BOOKS.

LORD PALMERSTON.*

(FIRST NOTICE.]

THESE volumes will be even more eagerly read, and probably will better satisfy the curiosity of Englishmen as to the great poli- tical figure which ten years ago disappeared from amongst us, than even Lord Dallimg's introductory work. Mr. Ashley has quoted Lord Pa1merston's papers and despatches, even in connec- tion with events which many of us can distinctly remember, with a frankness which gives the political history of the time, and also the personnel of the politics of the time, quite a fresh interest for us. In the present review, we desire to take a single episode from this interesting story, and to make the part which Lord Palmerston took in it more visible to our readers. Now that we have just been watching the slow and peaceful building- up of a French Republican Constitution out of the political debris which the Empire left behind it, there is a singular interest in looking at the line taken by the British Government, and also to some extent, by the British Throne, at the birth of the Empire, and at the curious confusions to which Lord Palmerston's very sharply-marked policy in the matter gave rise. As our readers are aware, it marked the turning-point of his career, by making him from that time forward, first Lord John Russell's rival and then his chief, whereas, up to that time he had acted under him. Yet curiously enough, as our readers probably know already, Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston did not really differ at all in the view which they took of Louis Napoleon's coup d'e tat. What • Me Mk 01 Henry Joh. Terapk, Monad Palmerston, 1846-1885. WititSelections from his Speeches and Oorrespoudence. By the Hon. Evelyn Ashler,aP. 2 vols. London: Bentley. the English people resented, and what caused the/disfavour with which Parliament regarded Lord Palmerston's action, was not at all that which the Throne resented, or that for which Lord John Russell, as the Prime Minister of the time, dismissed him from his seat at the Foreign Office. The British people were annoyed because Lord Palmerston so promptly intimated to Louis Napoleon that, in his opinion, the Prince was perfectly justified in the coup d'itat by the consideration that if he had not struck it, the Assembly would have struck a blow at him, and because Lord Palmerston spoke with so much scorn of the notion of applying constitutional ideas to French affairs, and of those who censured a high-handed course in France on the ground that such a course would have been highly criminal in England. That Lord Palmerston took this tone, and took it very strongly indeed, the following passage in a letter written eleven months before the coup dime, on the 24th January, 1851, to our French Ambassador of that day, will show with sufficient frankneaS "If I was the President I should not trouble myself as to whether the Assembly supported my Ministers or not ; whether they censured or approved them. I should say to the Assembly, '1 cannot get rid of you, and you cannot get rid of me, and your censures do not change my opinions of my own conduct. For that conduct I am not answerable to you (as long as I keep within the law), but to France. My Ministers are toting by my instructions, and they are responsible to me, and not to you. If you reject good laws which I propose to you, yours be the blame. If you will not vote money to keep up an army, navy, and civil government, let the nation call you to account for thus betray- ing your country ; but that which I will not do is to appoint Ministers who shall be your instruments, and not mine.' The analogy of our Constitution in regard to the relation of Ministers to Parliament and the Crown does not hold good as to the position of the French Ministers. The Constitutions of the two countries are wholly different."

Now, would not the same sort of reasoning, —which, by the way, Lord Palmerston continued to apply as confidently as ever even after Prince Louis Napoleon had ceased to keep "within the law," — been almost or quite as applicable to the policy of Marshal MacMahon of recent years, — that is, since he was elected President for a given term of years, and made independent of the National Assembly, — as it was to that of Louis Napoleon,—with this exception, that Marshal Mac- Mahon has not the same chance of founding a dynasty and getting a popular support for that dynasty from the people of France which Louis Napoleon had? And was not Lord Palmerston, by his steady encouragement of the President's indifference to the Assembly, and steady defence even of his violence in putting down the Assembly and appealing to a plebiscite, doing what in him lay to make Louis Napoleon indifferent to his constitutional obligations ? Unquestionably the line taken by the British Government in 1851 did very much to strengthen Louis Napoleon in his contempt for the constitutional ties by which he was bound ; but then,- quite as unquestionably, it was not Lord Palmerston who was responsible for this, but the whole Cabinet apparently • to which he belonged. Here is the contemptuous manner in which he wrote to Lord Normanby of the only self-governing element in the institutions of France, on the very morrow of the coup d'etat " C. G., 3rd Dec., 1851.

