10 OCTOBER 1874, Page 15

BOOKS.

LORD PALMERSTON.* Main NoricE.1

Tins volume of Lord Pahnerston's " Life " is, unfortunately; the last that we shall get from the pen of Lord Dalliuig and Bulwer. He did not live to bring the story beyond the year 1847; SO we hear nothing about Palmerston's condonation of Louis Napoleon's -coup d'etat, or of the great part that he played in the Crimean -War, or of the nearly absolute power which he wielded over the House of Commons and England in the last years of his life. Even the narrative that we do get is only a fragment, and the --editor, Mr. Evelyn Ashley, has often been obliged to piece isolated sentences together. He has done the work but poorly ; yet - the volume itself is, nevertheless, so interesting that we cannot afford to waste space or time in criticising a careless editor. It reveals Palmerston chiefly in the character which gave him European fame, and which forms his best title to the respect of his countrymen—that of a Foreign Minister. He never had the slighest pretensions to be a master of home policy ; his instincts -being too aristocratic to give him any sympathy with the popular -spirit which is slowly killing the Whig element of English Liberal- ism. But he filled a great position as a Foreign Minister, and he -upheld with no unworthy hand those hi,gh traditions of English -honour and -influence which had been guarded by Canning, Pitt, and Chatham. If he had not the genius of those men, he had their masterful, often wilful spirit. Never had we a Minister 'more thoroughly English both in his strength and in his weakness. Abroad he was held to be the very incarnation of English pride, prejudice, and courage ; and if he differed materially from his great -predecessors, it was in the almost boyish pugnacity of his nature, a pugnacity which seemed to give him a positive relish for a diplo- matic combat with such a swordsman as Guizot. His Irish blood revealed itself in the eagerness with which he flung himself into the fray, in the good-humoured ferocity with which he attacked his opponents, and in the frankness with which he expressed his disgust or anger when he found himself beaten. He carried to the Foreign Office much of the temper which his countrymen brought to Donnybrook Fair, and the results were somewhat similar. While he directed our foreign policy, England was the most quarrelsome State In the whole world. Palmerston always -assumed that the most powerful of British arguments is a British fleet, and, in these meeker days, when we turn our cheek to the smiter, it is amazing to see how Often he threatened to declare war against any Power that did not happen to agree with him. He was always the warlike member of the Cabinet. He would have sent a fleet to the Spanish ports in 1848 to demand an apology - for Narvaez's insulting dismissal of our Minister, Sir Henry Bulwer, after the negotiation of the Spanish Marriages. He would, even in his irresolute old age, have declared war against Prussia and Austria in order to defend Denmark, if. France had not refused to join England. Had he lived long enough to conduct the Alabama negotiations, and had he continued to wield as immense an influence over the minds of his countrymen as he exercised at the time of his death, there can scarcely be a doubt, not only that the Treaty of Washington would never have been framed, but- that the collision of the two countries would not have ended as it did. Palmerston's intellect was eminently of that direct, simple, and combative order which disdains subtleties, and chooses the nearest way to its end, even when that way lies through a field of battle. Hence he was more feared and hated by foreign States than any other English Minister of our time.

