Part 7 (1/2)

It was no longer open to Parliament to decide policy, and to direct the fortunes of the nation as it thought fit. Not even Opposition could make a free choice of the topics of controversy and of legislation. It became the duty of members to observe the main currents of opinion, to check and deflect them, but no longer to originate them. They must look in future, not to their leaders, but to their const.i.tuents, for the principles which were to direct their conduct. The people were brought into direct touch with politics, and a.s.serted their right, not only to censure their representatives by unseating them at elections, but positively to influence their actions while they sat in the House.

An equally remarkable feature of the League, though its immediate political importance was much less, was its use of a women's branch, which took an active part in the work. This was the first organized employment of women in practical politics. The women who took part in Reform demonstrations like that of Peterloo belonged to an impotent cla.s.s, and did little active work. The women of the Anti-Corn Law League did not make speeches.[255] But short of appearing on public platforms they did the same kind of work as their men. Politics were at last acknowledged by the most powerful cla.s.s in the State to be women's work as well as men's. For the moment there was no demand that women should control their own political affairs. But the one step followed inevitably from the other. It was impossible that a woman of strong character should thus engage in a strenuous political agitation without acquiring some of that desire for personal control which is the essence of democratic politics. Among the men of the League there were probably few who would have allowed women to work with them except as subordinates, and the supporters of the women used language which showed that they were not very far removed from the eighteenth century. ”I offer no apology,” quaintly says the historian of the League, ”for the course they took, for I never {202} had the smallest doubt of its perfect propriety and its perfect consistency with the softer characteristics of female virtue.”[256] It did not occur to him that, even if it had been inconsistent with those softer characteristics, it might still have been consistent with the desire of the women to use their natural powers as they themselves, and not as he, thought fit. Men had not yet got to the point of allowing women to regulate their own lives in their own way. But when they admitted that they might safely take part in serious public business, they sowed seed which has since borne much fruit. The modern Women Suffrage movement began in those Northern districts where the League was powerful, and it has made least impression in those quarters where the League was weak.

The repeal of the Corn Law was the greatest practical achievement of the Manchester School. In other matters they divided the credit with the Radicals, who were avowed followers of Bentham, and with the Peelites, who were often Utilitarian in practice though not in theory. So far as domestic policy was concerned their Liberalism was of the negative and incomplete kind. An attempt had been made in 1835 to establish agricultural training schools and model farms in Ireland. It was not enough to relieve the distress of that miserable land, but it attacked one of its most urgent problems in the right way. The Manchester men objected to their support of a particular industry by the State, and Peel and the Benthamites took the same side. In 1844 Peel ended the system of practical instruction, and the model farms were nearly all abandoned. In the same temper the Manchester School opposed Shaftesbury's Factory Bills, and if Free Trade is the best thing which they did for their country, their resistance to Factory legislation is the worst. Many of them accepted restrictions on the hours of child labour. But anything which forced the employer to regulate his buildings or his machinery or his processes in the interests of the health or safety of his workmen was opposed fiercely and persistently by the majority. They objected to any interference with adult {203} men. On a motion to inquire into the condition of journeymen bakers, Bright once spoke with a most unpleasant flippancy. ”He did not see how Parliament was to interfere directly and avowedly with the labour of adult men.... He should be ashamed to stand up in defence of about two hundred stalwart Scotchmen, who could publish a Gazette of their own, and write articles in it of considerable literary merit, and appeal for a remedy to that House.”[257] He and his a.s.sociates overlooked the fact that the difference between a man and a woman or a child was only a difference of degree. They misunderstood the principle of all legislation of this kind. Women and children were protected not because they were women and children, but because they were economically weak. They were not organized, they were poor, and their employers could use them as they pleased. Any cla.s.s of men which was economically weak was morally ent.i.tled to the same protection. To say that they were adult men was no answer to a complaint which had nothing to do with s.e.x or age. Maleness did not of itself prevent either long hours or dirty premises. Here Radicals and Manchester men failed, and by 1867 Parliament had got no farther than to prohibit the employment of children under eight years, to restrict the hours of labour of women and youths under eighteen to ten or twelve hours a day, and to impose conditions about sanitation, ventilation, and the fencing of machinery upon some of the more unhealthy or dangerous trades. This progress, qualified by many exemptions, was all that could be won in the face of individualist opposition to economic reform.[258] But in another quarter the different schools of individualists were united with conspicuous success.