"My DEAR NORMANBY,—Even we here, who cannot be supposed to know as much as people at Paris did about what was going on among the Bourbonists, cannot be surprised that Louis Napoleon struck the blow at the time which he chose for it ; for it is now well known here that the Duchess of Orleans was preparing to be called to Paris this week with her younger son to commence a new period of Orleans dynasty. Of course the President got an inkling of what was passing, and if it is true, as stated in our newspapers, that Changarnier was arrested at four o'clock in the morning in council with Thiers and others, there seems good reason to believe, what is also asserted, that the Bur- graves had a stroke prepared which was to be struck against the President that very day, and that, consequently, he acted on the prin- ciple that a good thrust is often the best parry. Your despatch of Monday might have suited the success of the Burgraves as well as that of Louis Napoleon, as in the earlier part of it you contemplated the chances of power passing out of his hands to those of other Powers. I have reason to think, because I have heard it from several quarters, that the President has been sometimes led to infer, from your social intimacy with the Bargrave party, that your political sympathies were more directed towards them than towards him. Of course, a minister or ambassador cannot be expected to adapt his social relations to the party jealousies of the Government to which he is accredited, but if it so happens that personal friendships and private and social intimacies lead him into frequent communication with persons who are hostile to the Government, it is the more necessary for him to take care to destroy in the mind of the Government any misapprehension which this circumstance might give rise to; and I have no doubt that you have been careful to do so. As to respect for the law and Constitution, which you say in your despatch of yesterday is habitual to Englishmen, that respect belongs to just and equitable laws framed under a Constitution founded upon reason, and consecrated by its antiquity and by the memory of the long years of happiness which the nation has enjoyed under it, but it is scarcely a proper application

of those feelings to require them to be directed to the day-before- yesterday tomfoolery which the scatter-brained heads of Marrast and Tocqueville invented for the torment and perplexity of the French nation : and I must say that that Constitution was more honoured by the breach than the observance. It was high time to get rid of such childish nonsense; and as the Assembly seemed to be resolved that it should not be got rid of quietly and by deliberate alteration and amend- ment, I do not wonder that the President determined to get rid of them as obstacles to all rational arrangement If, indeed, as we suppose, they meant to strike a sudden blow at him, he was quite right on that ground also to knock them down first. I find I have written on two sheets by mistake ; the blank leaf is an appropriate emblem of the pre- sent state of the French Constitution. It is curious that such a nation as the French, after more than sixty years of political struggle and five- revolutions—coanting the assumption of power by Napoleon as one— - should at last have arrived at a point where all Constitution is swept away, and where they are going to give a practical example of that original compact between the people and the ruler which is generally considered as an imaginary illustration of a fanciful theory.—Youre

sincerely, ‘' PALMERSTON."

That is tolerably frank. And no doubt it is probable that the Orleanists were plotting a return to France, and an attempt against the Government, and it is also true that the Courts of Europe were more or less in sympathy with the Orleanists, while the Liberal party in Europe regarded Orleanism as a reactionary policy, and regretted Lord Palmerston's fall from office as a triumph of the Austrian and Russian Courts over the popular party. But considering the unscrupulous absolutism of the popular policy of the moment in France, the unsparing blood- shedding by which it was accompanied, the reckless blow at con- stitutional obligations in which it consisted, and the long reign of plebiscitary despotism in which it resulted, we cannot help thinking that the Liberal party in Europe were very much mistaken in attaching so much importance to a petty Orleanist intrigue which would have been sure to fail, and so little importance to the utterly unconstitutional character of the policy pursued, and of the man who, in the name of the French people, destroyed the liberty of France, and moulded the political life of France for the next nineteen years. It is perfectly clear from this book that no one of Lord Palmerston's colleagues held any better views on the sub- ject than he did, that Lord John Russell acted most shabbily in using the Court's jealousy of a Minister who did not suf-

ficiently defer to the etiquettes of the situation, to throw- over a colleague with whose policy in the particular matter

at issue he had no fault to find, nay, whose words on that matter to the French Ambassador (Count Walewski) had not been at all stronger, perhaps even less strong in the same sense, than his own words to the same person at the same crisis. And the special shabbiness of the course taken consisted in this, that Lord John Russell availed himself of a sound, popular English feeling, with which he agreed as little as did Lord Palmerston,—the popular feeling, namely, that Prince Louis Napoleon had acted most un- scrupulously, tyrannically, and mischievously in the coup d'etat,— to eject him from office, though he and his Government continued to carry out Lord Palmerston's policy to the very letter. All this is as clear as the day. What we have not known so well till now was the singular good-temper towards the Throne,—the real source of his defeat,—with which Lord Palmerston bore the blow, the curious equanimity and complete self-confidence with which he carried

himself when all his foes and most of his friends supposed him to be put out of the political field for life,—Mr. Disraeli is

in this book to have greeted a friend with the sentence, "There was a Palmerston,"—and the address with which he turned what seemed a crushing calamity for him into the turn of fortune which enabled him to outstrip his rival and become chief where he had been second in command. In relation to the patience with which he bore the raking-up in Parliament of the Queen's sharp reprimand, written a year and a half before—a very unhandsome act of Lord John's—this passage in a letter to his brother is very characteristic :—