His weakness as a statesman was closely linked to his strength. If he was English in his peremptory determination to have his own way, even at the sacrifice of all the canons of politeness, he was equally English in his political creed, and he had formed it at a time when to be English signified ,to be provincial. Mr. Matthew Arnold would have called him, an incurable Philistine. He was possessed with the belief that the British Constitution was a specific for the cure of all political ills, and he offered it to every nation that he found troubled with revolutionary maladies. He was like a country doctor who should prescribe the same pill for con- sumption, cholera, paralysis, and raving delirium. In sober earnest, he besought even Spain to sviallow the pill. Lord Dalling's respect for his memory breaks down before that preposterous limitation of the resources of the political pharmacy to one kind of dose. The truth is that Palmerston did not understand the Revolutionary, or even the Radical, temper ; he did not see whence it came, or *Lsfe of Henry /Ma Temple, Vi.seount Palmerston. By the late Bight Hon. Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer (Lord Dolling). Vol III. London Richard Bentley and Son. 1874. whither it was leading .Europe; he did not perceive that it was too subtle to be withstood by treaties or put down by grapeshot ; and hence, when he passed beyond the circle of statecraft, he seemed hopelessly blind to the future of the Continent: His sagacity appeared to desert him when he quitted the ground which could be covered by protocols. Therefore he has left no per- manent mark on the map of Europe. All his diplomatic structures rested on too slender a foundation to stand alone, because they were made to depend on fleeting interests or dynastic arrangements. They were never shaped at the bidding of the profounder cravings of his time, such as the demand for the unification of nationalities. Thus, although he seemed to suspect that Italy could not remain a mass of petty States, he also held, in 1846, that the best policy of England was to encourage the Liberalism of the Pope, and discourage the fol- lowers of Mamzini He saw the battle coming,—nay, his apprehen- sions were prophetic ; for he feared that France might fight Austria in Italy, that the contest might spread to Germany, that Austria might be broken, and France made more powerful than ever. He anticipated all but the final catastrophe, in which France was struck to the dust; and yet he so miscalculated the tremendous forces which he saw at work, as to imagine that they might be guided into the safe channel of constitutional Whiggery by the hand of a reforming Pope. Lord Milling politely expresses his surprise at the belief that a government of priests would willingly resign any portion of its power into the hands of laics, or that men like Mazzini "would care two straws about moderate con- stitutional government." The error sprang, we repeat, from the provincial Whiggery of Lord Palmerston's instincts and his creed. The profounder political passions were a mystery to the healthy and vigorous mind of a statesman whose digestion was admi- rable, who enjoyed life as heartily as any man in Europe, who held England to be the model country of the world, and who believed that she had become such by following the moderate counsels of that great Whig party which he him- self helped to guide. Yet Continental statesmen imagined, as Lord Milling says, that he was "animated by the passions of the Revolutionist." The only foundation for the idea was that the rule of Austria and Spain was so detestably despotic, as to make an Englishman like Palmerston wonder how flesh and blood could stand the daily and hourly outrages, the espionage, the gagging of free speech, and the power committed to priests,—a class from whom he instinctively shrank. Palmerston did often stir the inflammable mass of discontent with what the Metternichs fancied to be the poker of revolution ; but he was only giving vent to such healthy indignation as he might have felt if he had seen a big hulking scoundrel thrashing a woman. He laid the lash on the shoulders of the despots at the impulse of a somewhat impulsive passion, without stopping to ask too cously how he himself might fare in the fray. A story is told of Pro- fessor Wilson that exactly illustrates the so-called revolutionary temper of Palmerston. Seeing a carter abusing an overloaded horse it the streets of Edinburgh, he sternly rebuked and threatened the ruffian. The man lifted his whip, as if to strike the old man, but it was instantly twisted out of his hand by a wrist of unabated strength, and the next moment the horse was unloosed and the load shot into the street. Then the Professor led the poor half-starved beast along the street to give it into the keeping of the police. That is exactly what Lord Palmerston would have done when dealing with despotic States, would have done, that is, if his resolve had always been as tenacious as his impulse was defiant, and if his colleagues had been as pugnacious as himself. He began to act at the bidding of chivalrous instincts, and not of any profound political theories. It is ludicrous to picture him as a Mac- chiavelli, although that is the character in which he used to be fashioned by the exasperated imaginations of foreign diplomatists for never did a statesman of equal rank depend less upon systematic craft and more upon the impulse of the moment. Still, Palmerston was no revolutionist. He only wanted to stop the tyranny of Continental States, and to give the public as much liberty as he found in the creed of the Whig Church. His revo- lutionary desires were all confined within the respectable area of the British Constitution. The Metternichs warned him that he was playing with fire in a powder magazine, but he did not believe them. Perhaps he would have been less free with his threats if he had understood the revolutionary temper better. At least, when the Revolution of 1848 taught him that French Republicanism had little in common, with English Whiggery, he quickly took the dd.., of the very despots whom he had been denouncing all his life, and he condoned the crime of

