Chapter 27
Section 27 of The Life of Viscount Palmerston by Lloyd Charles Sanders. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 14. France and the United States. 1860-1863. Part 1. Distrust of France and of the Emperor of the French was the distinguishing feature of Lord Palmerston's foreign policy during the last five years of his life. And though it may seem
inconsistent that the statesman who had been the pivot of the Anglo-French alliance during the Crimean War should abruptly part company with his former friend and become his undisguised opponent, the Prime Minister was in reality no more inconsistent than when, at an earlier period of his career he had thrown over the Entente Cordiale with Louis-Philippe. For with Palmerston the interests of his country were all in all, and he would never have consented to surrender
an infinitesimal part of them to further the designs of Louis-Napoleon or anyone else. He had trusted the emperor to the last, perhaps during the Italian campaign, beyond the limits prudence, but his eyes were opened by the annexation of Nice and Savoie, still more by the natural frontiers theory, which was then put forward as the reason for that act of vandalism and the additional violation of the arrangements of 1815 committed by Napoleon when he refused
to hand over to Switzerland Chablis and Faucigny, the northern districts of Savoie, which had been declared by the Congress of Vienna to share in the neutrality of the Helvetic Federation. The natural frontiers theory was evidently capable of being put into practice in several directions, practically toward the Rhine, where the resistance, thanks to the want of cohesion among the German states, would possibly be feeble in the extreme. The cabinet
it was constrained to declare through the mouth of Lord John Russell that upon such an unsettlement of the peace of Europe, England would not pursue a policy of isolation. Lord Palmerston was no milk-and-water enemy, and his distrust of the emperor was undoubtedly to some degree exaggerated. Napoleon might have had a mind like a rabbit warren, but it did not necessarily follow from his recent proceedings that he had intended all along to avenge Waterloo, and that his design was
to beat, with our aid, or with our concurrence, or with our neutrality, first Russia, and then Austria, and by dealing with them generously to make them his friends in any subsequent quarrel with us. That was a somewhat unsubstantial specimen of a deductive argument, and Lord Palmerston was in all probability equally under a delusion when he ascribed to the French emperor the design of instigating Spain to seize Tangiers, and so, by occupying fortified points on each side
of the gut of Gibraltar, of virtually shutting England out of the Mediterranean. His suspicions were also based upon a slight substratum of fact when he accused Napoleon, who, as mandatory of the powers had sent an expedition to put down a bloody and barbarous war of religion between the Druzes and the Maronites in Syria, of being actuated by the desire of permanently occupying that country. Lord Palmerston seems, in fact, to have hardly appreciated the position of the man
of December. Napoleon was not ungrateful. He was fully conscious, as his letters to the queen and the prince consort clearly prove, that he owed nearly everything to England. She had been the first power to give him a status, and without her make-weight he would never have been able to pose even for a moment as the holder of the European balance. If the French alliance was useful to Lord Palmerston, the English alliance was to the emperor as the breath of his nostrils.
At the same time, there were both permanent and special reasons for regarding the emperor of the French as an untrustworthy ally. The permanent reasons were compressed in the contradictions of his position. The elected of a plebiscite, the crowned ex-carbonado, was logically bound to assist subjects against the sovereigns. On the other hand, a ruler who claimed to govern by divine right was equally bound to uphold the royal and particularly the papal power. He had thus
no firm basis of action, and as the author of the coup d'etat, the patentee of a veiled aristocracy, he was irresistibly driven to risky adventures abroad so as to distract the French nation from the spectacle of ministerial corruption and financial mismanagement in which the Second Empire was rapidly being engulfed. The Man of December was, in short, developing into the Man of Mexico and Sedan. The special reasons were to be found in the vast naval preparations which were
being hurried on in the French ports and which evidently menaced a maritime power. It was in vain that the Emperor protested that his navy was not sufficient for his wants and that Mr. Cobden, of course, in perfect good faith, attempted to persuade the cabinet that the alarm was entirely baseless. We know, said Lord Palmerston on the fortifications bill, that the utmost exertions are made, and still are making, to create a navy very nearly equal to our own, a navy which cannot
be required for purposes of defense for France, and which therefore we are justified in looking upon as a possible antagonist we may have to encounter, a navy which under present arrangements would provide to our neighbors the means of transporting, within a very few hours, a large and formidable number of troops to our coast. And he made no disguise of the fact that the increased expenditure on our defenses was necessitated by the attitude of France.
