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A Liberal in the modern sense of the term, a nonintervention or commercial Liberal, Lord Palmerston never was; and hence his reign at the Foreign Office was a very different thing from that of many of the Foreign Ministers who succeeded him. Lord Grey's term of office ended in 1834; then followed a year of Tory power, under Sir Robert Peel; and in 1835 Lord Melbourne began his six years' Whig administration, during the course of which came the death of William IV. and the accession of Queen Victoria. Lord Palmerston succeeded, as a matter of course, to his old office, that of Foreign Secretary, and he found plenty of work. The Greek question, the Portuguese and Spanish questions, the Polish question, the Circassian question, had occupied him in his previous term of office. His treatment of them had made him known throughout Europe; while at home he had to bear the unceasing attacks of Mr. Urquhart, "the Russophobist," who at one time was for impeaching Palmerston on the charge of receiving bribes from the Czar. Now he found himself face to face with the Czar, and his gigantic game of chess with Nicholas forms, one may say, the remaining history of his foreign policy. So far as the Eastern question is concerned, that policy was inaugurated by the treaty in which the five great Powers, in 1841, agreed to a protectorate over Turkey, and culminated in the Treaty of Paris, in 1856, after the Russian War. As incidents in this general policy come his Persian manoeuvring in aid of Shah Muhammed, and his opposition to Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt, in his designs upon the Turkish throne-pieces of policy successful and even brilliant at the time, but leading us in the one case to the disastrous Afghan War, with the Khyber Pass for its climax, and in the other to the war in the Crimea. Yet Palmerston did not oppose Nicholas when opposition might have helped the canse of progress and civilisation. He let the Czar extinguish Poland in 1830; and he spent tens of thousands of English lives and a hundred millions of money in preventing him giving the coup de grâce to the effete Ottoman Empire in 1854.

Sir Robert Peel became Prime Minister for the second time in 1841, and Lord Palmerston went into opposition with his colleagues. As yet he was not, however, the leader of his party in the House of Commons; Lord John Russell-partly no doubt from the weight of his family name, and partly from his many illustrious services to the popular cause-still had, and till 1855 continued to have, precedence over him. But Lord John Russell, whose forte had never been criticism, left the House before the session ended, and gave over his functions for a time to Lord Palmerston. But few important performances marked the new part that Lord Palmerston played. In those days at least he preferred to keep to foreign policy; he was a born diplomatist; he liked to have his finger, or at least his eye, upon every political transaction from China to Peru. When he went back again, in '42, to the post of Opposition critic of the foreign policy of the Government, he found congenial occupation. The Foreign Minister was Lord Aberdeen, the best, but hardly the wisest, and certainly not the most successful,

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of men. It was the time of the "Ashburton Capitulation," the treaty with the United States which settled the boundary of Canada and the state of Maine. That treaty was neither the first nor the last treaty that has been signed between England and the United States; and its characteristics were those of almost all the treaties from the days of Lord Cornwallis to the days of the Marquis of Ripon. That is, it gave everything and took nothing. It achieved without arbitration what was achieved for the San Juan Boundary with arbitration; and Lord Palmerston was very angry. His speech in condemnation of the treaty will always be held to be one of his principal parliamentary utterances. But on the great Free Trade question he went cordially with Sir Robert Peel; and, indeed, these years of non-official life, from 1841 to 1846, are among those to which a biographer of Lord Palmerston looks back with the greatest pleasure. He did good work by his speeches and votes, and his exuberant activity-" mischievous activity," as Mr. Roebuck called it was quieted for a time. He came in again and took his old place when Lord John Russell succeeded Peel; and thenceforward till his death, except during Lord Derby's two short reigns, and during a few months in 1851, he was in power. Cracow annexation, Spanish marriages, the general revolutionary disturbances of 1848 these were what occupied his official thoughts while he was at the Foreign Office. He was Home Secretary under Lord Aberdeen; and when that Ministry fell, the veteran Palmerston, seventy years of age, and a member of Parliament of forty-nine years' standing, became Prime Minister. His after-history is too well known to require much comment. His too ready recognition of the author of the coup d'état had cost him his seat in the Cabinet in 1851; in 1858, a bill, which some called truckling to the same man, cost him and his Ministry their offices. This was the "Conspiracy to Murder" Bill, aimed against persons like Orsini. It was lost by a majority of nineteen, and Palmerston resigned. He came in again, after the Derby Ministry had been beaten on the Reform Bill, in June, 1859; and from that time till his death he continued to be Prime Minister.