• “Then I said to the Duke [of Bedford] that I thought it was un- handsome by me, and very wrong by the Queen, for him, John Russell, to have read in the House of Commons the Queen's angry memorandum, of August, 1850, hinting at dismissal. In regard to the Queen, he was thus dragging her into the discussion, and making her a party to a question which constitutionally ought to be, and before Parliament could only be, a question between me and the responsible adviser of the Crown; and I said that this mention of the Queen as a party to the transaction had given rise to newspaper remarks much to be regretted, and which the Prime Minister ought not to have given an occasion for. I said that, as regards myself, the impression created by his reading that memorandum was, that I had submitted to an affront which I ought not to have borne ; and several of my friends told me, after the discussion, that they wondered I had not sent in my resignation on receiving that paper from the Queen through John Russell. My answer to those friends, I said, had been, that the paper was written in anger by a lady as well as by a Sovereign, and that the difference between a lady and a man could not be forgotten even in the case of the occupant of a throne ; but I said that, in the first place, I had no reason to sup- pose that this memorandum would ever be seen by, or be known to, anybody but the Queen, John Russell, and myself; that, secondly, my position at that moment, namely, in August, 1850, was peculiar. I had lately been the object of violent political attack, and had gained a groat and signal victory in the House of Commons and in public opinion ; to have resigned then would have been to have given the fruits of victory to adversaries whom I had defeated, and to have aban- doned my political supporters at the very moment when by their means

bad triumphed. Bat, beyond all that, I had represented to my friends, by pursuing the course which they thought I ought to have followed, I should have been bringing for decision at the bar of public opinion a personal quarrel between myself and my Sovereign—a step which no subject ought to take if he can possibly avoid it; for the result of such coturee must be either fatal to him or injurious to the country. If he should prove to be in the wrong, he would be irretrievably condemned ; if the Sovereigz should be proved to be in the wrong, the monarchy would suffer.'

Another very striking phase of this curious political incident is most characteristic personally of Lord Palmerston,—we mean the singular vigour and openness of his private letters to Lord Normanby, who was certainly thwarting his policy in Paris, and thwarting it so pertinaciously, that but for the influence of the Crown, no doubt he would have been at once removed. Take this for as agreeable a sarcasm on an ambassador as such a func- tionary has ever received, we should think, in the present century from an English Minister :—

" The great probability seems still to be, as it has, I think, all along been, that, in the conflict of opposing. parties, Louis Napoleon would remain master of the field, and it would very much weaken our posi- tion at Paris, and be detrimental to British interest; if Louis Napoleon, when he had achieved a triumph, should have reason to think that during the struggle the British representative took part (I mean by a manifestation of opinion) with his opponents. Now, we are entitled to judge of that matter only by your despatches, and I am sure you will forgive me for making some observations on those which we have re- ceived this week. Your long despatch of Monday appeared to be a funeral oration over the President, with a passage thrown in as to his intentions to strike a coup d'etat on a favourable opportunity, as if it were meant to justify the doom which was about to be pronounced upon him by the Burgrave [Orleanist] majority. Your despatches since the event of Tuesday have been all hostile to Louis Napoleon, with very little information as to events. One of them consisted chiefly of a dis- sertation about Kossuth, which would have made a good article in the Times a fortnight ago ; and another dwells chiefly upon a looking-glass broken in a club-honse, and a piece of plaster brought down from a ceiling by musket-shots during the street fights."

This and similar passages, and indeed the whole tenour of Lord Palmerston's conduct in this matter, show the man with remarkable force. He was not a Considerate Minister. He did not reflect deeply on the consequences of the policy to which he gave his support, or the policy which he resisted. In this matter he was evidently carried away by dislike of the Orleanists as a nest of hole-and-corner intriguers, into hearty support of a French policy of a much broader kind certainly, but also of a much more dangerous kind, and one fraught with much more fatal con- sequences to the French nation. But he was a strong, consistent, real-minded Minister, who made all his subordinates feel his strength, and generally at least transmit his force. He made the Foreign Office a reality, and spread his influence, good or bad, in all directions, so that there was more life and vividness in

England, and more life and vividness in the world, while he lived and directed Foreign affairs, than there had

been for generations past, or will be for generations to come. And generally, his policy, though eager and a little superficial, was healthy in kind. It was Louis Napoleon the representative

'of the French millions, versus a petty Court intrigue, whom he supported, not Louis Napoleon the underminer of French

liberty. No doubt he made a mistake. Probably, if he could have lived to oar day, and been still the vivid-minded Foreign Minister he was, he would have corrected his mistake, and -done all in his power to strengthen the hands of the French Republicans against the hands of the French Imperialists. But

his mistake was not bad in kind, though it was serious in conse-

quences. And the immense vivacity which he put into his general policy unquestionably went very far towards redeeming the character of that policy. It made it human, cordial, candid. Whatever he did, there was no mistake about it. Every European State with which he dealt was forced into a more vivid, cordial, and candid treatment of foreign affairs by the mere exertion of his influence. This was not a little even in itself. In politics, perhaps hardly anything is worse than the dimness which allows of all sorts of half-unconscious and half-conscious insincerities. In foreign politics, especially, nothing leads to more fatal quarrels and more disastrous blunders than this sort of poli- tical somnambulism. In Lord Palmerston's time, so far as his influence went, it was impossible ; and that alone was a great good.