It is impossible for any man to cast his eyes over the face of Europe and to see and hear what is passing without being convinced that the future is not free from danger. It is difficult to say where the storm may burst, but the horizon is charged with clouds which betoken the possibility of a tempest. The committee, of course, knows that in the main I am speaking of our immediate neighbors across the Channel, and there is no use in disguising it. No one has any right to
take offense at considerations and reflections which are purely founded upon the principles of self-defense. A few months previously, Lord Palmerston had stated his meaning with even more definiteness in the well-known conversation with the old Count Flau, then French ambassador in London, as they drove together to the House of Commons. He bluntly told him that it was impossible to trust the Emperor any longer, and that if war was forced upon England, England would fearlessly
accept it. This was very spirited and becoming, was the verdict of Greville in one of the last entries in his journal, upon an imperfect report of the conversation being transmitted to him by Lord Clarendon. And though it is proverbially difficult to prove a negative, the terms of the Emperor's letter of self-exculpation to Count Persigny of the 23rd of July, 1860, fairly warrant the conclusion that in this case, post hoc and propter hoc were identical, and that war was
averted by Lord Palmerston's firm language, backed up by preparations for war. At all events, the relations between the two countries grew considerably less fraught with danger, and the international friendship was almost reconnected before the close of the year by the success of the joint Anglo-French expedition to China under Sir Hope Grant and General Montauban, better known as Count Palicao. Pekin was taken, and the ratification
of the important Treaty of Tien-Sin, which had been signed by Lord Elgin two years previously, was at length wrung from the celestial government. The breach was never, however, completely healed, and it was well that the British government continued to be on its guard against the dreamer of the Tuileries. Otherwise, we should have been almost inevitably embroiled in the American Civil War. More than once in the course of that struggle, the Emperor of the French urged
our ministers to recognize the southern states, but he was always met with a firm but courteous refusal. That refusal was greatly to their credit. There could be no doubt that there was in England a strong current of feeling in favor of the South, especially among the upper classes. Material interests may be considered to have influenced the commercial stratum of society more than the fact that the Virginians could trace dissent from the Cavaliers.
The closure of the southern harbors would cut off the cotton trade and inflict vast losses upon manufacturers, if not, as actually occurred, famine upon their workmen. Mr. Gladstone gave expression to a very prevalent feeling when, in his famous speech at Manchester, he declared that Mr. Jefferson Davis had made an army, had made a navy, and more than that, had made a nation. How far Lord Palmerston shared the views of his Chancellor of the Exchequer,
it is difficult to say with any approach to certainty. Mr. Ashley tells us that though he admired the American people, the politicians of the United States appeared to him to fail on the score of character, and he certainly would not have committed himself to remarks upon the unfortunate rapid movements of the Federal troops at the Battle of Bull Run, unless he had anticipated a speedy triumph for the Confederate cause. All the more credit is due to him for
having observed a complete neutrality at the outset of the struggle. A letter to Mr. Elise establishes beyond all doubt the prudence of his motives. He was all for non-intervention until the wire edge of the craving appetite for conflict had worn off, and he pointed out that it was impossible to intervene upon any solid basis except that of separation, the discussion of which would evidently be premature, or without committing ourselves to an acknowledgment of the
principle of slavery and the right to pursue fugitive slaves from state to state. But it may be said, did not Her Majesty's government, by the act of proclaiming neutrality, acknowledge the South as a belligerent power and so virtually play into its hands? The answer is conclusive and complete. Unless the South was acknowledged as a belligerent power, there was obviously no war going on. If there was no war, the English government could not be expected to recognize
the blockade of the Southern ports. The recognition of the South as a belligerent power was indeed to the advantage of the North, as its advocates discovered, when in the crisis of the English cotton famine, numerous appeals were made to ministers in the House of Commons to break the blockade, which was paralyzing the energies and stopping the supplies of the Confederate government. Fortunately, Lord Palmerston and his colleagues stood firm and sought relief for the deficiency,
not in embroiling themselves in their neighbor's quarrel, but in drawing supplies of cotton from other parts of the world. End of Section 27.
