On foreign policy, Lord Granville congratulated himself that if he
had been attacked for pusillanimity, he had been attacked in good company,—with Mr. Canning, with Lord Palmerston, with Lord Aberdeen, with Lord Clarendon. He described his policy during the late war thus :—" But what I do claim for myself is this,—a most honest and steadfast determination to adhere to those great principles of foreign policy which were adopted unani- mously by my colleagues, with the sanction of the whole country, and perhaps still more especially by this great city, namely, that our duty in foreign policy was to maintain the honour and the dignity of this country, but in the maintenance of that honour and of that dignity, to consider judicially, and not in an impul- sive and exaggerated feeling, what the requirements of those two great nations were, and to establish peace, as much as we could, among all other nations, and avoid a war which was not abso- lutely necessary for ourselves ;"—a very good "form of sound words," which would probably cover, however, fifty different practical courses of action. Only as a matter of fact, when Russia was willing to do something to stop the war and the convulsions of Europe, we were not ; and of course when we were willing to do something, Russia was not.
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