the encroachments and the usurpations of Don Miguel-to defend constitutional rights and liberties against arbi-kets on his shoulders. They took him at first trary power-he took command of a modest fleet of frigates and corvettes, and at the head of that little squadron he captured a squadron far superior in force, including two line-ofbattle ships, one of which my gallant friend was the first to board. But on that occasion my gallant friend exhibited a characteristic trait. When he had scrambled on the deck of this great line-of-battle ship, and was clearing the deck of those who had possession of it, a Portuguese officer ran at him full dart with his drawn sword to run him through. My gallant friend quietly parried the thrust, and, not giving himself the trouble to deal in any other way with his Portuguese assailant, merely gave him a hearty kick and sent him down the hatchway. Well, gentlemen, that victory was a great event. I don't mean the victory over the officer who went down; but the victory over the fleet, which my gallant friend took into port; for that victory decided a great cause then pending. It decided the liberties of Portugal; it decided the question between constitutional and arbitrary power a contest which began in Portugal, and which went on afterwards in Spain, when my gallant

for Robinson Crusoe; but who should these men prove to be but the gallant admiral on my right, and a marine behind him. 'Well, Napier,' said Lord W. Russell, 'what are you doing here?' 'Why,' said my gallant friend, 'I am waiting to take Valenza.' 'But,' said Lord William, ‘Valenza is a fortified town, and you must know that we soldiers understand how fortified towns are taken. You must open trenches; you must make approaches; you must establish a battery in breach; and all this takes a good deal of time, and must be done according to rule.' 'Oh,' said my gallant friend, 'I have no time for all that. I have got some of my blue jackets up here and a few of my ship's guns, and I mean to take the town with a letter;' and so he did. He sent the governor a letter to tell him he had much better surrender at discretion. The governor was a very sensible man; and so surrender he did. So the trenches and the approaches, the battery, breach, and all that, were saved, and the town of Valenza was handed over to the Queen of Portugal. Well, the next great occasion in which my gallant friend took a prominent and distinguished

part-a part for which I can assure you that I personally in my official capacity, and the government to which I had the honour to belong, felt deeply indebted and obliged to him was the occasion of the war in Syria. There my gallant friend distinguished himself as usual at sea and on shore. All was one to him, wherever an enemy was to be found; and I feel sure that when the enemy was found the enemy wished to Heaven he had not been found. Well, my gallant friend landed with his marines, headed a Turkish detachment, defeated the Egyptian troops, gained a very important victory, stormed the town of Sidon, captured three or four thousand Egyptian prisoners, and afterwards took a prominent part in the attack and capture of the important fortress of Acre. I am bound to say that the government to which I belonged in sending those instructions which led to the attack upon Acre were very much guided by the opinions which we had received of the prac ticability of that achievement in letters from my gallant friend.”

Whether the effects of the banquet still remained in a touch of gout which made him unusually irritable, or whether he felt it to be a monstrous proceeding to attack him for words uttered at "the social board," and perhaps intended to infuse spirit and cheerfulness into an otherwise dull assembly, cannot be easily determined; but it is certain that Lord Palmerston resented with quite unwonted bitterness the reference made to the tone and temper of his remarks at the Napier banquet. Mr. Bright's expressions were certainly strong; he had, he said, read the proceedings with pain and humiliation, the reckless levity displayed being in his opinion discreditable to the grave and responsible statesmen of a civilized and Christian nation. Palmerston rose to reply, and commenced in his jaunty manner, "Sir, the honourable and reverend gentleman"-upon which Cobden stood up to call the attention of the speaker to the phrase as flippant, undeserved, and not justitied by the rules of the house. "I will not quarrel about the words," retorted Palmerston; "but as the honourable gentleman has been pleased to advert to the circumstance of my being chairman at the

dinner to which allusion has been made, and as he has been kind enough to express an opinion as to my conduct on that occasion, I deem it right to inform the honourable gentleman that any opinion he may entertain either of me personally or of my conduct private or political is to me a matter of the most perfect indifference." This was received with some laughter and a good deal of cheering, and Palmerston continued, "I am further convinced that the opinion of this country with regard to me and to my conduct will in no way be influenced by anything that the honourable gentleman may say; I therefore treat the censure of the honourable gentleman with the most perfect indifference and contempt." The laughter and cheering were repeated at this; but they were mingled with cries of remonstrance. "Is that parliamentary or not?” said the veteran gladiator. "If it is not I do not insist on the expression."

Surely there must have been a kind of answering note of defiance or of pugnacity between Lord Palmerston and Mr. Bright, and this, the first unmodified expression of it, came from the elder antagonist. But Palmerston could scarcely have felt either the contempt or the indifference of which he almost boastfully protested. The opinions enforced by an orator of Mr. Bright's power,-by the successful advocate of free-trade,-would not always fall on the ears of a community dull with the roar of war; and it is pretty certain that though they may not have affected the public estimate with regard to Lord Palmerston personally, they had much to do with the change which came over English policy after Palmerston's death and with the impossibility of repeating a personal influence such as Palmerston's, even had there been another statesman possessing his peculiar abilities and qualifications. But what were Mr. Bright's opinions? The country was not altogether a stranger to them, and whatever they may have been, they were not, could not be, contemptible. Many of his declarations may have been founded on an erroneous impression of the facts of the case; his conclusions may have been drawn from imperfect information of diplomatic movements, exact knowledge of

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