He was certainly a wonderful man, but he was as certainly not a great one. Physically, even, he was wonderful; for sixty years a member of the House of Commons, for nearly fifty a minister of the Crown, the mere amount of work that he got through was marvellous. This was especially so in the latter half of his Parlia mentary life. "It was amazing," said the memoir in the Times, "to see how he could sit out the whole House of Commons in its longest sittings. At three o'clock in the morning, he was the freshest and liveliest man there, ready with his joke or a clever explanation to appease the irritability of a worn assembly. Besides the toil of debate and incessant watching in the House of Commons, his office work was enormous. His minutes upon every conceivable subject of interest in the last fifty years would fill many volumes. We may add, in a parenthesis, that he generally wrote standing." And then the chronicler goes on to describe Lord Palmerston's sparing diet, his activity in the field, his love of society, his eager

delight in all the excitements of the day, from a public dinner to the coming Derby; in a word, his "prodigious vitality." It was this prodigious vitality which made him what he was, and made his policy what it was. His activity must find scope somewhere, and found it in the field of foreign policy, for "English interests," he said, "encircled the globe," and his energy must encircle the globe too. And yet if one asks what has been the result of all this energy, one is compelled to answer "very little." The truth, is that his view of life was essentially superficial, and his policy, home and foreign, was superficial too. His mission, he might have truly said, was to "keep things going." But he kept them going abroad by playing off Court against Court and Cabinet against Cabinet. He was nominally a Liberal, but he had very little insight into the real life of peoples. Hence, too, the radical emptiness of his home policy, which, after all, was rather an administration than policy properly so called. He had no profound belief; he had tact and good-nature, and thought that men might very well be governed by those two qualities. For ideas of all kinds he had a hearty contempt; he never, not even in the matter of Catholic Emancipation, gave a vote on the ground of abstract justice, but always on the ground of political advantage. It follows that he led the House of Commons as no one has led it in this century; that the aristocracy admired his cleverness, and called him "safe;" that the middle classes found him indispensable; but that the people never liked him, save for his good humour, and that he never kindled a spark of enthusiasm in any human breast. In foreign policy he was respected, because he always knew when to strike, and struck; he did not first threaten and then retreat; in home affairs, the wonder is that he kept things straight so long. Reform, Education, the Reorganisation of the Army, the great Irish questions-he kept them all at bay by his inimitable power of diverting the national mind from really important problems. He died, if one may say so, in the nick of time, "full of years and honours," and just in time to escape being an anachronism. England could not have borne much longer with a Liberal leader who distrusted Liberal policy, and contrived, with wonderful success, to postpone from year to year the discussion of burning questions. Lord Palmerston was buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey.

Just six months before his own death, Lord Palmerston rose in Parliament to call attention to "the great loss which the House and the country had sustained in the death of Mr. Cobden." There was something strange and a little jarring in the words of official praise in which the successful veteran spoke of the merits of the simple, unobtrusive, yet infinitely greater man that was gone. Moro true, more touching, were the few sentences in which his friend and brother-worker, Mr. Bright, told of his own sorrow in Cobden's death; and all who read the words the next morning felt a throb of sympathy. "Sir," he said, "I feel I cannot address the House on this occasion, though every expression of sympathy has been most grateful to my heart; but the time which has elapsed since I was present when the manliest and gentlest spirit that ever actuated or tenanted a human form took its flight

is so short, that I dare not even attempt to give utterance to the feelings by which I am oppressed. I shall leave it to some calmer moment, when I may have an opportunity of stating to some portion of my countrymen the lesson which I think may be learned from the life and character of my friend. I have only to say now that, after twenty years of the most intimate and the most brotherly friendship with him, I little knew how much I loved him until I found that I had lost him."

