PALMERSTON AT FRANKFORT.
" DIFFICTI.TIES are obstacles to be overcome," is the motto under which all great achievements have been attempted and all great triumphs won. To know when an obstacle exceeds a difficulty and becomes an impossibility, is the fine tact and true insight of the hero as distinct from the fanatic. Our Foreign Secretary would scarcely rejoice in either title ; but, if it. be not fanaticism, it is a quality not half so respectable, which prompts him to be always tendering his advice, and obtruding his remonstrance, where the one is sure to be rejected, and the other to be defied. Would any grown man in his senses have even dreamed that the Germanic Diet, at the moment of its re- storation to power by the divine might of rbayonets--renting solely on a system of proscription, espionage, and stern repression, flushed besides with the insolence of its unlooked-for -victory over constitutional liberty—would listen to remonstrances addressed to it on behalf of men who are suffering the penalty of attachment to freedom, and that penalty, in all probability, dictated or at least approved by the leading power in the Diet? Appeal to Absolutist Germany to join in urging upon Absolutist Naples milder treatment and more legal proceedings towards her political prisoners! Besides, if Germany had ever so strongly disapproved of Neapolitan tyranny and injustice, Lord Palmerston's interference could have had no other effect, in the present temper of Austrian statesmen, than to provoke a spiteful silence or an offensive rejoinder. The despatches of the Foreign Office are too often like William-the-Testy's famous proclamation ; which was " perfect in all its parts—well con- structed, well written, well sealed, and well published ; all that was -wanting to insure its effect was, that the Yankees should stand in awe of it .; but, provoking to relate, they treated it with the
most absolute contempt, applied it to an unseemly purpose, and thus did the proclamation come to a shameful end." But the Foreign Secretary is a supremely clever man ; and though, in the Hudibrastic philosophy, " the pleasure is as great Of being cheated, as to cheat,"
we never heard that both parties enjoyed the process of snubbing. Mawworm, indeed, liked to be despised ; but then the rascal always took care that he was paid for it in the long run. Can our political Mawworm find any possible advantage in evoking the undisguised dislike and contempt of foreign powers ? In the present instance, he may possibly consider it a set-off against the contumely and indignation which he has drawn upon himself, that a por- tion of it may be supposed to rebound upon Mr. Gladstone, his for- midable 'deal opponent. It may be his arriere pence to hold up Mr. Gladstone as guilty with himself of impertinent interference with the internal arrangements of other countries, and so discredit him with statesmen abroad. But the world will not be slow to perceive the difference between an English gentleman printing his private opinion of certain proceedings of a foreign Government, after a vain endeavour to induce that Government to alter its course, and an English Minister carrying a formal complaint against one Government to another, which is involved in the same general charge, if not committed to the special delinquency complained of. If this be too subtile a malice to be attributed to the clever Secre- tary, we must fall back upon the old trick of keeping up credit with his party by a showy Liberalism in foreign policy, that ex- pends itself in terrible pyrotechnics of articulate wind ; the only practical effect of which is to delude oppressed peoples, who, under the notion that they are rocket-signals of coming aid, rush into certain destruction, not knowing that, like Box in the farce, Lord Palmerston does not bid the oppressors of humanity " Come on," till he has found out that they do not fight.
Previous page