Louis Napoleon with an indecent haste that is the greatest blot on his memory. We fear that were he living now he would be the steady foe of the Republican party in France, and would give an underhand encouragement to the Bonapartes, on the cynical plea that the French could not be ruled except from a barrack- room. His nature was not deep enough, nor was his mind sufficiently well furnished with ideas to give him a real sympathy with those popular impulses which are refashioning nations. Hence, he openly took the side of the Southern States during the American civil war. He has been known to say, "We are all Confederates here ;" meaning that he and his colleagues in the Cabinet sympathised with Jefferson Davis. Happily, the boast was not true ; for the Duke of Argyll, Sir George Lewis, and perhaps Lord Russell, favoured the North ; but such reckless words did immense mischief when they were whispered abroad by ready lips, and when they were spread through the United States. And yet Palmerston could have had no sympathy with the Southerners merely because they were slaveholders. The whole course of his life forbids us to believe that he could have so far degraded himself. But be disliked the Union, because it was Democratic, because its diplomacy had often been insolent and not always scrupulous, and because, above all, the nation which thus asserted Imperial authority was a nation of democratic traders.

Much might be said on the other side. If Palmerston did not like Democracy, and was essentially an aristocrat in feeling, even when he was exchanging " chaff " with Ratcliff, the Tiverton butcher, he was no sycophant of Courts or Princes. It is no secret that he held up his head stiffly in our own Court, and would allow no august personage to put a regal toe into the Foreign Office. He had once to quit power because he had acted with too ostentatious a disdain for certain forms that still linger in the Constitution. And he sometimes spoke of royal personages with astonishing frankness. Writing to Sir Henry Bulwer, he thus speaks about Prince Leopold of Coburg, who was a cousin of Prince Albert's, and the favourite candidate of the English Court, if not of the English Government, for the hand of the Queen of Spain :-

"I have not seen the Prince since he was here as a boy of twelve years old. He was then a sharp, quick lad, but nothing more. But I know what his father is ; I know what his second brother, the heir to the father, is ; and I know what his sister, the Duchess of Nemours' is. If all these high and distinguished persons were to put together all the energy and ability which they severally possess, it would fall far short of the quantity necessary to endow a great prince. They are, all of them, except the King of Portugal, below par. The chances, therefore, are against Prince Leopold being anything remarkable, and the best that can be hoped from him is, that he may turn out an ordinary man, with not much less sense and judgment than the generality of mankind."

Lord Dalling points out that Lord Palmerston further departed from the tone of good society by the detestation with which he regarded the slave-trade, and by the lifelong efforts which he made to put it down. His hatred of that wicked traffic Was akin to his hatred of despotism. But, after all, the one hatred, hie the other, was strictly confined within the limits of the British Constitution, and as we have seen, it broke down in the case of the American Civil War, as signally as the hostility to military rule broke down during the Republic of 1848. Again, Lord Palmerston gave great help to Lord Ashley during the agitation for the protection of the factory-workers ; and the present volume contains a most interest- ing as well as amusing anecdote respecting the way in which some operatives showed him, by a practical experiment, how grinding was the toil of the poor factory children. The trial took place on the spur of the moment in his own drawing-room, chairs being used as a "spinning-mule," and Lord Palmerston himself helping to set it in motion. He was satisfied that the toil was crushing to the poor children, and from that day he helped Lord Ashley. The whole story is a charming example of his quick and impulsive generosity.

The most important part of the present volume is contained in the chapters which tell the story of the long negotiations that led to the infamous Spanish Marriages. Sir Henry Bulwer himself played so great a part in the combat, by striving to defeat the designs of France, and his indictment of Guizot is so unsparing, as to give his evidence a high historical value. But the thread of the story is so tangled, the revelation of the diplomatic cynicism is so shocking, and the consequences to the Spanish Court and nation have been so disastrous, that we must put off the examination of the affair until next week.