Mr. Cobden was not yet sixty-one when he died. He was born near Midhurst, in Sussex, on June 3, 1804, and was the son of a yeoman-farmer. From school he went into business in London, in a Manchester warehouse, and at the age of twenty-six, joined some relatives in the cotton-printing business in Lancashire. Here his genius for business began to tell; the firm prospered greatly, and he, both by home study of the principles of trade, and by foreign travel in pursuit of trade, laid up the stores of knowledge on which in after years he based his political action. At about thirty years of age, he began to write on questions of commercial politics, and that soon led to politics in general. His first two pamphlets, “England, Ireland, and America," and "Russia," both signed “ By a Manchester Manufacturer," attracted great attention; for it was just at the time when the Free Trade controversy was beginning to agitate at least the vanguards of the two armies. In 1838, the battle began in earnest; the Anti-Corn-Law League was formed. We need not tell in detail the history of the struggle; for three years, one may almost say, the history of the Corn Laws is the history of England. In another sense, and with almost equal truth, one may say that the history of the Corn Laws is the history of Mr. Cobden. Neither he nor Mr. Bright were original members of the League, but they were early recruits, and its importance dates from their admission. It was they, and notably Mr. Cobden, who presided over the division of England into districts; who chose agents to go through every village and along every highway and byway in England, taking notes of the cultivation of every field, asking every labourer what his weekly wages were, what his food was, what his home; who appointed lecturers to visit every important town, to stir up public opinion in England against the monstrous monopoly of the landlords. It was not till 1841 that Mr. Cobden entered Parliament; in that year, the year of Sir R. Peel's becoming Premier, he was returned for Stockport. From that time, or from an even earlier date, he gave himself up, body and soul, money and mind, to securing the repeal of the Corn Laws. His first speech struck the key-note of his life; it was a statement-simple, serious, uncompromising, in the midst of a House pledged to Protection--of the case of the Repealers. It was signi ficant that the advocacy supported itself, if it did not base itself, on a great meeting of the ministers of religion -Churchmen, Catholics, and Protestant Dissentersassembled at Manchester to petition against the Corn Laws. He said, speaking from the bottom of his heart. that this singular unanimity among ministers of hostile denominations seemed to stamp the cause as a sacred cause; " and where," he said, addressing the Protectionists,

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"the sympathy and respect of the English people are enlisted on behalf of a sacred cause, you and yours will vanish like chaff before the whirlwind." In this spirit of profound conviction Mr. Cobden carried on his campaign, and at last the day of victory came. He had said in his first speech—the speech which the House would hardly listen to that he was a man of no party; that he was a Free-trader, and would vote with Whig or Tory for Free Trade. Hence his readiness to support Sir Robert Peel when the Prime Minister's conversion to Repeal was assured; and hence the significance of the double tribute from Whig and Tory which was paid him at the moment of the victory of the cause. Sir Robert Peel's words are well known:-"The name which ought to be, and will be, associated with those measures is not that of the noble lord (Lord John Russell), the organ of the party of which he is the leader, nor is it mine. The name which ought to be, and will be, associated with those measures is that of one who, acting as I believe from pure and disinterested motives, has, with untiring energy, made appeals to our reason, and has enforced those appeals with an eloquence the more to be admired because it was unaffected and unadorned; the name which ought chiefly to be associated with those measures is the name of Richard Cobden." In like words, Lord Palmerston, in the same debate, paid the debt of the Whigs to the man who had taught them to be true to their principles. "When the House and the country look," he said, "to the highest point in the history of these events, they will see the name of Richard Cobden-a man distinguished by great zeal and enlightenment in advancing a great and important change in our commercial code, and a man, likewise, who presents in his own person a distinguished result of that Parliamentary Reform which has produced this among other great results."

It will be seen on a review of Mr. Cobden's life as a whole, that his advocacy of Free Trade was only a consequence of certain still more general views of the conditions necessary to human welfare; but it may here be remarked that it, in its turn, had consequences, though indirect ones, of great political importance. When it came home to the minds of the Free-traders that the existing Parliament would never pass their bill, they set themselves at once to prepare for the next general election, so as to secure a Free Trade majority in a new House of Commons. Of the boroughs they were sure enough; but not so in the counties. Here Mr. Cobden, solely as a means to his end, took the great and original step of defeating, by a device of his own, what was called the Chandos clause of the Reform Bill. That clause allowed persons holding a joint tenancy to have, under certain circumstances, separate votes; and hence the landlords, who invariably commanded the votes of their tenants, were always able to bring a vast number of votes to the poll by the simple expedient of dividing their tenancies into nominal partnerships. A landlord, for instance, let his farm really to A, but nominally to a partnership consisting of A, his father, his two uncles, his eldest son, and his nephew. Hence while A was for every purpose, except the political one, the real tenant, for the purpose of voting he was only one of six.

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To meet this, Mr. Cobden fell back upon the clause which gave votes to "forty-shilling freeholders "—that is, to persons owning freehold property of the value of forty shillings a year. He set on foot an immense subscription to raise a fund, from which money might be advanced to artisans for the purpose of providing them with such freehold houses as would give them the franchise. The plan succeeded; several counties were carried by it; and what is still more important, an example and an impulse were given to the operative class throughout the country. Whatever has been done-and it is much-in the manufacturing districts and elsewhere towards providing, on a great scale, the English artisans with freehold houses of their own, may be traced to this best and most honest of electioneering devices, the "Forty-shilling Freehold Fund” of Mr. Cobden.