The most complete and the most successful application of Liberal principles during this period was in the reconstruction {204} of the colonial system.

The American Rebellion and the restoration of Canada had been isolated examples, the first of Liberal defeat, the second of Liberal victory. But by the middle of the century this casual wisdom had been developed into a deliberate and consistent policy. The growth of the other Colonies at the Cape, Australia, and New Zealand forced upon the Home Government the reconsideration of their methods of transacting colonial business. The Cape had been taken from the Dutch during the French War. Australia and New Zealand had been discovered at the end of the eighteenth century, and by 1840 were both recognized as British Colonies. The Government were then faced with the same problem as that which had confronted them in America.

The old system was government by the Colonial Office, and in one respect it had been more deliberately egoistic than in any other part of the world.

The Australian Colonies had for a long time been used as a dumping ground for social rubbish. The people for whom the Home Government could not provide in England, it had been accustomed to send to New South Wales, to Western Australia, and to Van Diemen's Land. A large part of the population of these countries consisted partly of transported convicts and partly of paupers whom public or private money had enabled to emigrate. As Sir William Molesworth bluntly described it, ”Colonial Office colonization consists in the transportation of convicts and the shovelling out of paupers.”[259] The time was at length reached when the independent emigrants and the descendants of earlier settlers who were themselves of good character protested against this use of their country without their own consent.[260]

{205}

In 1839 Russell, as Colonial Secretary, stopped transportation to New South Wales. But convicts were still sent to Tasmania and Norfolk Island. In four years no less than sixteen thousand of these unwelcome immigrants had been forced upon the inhabitants of Tasmania, and in 1840 they presented a pet.i.tion praying that the system might be stopped. Peel's Government suspended transportation to Tasmania for two years, but actually contemplated reviving it in the case of New South Wales. Transportation was apparently regarded as a sort of administration of human alcohol. So long as the proportion of convicts to independent settlers did not exceed a certain figure no harm would be done. But the inhabitants of New South Wales protested loudly, and when the Whigs came into office in 1847, with Lord Grey as Secretary for the Colonies, they abolished all transportation except to Bermuda and Gibraltar. A last attempt to impose upon colonists was made in 1849. A s.h.i.+pload of convicts was then taken to the Cape. There was a violent outburst of feeling, and the noxious cargo was finally discharged in Tasmania. After a few more years of bickering between the embarra.s.sed Imperial Government and the determined colonists, the system was completely abandoned in 1853.[261]

The next step was to entrust the colonists with the management of their own domestic affairs. The details of the various Acts of Parliament are not important. In 1842 Peel's Ministry had established a Legislative Council in New South Wales. The Whigs extended the system to the whole of Australia.

But the real credit for establis.h.i.+ng the new spirit belongs to the Manchester School and the Radicals, of whom Sir William Molesworth was the most conspicuous. Russell and Grey always took the Liberal line, but with more coldness. They were content with nominated or partly nominated Legislatures. Molesworth argued boldly for a complete system of responsible government. ”The nostrum of the Colonial Office for the Australian Colonies is the {206} single, partly nominated Chamber. Now every one acknowledges that such an inst.i.tution is not only in opposition to the principle of political science, but to the universal experience of Anglo-Saxon communities in every part of the globe.... An Englishman, when he emigrates to the United States, carries with him in reality all the laws, rights, and liberties of an Englishman; but if he emigrates to our Colonies, on touching colonial soil he loses some of the most precious of his liberties, and becomes the subject of an ignorant and irresponsible despot at the Antipodes.”[262] He proposed ”that the Colonial Office shall cease to interfere with the management of the local affairs of these Colonies, and that they shall possess the greatest amount of self-government that is not inconsistent with the unity and well-being of the British Empire.”[263]

The practical proposals of Molesworth were not immediately accepted, and the first colonial const.i.tutions did not provide for the responsibility of Ministers to the Legislature. But a clause in the Australian Colonies Government Act of 1850 provided that the Colonies might alter their own const.i.tutions, and it was not long before they took advantage of the permission. The Liberal principle of local independence was thus permanently established. The temper in which the Imperial Government has ever since applied itself to the details of administration has been that of Molesworth. ”The great principle of colonial government is, that all affairs of merely local concern should be left to the regulation of the local authorities; to that principle I know of no general exceptions, unless in cases where local interests may clash with the interests of the Empire at large, or in cases where some one predominant cla.s.s of a society might be disposed to exert such powers, so as unjustly to depress some feebler and defenceless cla.s.s.”[264] In modern times the line between local and Imperial interests has been pushed farther back. Some Acts of {207} Colonial Legislatures have been disallowed by the Crown. These have generally conflicted in spirit or in letter with the Imperial law. Among them have been Acts for reducing the salary of a Governor-General, for regulating copyright and s.h.i.+pping, for checking foreign immigration, and for altering the law relating to marriage and divorce. But with the growth of colonial populations even this interference has become rarer. Acts for checking Chinese immigration into Australia and for permitting marriage with a deceased husband's brother in New Zealand have been recently sanctioned by the Crown. Under the influence of this Liberal temper the self-governing Empire has grown to its present proportions. A queer freak of political fortune has made Tories of the present generation the self-styled champions of communities which, if Tory doctrines had been applied to their government half a century ago, would have been long since driven into revolt and independence.

The fidelity of Parliament to the new theory was once more seriously tested in 1853, when the Whigs were no longer in absolute power, and the government was in the hands of a coalition of Whigs and Peelites. The Tory side was then weighted by the influence of the Church of England, in whose favour an unfortunate reservation had been made in Canada. The question arose out of the appropriation of some lands in Canada for the endowment of the Church. The Canadian Legislature had presented an address to the Crown, praying that the disposition of these lands might be left to itself as a matter of purely local and not Imperial concern. There had been considerable dispute about the subject in previous years, and in 1840 Parliament had pa.s.sed an Act appropriating the revenues of the Clergy Reserves in part to the Church of England, in part to the Church of Scotland, and otherwise for religious and educational purposes. The Canadian Legislature now asked that Parliament should invest it with full power to deal with the endowments according to the wishes of the inhabitants of the Colony. The issue was plain. The Churches were in Canada, the clergy were in Canada, the lands were in Canada. {208} Were their affairs to be managed by Canadians or Englishmen? The Church fought for its privileges. In 1840 the Bishops in the House of Lords had demanded that whatever other concessions were made to colonial feeling, the Church at least should be maintained at all costs. ”The Church wished, for the sake of peace, to make any reasonable concessions with regard to property, provided always that the Church was recognized as the Established Church of the Colony.”[265] The Canadians were to be adapted to the use of the Church, not the Church to the use of the Canadians.

In 1853 these arguments were employed in the House of Commons by Sir John Pakington and by Lord John Manners. Property had been appropriated to the Church of England, and it must remain with her even at the cost of colonial independence. Sir William Molesworth and Gladstone put the Liberal case as forcibly as on the Australian Bill. ”It is high time,” said the latter, ”to have done appealing to one part of the people. We know of old the meaning of these words--we know from disastrous experience their effects--we know that the effect of them was to create knots and cliques of intriguers, who put upon themselves the profession of British supporters, who denied the name of loyalists to all who would not adopt their s.h.i.+bboleth, and caused a strong reaction in the minds of the colonial population; so that, if under that system of government you would look to govern the people of Canada, you must expect the spread, if not of disloyalty, yet of dissatisfaction and dissent; and that pervading the great ma.s.s of the community there will be a current of public opinion throughout the Colony, if not contrary to, yet distinct from, the current of British feeling.”[266] This argument, showing clearly that the speaker's mind was already moving towards the Irish policy of which he himself had as yet no conception, was sufficient to keep the House in the path upon which it had previously entered. The Church was beaten by 275 votes to 192, and the last foundation-stone of Empire was firmly laid. The strength of the {209} structure was tested again in 1858, when the Canadian Parliament was allowed to impose duties upon British manufactures. It stood the strain, and in 1879 it was finally acknowledged that in its fiscal arrangements a Colony might treat the Mother Country as it treated a Foreign State.[267]