When the great work of the League was done, when the Corn Laws had ceased to exist, and the principle of the protection of the interest of one class at the expense of others had been for ever abandoned, Mr. Cobden could rest from his labours. He had lost much besides his time; he had injured his health, and sacrificed at least £20,000 in money. But money was always ready at the call of the League. They raised a monster subscription for him, and presented him with £80,000, to make good his losses, and to enable him to devote his whole life to the political service of his fellows. The two purchases which were made with this money were characteristic. One was the Midhurst estate, the scene of his boyhood; the other was American railway stock-a share in one of the great industries of the Western Republic, which he admired so profoundly. The unfortunate decline of this stock some years after the investment caused him great anxiety and seriously injured his health.

For eleven years after the repeal of the Corn Laws he sat for the West Riding of Yorkshire, holding to the views which he had always maintained, and in the end offending those who could not see how one of those views depended on another. He was one of the strong, uncompromising opponents of the Russian War, the war into which we drifted, and which is now owned to have been so resultless. In 1857, following the same line of pacific thought, he carried a vote of censure on Lord Palmerston's Government for their policy in China, which he and the majority thought to be unjust to the Chinese. But Yorkshire, which had gone wild for Free Trade, went wild against the principle which is the justification of Free Trade, namely, the principle of the community of nations. Cobden's popularity was gone, and he did not again offer himself for election in Yorkshire. He had two years' rest, and then in 1859 was, in his absence, elected for Rochdale. Lord Palmerston, who just then came into office again, offered him the Presidency of the Board of Trade, but he declined it, because, as Lord Palmerston afterwards said, "his opinions were not on all points in unison with those of the Head of the Government." It was impossible, as he saw, that he could ever sit in Palmerston's Cabinet. He, to whom the love of peace between nations was a passion, to whom patriotism was but a rude and imperfect virtue, could never have consented to be an

agent of the policy of a "fighting minister," who piqued himself on his John Bullism. So Cobden remained a private member till he died. One piece of official business he did, however, perform. In 1859, there was at last a chance of a Commercial Treaty with France being effected, and Cobden was sent to Paris with full powers to negotiate it. The Emperor, as is well known, was favourable to Free Trade; for his throne reposed on the bourgeoisie, and it is the bourgeoisie who are especially profited by freedom of exchange. Hence Mr. Cobden had an easy task, and he performed it successfully. Still he would take no reward for his services, even though Lord Palmerston offered him a baronetcy and a place in the Privy Council. To be a simple representative of the people in the House of Commons was enough for him; as such, and no more, he died. He took no very great part in the debates during the last few years of his life; his health was weak and failing, broken down by long and hard labour in early and middle life. An attack of bronchitis carried him off on the 2nd of April, 1865.

Mr. Cobden's name is so well and affectionately remembered, not only among the members of the "Cobden Club," which, after his death, was established to embody and carry out his principles, but among English people of all classes and kinds, that we need not spend many words in describing his character. Earnest yet prudent, enthusiastic yet not fanatical, indefatigable yet patient, devoted yet wise-these he certainly was. And under all these qualities he had that which gave them half their force, and which was, in fact, at the root of them, the quality of disinterested simplicity. It was this, in fact, that lent him such a rare personal charm, and that made so many thousands feel a sense of personal loss in his death. He was an English Garibaldi, fighting with different weapons and for a less dazzling end, but scarcely in a less heroic struggle. Indeed, if allowance is made for their wholly different circumstances, different blood, different conditions, different temperaments, there is something very much alike in the Italian and the English soldier of freedom. The one, it is true, stirs a keener emotion and acts with the sword; the other acts by force of logic. But the one gives his life to fighting against narrow, cramping tyrants; and the other gave his to fighting against a narrow, cramping monopoly. More than all, the same great passion impelled both; Cobden was what Garibaldi was, an "international man." What Garibaldi fought for at Naples and Mentana was avowedly Italy, but in reality it was freedom, and that because freedom was to him the indispensable condition of human progress throughout the world. with Cobden and the Corn Laws, and the Russian War, and the Commercial Treaty; what he fought and argued for there, was something real enough, but it was only a means to an end. That end has since been well described by one of the ablest of Cobden's disciples, and one who has always manifested a strong desire and interest in seeing the views of his master carried out in a practical way-Mr. Grant Duff. He is speaking of what he calls "the legacy of Mr. Cobden." "By that I mean that policy which was inaugurated by the repeal of

So

the Corn Laws, the policy of Free Trade or free exchange, in its widest sense-the policy which takes for granted that the country has made up its mind to get rid, in home matters, of all trammels upon industry; and to get rid, in foreign matters, of the old evil ways of national jealousies, huge armaments, artificial arrangements for securing the balance of power, and, in short, of the whole course of conduct which was based on the idea that nations should act in the spirit of the old rhyme :

'As I walked by myself, I said to myself,
And the selfsame self said to me,
"Look out for yourself, take care of yourself,
For nobody cares for thee."'

The policy, in other words, which substitutes international co-operation for international hostility."

We know how far the world is yet from the ideal of Cobden and Garibaldi; we see a practical denial given to their aspirations in such fearful cataclysms as the American War and the War of 1870. But at least it is to be remembered that the wars of the present, if they are as fierce as the wars of old, are yet neither wars of aggression, for the most part, nor wars of dynasties; and that is one step towards the cessation of war altogether. In the next place, it must be remembered that now, for the first time in the world's history, is the international theory finding a voice. A little more than a century ago Adam Smith published his book on "The Wealth of Nations;" and he showed in it that the wealth of nations sprang from mutual intercourse, and not, as had been believed till then, from mutual exclusion. Seventy years or so later Cobden arose to carry out Adam Smith's idea into a wider field-into a field co-extensive with life itself. He believed, he demonstrated till others believed, that not only the wealth of nations, but their welfare, depends on their co-operation; "that it is a rational and practical proposition, that men may be brought no longer to look upon differences of race, creed, and climate, as a necessary obstacle to political unity." To this point has Adam Smith been brought in less than a century. In a century more, how much farther will the idea, so glorious, so hopeful, so hard, have advanced towards its realisation?

CHAPTER XIV.

Foreign Affairs-Quietness of the Situation-Debate on Poland-The English Prisoners in Abyssinia: Debate in Parliament-French Politics-The Roman Question-The Pope's Encyclical LetterNapoleon goes to Algeria: Proclamation to the Arabs and Pamphlet on their Condition-French Finance: Criticisms of M. Thiers-The French Fleet at Portsmouth-Prussia and AustriaThe Convention of Gastein-Contests between the Prussian Government and the Chamber-Austrian Affairs-Italy, Spain, Greece-Approaching troubles in Mexico.

IN European history, the year 1865 will always be looked upon as an interregnum, a breathing time, between the two eventful years that preceded and followed it. It was the interval between two wars; and its history is the history of passions that smouldered, and of intrigues that worked in secret. The underground records of

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diplomacy have much to tell of it; but as for events, there are none. Nor, so far as England is concerned, is there very much to record under the head of foreign policy. The dulness of such foreign debates as Parliament saw in this year contrasts sharply with the keen excitement of the debates of 1864, when Mr. Disraeli and Mr. Gladstone flung in each other's faces their opposing views of what constitutes the honour of England. Schleswig and Holstein were irrevocably gone now; rightly or wrongly we had stood by and seen them taken; and it was of no use to protest after the event, or to de

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In this

that policy only war can make her swerve. matter of Poland, in this year at least, we escaped the blunder which we had committed so often and so ludicrously in 1864; as we did not mean to enforce our opinion, we kept it to ourselves.

It was in this year that the public began to hear stirring accounts of the English prisoners in Abyssinia, who were, a short time afterwards, to be raised to a position of such national importance. The full story of their captivity is perhaps better deferred till the time comes for treating of the Abyssinian War, set on foot to rescue them; but the

bate about our duty. On the other hand, the quarrel about the division of the spoil had not yet broken out; so we have few despatches from Lord Russell, and few scoldings by the Times. The only debate on European affairs that need be chronicled was one on a motion brought forward by Mr. Pope Hennessy, on the treatment of Poland by Russia. The terms of the motion referred to Russia's palpable violation of the Treaty of 1815, and entered a protest against it. But Lord Palmerston, and the good sense of the House with him, refused to entertain the resolution; for such a resolution means less than nothing unless it means war if its request is not complied with. Neither Mr. Pope Hennessy nor any one else thought seriously of a war with Russia; and Russia, like Prussia, is a state that possesses a policy, clear-cut, unscrupulous, and backed by force, and from

points at issue may be shortly recorded here, as they were told by Lord Chelmsford in the House of Lords during this session. In July, 1862, Captain Cameron had been sent to Abyssinia as consul, with flattering messages and presents to King Theodore, a half-savage chieftain, professing a kind of spurious Christianity. He was well received by the King, and treated with honour; especially when, on the breaking out of a war between Egypt and Abyssinia, he attempted to mediate in favour of King Theodore. But this mediation was ill received by the Egyptian authorities, and Consul Cameron was induced to desist. This made the King very angry; especially as he had received no answer to an autograph letter which he had written to Queen Victoria on Captain Cameron's arrival in July. With the fickleness of a savage, he turned round upon the consul and began to treat him with great