In foreign affairs the predominance of Palmerston gave a uniform tone to English policy for a whole generation. The Whigs were in power from 1830 to 1841, from 1846 to 1852, and, with a brief interval, from 1852 to 1866, and though Palmerston was not always at the Foreign Office, his influence was always great while his party was in a majority. Generally his sympathies were on the side of Liberalism. He believed in the theory of nationality, and, though he was no enthusiast for democracy, he had a great hatred of tyranny. But while his principles were in the main Liberal, his methods were essentially Tory. He had a constant desire to see England play a great part in foreign affairs, and while he sometimes oppressed small peoples for unworthy objects, he frequently irritated and offended Great Powers without any profitable result. As one of his subordinates said of him, ”He wished to make and to keep England at the head of the world, and to cherish in the minds of others the notion that she was so.”[268] ”England,” he said, ”is strong enough to brave consequences.”[269] The braving of consequences in foreign, even more than in domestic affairs, is a dangerous game to play.

It was a game in which Palmerston delighted, and whenever he was in office the country might count on a succession of hazardous enterprises being undertaken for its amus.e.m.e.nt, and at its expense.

This egoistic policy was not inconsistent with the principles of Whigs who liked national independence and English political inst.i.tutions, and in some of his most dangerous exploits Palmerston had the powerful support of Lord John Russell. But it was opposed on the one hand to the theories of Peelites like Peel himself, Gladstone, and Lord Aberdeen, and on the other to the {210} theories of Cobden and Bright and the Manchester School. The former disliked everything that was unmethodical, disturbing, and expensive. The latter hated Palmerstonism, because it so vividly expressed that aristocratic subordination of domestic to foreign affairs, that use of the common people for purposes which they could not understand, which it was their habit to attack in all its forms. The conflict which extended over the whole of the Palmerston era was thus rather a conflict between a Tory use of Liberalism and a Liberal use of it than between Toryism and Liberalism. There was no general disposition on either side to interfere directly in the domestic concerns of foreign peoples. Palmerston was more than once guilty of this gross offence. But men so opposite as Peel and Cobden were agreed on the point, and Peel's dignified request for fair play for the Socialist French Republic of 1848 is more in the vein of Fox and Grey than in that of Pitt and Grenville. Even Palmerston would not dispute the soundness of the general principle. But his constant attempts to dictate policies to other peoples made his Liberalism a very different thing from that of his opponents, who, while they were sometimes ready to offer mediation, were never ready, as he was, to hazard the fortunes of the English people on behalf of causes where success was doubtful or impossible.

Between 1830 and 1841 Palmerston was chiefly concerned with the Iberian Peninsula and the Near East. In 1832 he very rightly sent a fleet to the Tagus to stop Miguel's abuse of British subjects, and he declined with equal propriety to prevent France from doing the same on her own behalf. He then proceeded to open negotiations for filling the thrones of both Portugal and Spain, which were inconsistent with Liberal principle and produced no result except to excite the jealousy of France. Hostility to France combined with hostility to Russia to shape his policy in Turkey and Egypt. He had at this time a belief, which he never lost, that Turkey could regenerate herself. When Mohammed Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, threw off his allegiance to the Sultan, and not only expelled the Turks from his own territory but conquered a large part of their possessions in Syria, {211} Palmerston interfered to prevent his advance. France had shown sympathy with Egypt, Russia with Turkey. To leave the matter where it stood meant the permanent separation of the two Eastern countries, neither strong enough to stand alone, and each therefore dependent on and dominated by one of the two European Powers whom Palmerston disliked. At all costs Turkey must be kept from Russia and Egypt from France. The British fleet was therefore sent to Syria, and Mohammed Ali was stripped of his conquests and sent back to his own country. This was a clear case of the exploitation of weaker races in the interest of England's private disputes with other Powers.

The Chinese War of 1840, in which English s.h.i.+ps and men were used to force the opium traffic upon China, was hardly Palmerston's fault, and was begun and conducted by the British diplomatic agents. In 1841 he rendered great service to the cause of international friends.h.i.+p by procuring the European Powers to consent to a convention for the suppression of the Slave Trade, and thus completed the work which had been begun by Wilberforce and Clarkson more than fifty years before. In 1846, after the fall of Peel, he began his second term of office by a refusal to join France and Austria in interfering by force of arms in the internal disorders of Switzerland, and procured a settlement by mediation. This was as wise and temperate a course as could be required. But immediately afterwards he began a series of extraordinary violations of Liberal principle. In July, 1846, he instructed the British Amba.s.sador in Spain to lecture the Spanish Government on its unconst.i.tutional domestic policy, and in order to thwart Louis Philippe of France, meddled with the marriage of the young Queen. In November he sent a fleet to Lisbon to overawe the Portuguese Junta, and re-established the Queen, who had been expelled, on condition of her giving up her absolutism and undertaking to govern with free inst.i.tutions. In the next year he sent Lord Minto to Italy on a pedagogic tour among the various Governments, bidding them set their houses in order before the prevailing unrest upset them. {212} All this was in the worst possible manner, and love of national freedom was strangely mixed with jealousy of France and Austria. In 1848, the year of Revolutions, when every country in Europe except Russia was disturbed, and even England suffered a final and sporadic outbreak of Chartism, Palmerston indulged his love of freedom to the full. Neither he nor Lord John Russell concealed their sympathy with the Poles, the Hungarians, and the Italians, and while they declined to join in Continental wars, they upheld the Sultan in his refusal to give up Hungarian refugees to Austria and Russia. No Liberal could find much cause for complaint in this sympathetic policy, even though it incurred the hostility of reactionary Governments. Contrasted with Russia a.s.sisting Austria to put down the Hungarians, and with the French Republic helping Austria to destroy the Republic of Rome, England at this time appeared conspicuously magnanimous. But in 1851 Palmerston's gay pugnacity led him into a gross blunder.

The object of his censure was Greece. The condition of that State was such as Palmerston could not overlook. British subjects had from time to time reason to complain of the inefficiency of the law and of the delays and evasions of the Government. A riot, in which a substantial amount of private property was destroyed, at last gave an excuse for intervention.

Claims for compensation were presented to the Greek Government, and Palmerston, without advising the sufferers to try the law, and without himself allowing any play for diplomacy, sent a fleet to blockade the Piraeus, and demanded the settlement of all the claims in full. Some of these claims, of which that of the Maltese Jew Pacifico was the worst, were notoriously extravagant or dishonest, and Palmerston, by his hasty action, had made the British fleet an instrument of the most impudent blackmail.

France and Russia stepped in, at first with offers of mediation, and then, when Palmerston flouted their suggestions, with vigorous remonstrance. In the face of this opposition such a bad case could not be pressed, and the matter was referred to arbitration. Palmerston's egoism had betrayed him.

He had bullied Greece. {213} He gave way to France, and he abased himself before Russia. The note addressed to the Russian Amba.s.sador by Count Nesselrode is perhaps the most humiliating doc.u.ment ever received by an English Minister. ”It remains to be seen whether Great Britain, abusing the advantages which are afforded her by her immense maritime superiority, intends henceforth to pursue an isolated policy, without caring for those engagements which bind her to the other Cabinets; whether she intends to disengage herself from every obligation, as well as from all community of action, and to authorize all Great Powers, on every fitting opportunity, to recognize to the weak no other rule but their own will, no other right but their own physical strength. Your Excellency will please to read this dispatch to Lord Palmerston, and to give him a copy of it.” To the meek acceptance of lectures like this was Great Britain reduced by Palmerston's ”spirited and aggressive” policy. The rebuke was not made less effective by the fact that every word of it might have been addressed to Russia herself.

But Palmerston, with his theories of the Balance of Power and his bl.u.s.ter in Spain and Portugal, no less than with his genuine love of national independence and const.i.tutional government, had contrived to offend all the Great Powers in turn, and they clutched eagerly at this chance of reading a lecture to the man who had so often played the pedagogue towards themselves.

The case of Don Pacifico was the cause of a general attack upon Palmerston's conduct of foreign affairs. In the House of Lords, Stanley carried a vote of censure on the particular incident. This was answered in the Commons by Roebuck's motion of general confidence in the whole policy.

The debate lasted for six days, and Palmerston defended himself in the finest speech he ever made. He claimed to have maintained the honour of England, and to have ent.i.tled every subject of the Crown to boast of his citizens.h.i.+p like the old Romans. He was answered as brilliantly by Peel and Gladstone, by Molesworth, and by Cobden. ”I protest,” said the philosophic Radical, ”against the honourable and learned gentleman's doctrines, which would {214} make us the political pedagogues of the world.... I maintain that one nation has no more right to interfere with the local affairs of another nation than one man has to interfere in the private affairs of another man.”[270] Gladstone was less dogmatic but equally forcible, and it is in his speech rather than in those of Radicals and Manchester men that the real Liberal view of the case was expressed. He admitted that it might sometimes be right that one nation should interfere with another, and that if England ever interfered she should interfere on the side of liberty as against despotism. But his case against Palmerston was that he interfered on behalf of revolution before it was successful. We should interfere, if at all, to protect an established const.i.tutional Government, and not to set it up. ”The difference among us arises upon this question: Are we, or are we not, to go abroad and make occasions for the propagation even of the political opinions which we consider to be sound? I say we are not.... We must remember that if we claim the right not only to accept, when they come spontaneously and by no act of ours, but to create and catch at, opportunities for spreading in other countries the opinions of our own meridian, we must allow to every other nation a similar license both of judgment and of action. What is to be the result? That if in every country the name of England is to be the symbol and the nucleus of a party, the name of France and Russia, or of Austria, may and will be the same. And are you not, then, laying the foundation of a system hostile to the real interests of freedom, and destructive of the peace of the world?...

Interference in foreign countries, sir, according to my mind, should be rare, deliberate, decisive in character, and effectual for its end.... I protest against these antic.i.p.ations of occasion, on every ground both of policy and of justice. The general doctrine is that we are not ent.i.tled to recognize a government, far less to suggest one, until we see it established, and have presumptive evidence that it springs from a national source.”[271]

On the point of Don Pacifico, Gladstone administered a rebuke {215} which was equally crus.h.i.+ng. ”It would be a contravention of the law of nature and of G.o.d, if it were possible for any single nation of Christendom to emanc.i.p.ate itself from the obligations which bind all other nations, and to arrogate, in the face of mankind, a position of peculiar privilege.... What was a Roman citizen? He was the member of a privileged caste; he belonged to a conquering race, to a nation that held all others bound down by the strong arm of power. For him there was to be an exceptional system of law; for him principles were to be a.s.serted, and by him rights were to be enjoyed that were to be denied to the rest of the world.... He adopts in part that vain conception that we, forsooth, have a mission to be the censors of vice and folly, of abuse and imperfection, among the other countries of the world; that we are to be the universal schoolmasters.”[272]

The victory of argument was with the critics. But Palmerston triumphed in the Lobby, and there is no question that his policy was popular. A few months later he was turned out of office. He procured his downfall by a succession of foolish acts. Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot, paid a visit to England early in 1851, and Palmerston gave a cordial reception to a deputation which described the Emperors of Austria and Russia as despots, tyrants, and odious a.s.sa.s.sins. The language was not very inaccurate. But it was not the business of the Foreign Secretary to receive it with approbation. Public feeling was in this matter with Palmerston, and he was allowed to keep his place. But in December of the same year Napoleon, then President of the French Republic, tore up the Const.i.tution under which he held office, shot down some of his subjects in the streets of Paris, imprisoned his princ.i.p.al enemies, and took steps to get himself elected Emperor. The affair was as flagrant a violation of moral rules as any revolution that had ever taken place, and the most stubborn of English Tories might have been repelled by such a breach of faith. The Government, acting on the Liberal principle of non-interference, instructed the British Amba.s.sador to be strictly neutral. But Palmerston privately told {216} the French Amba.s.sador that he strongly approved of what had been done. This was too much for the Queen and for the Cabinet, and it was also too much for Parliament and the people. The offending Minister was dismissed. With him went the strength of the Whig party. In a few months the Ministry had fallen to pieces, and a coalition of Whigs and Peelites, with Lord Granville at the Foreign Office, had taken the place of the Tory Ministry which succeeded it.

In a Memorandum addressed to the Queen, Lord Granville laid down the main principles of the new foreign policy. They were a distinct expression of Liberal ideas. ”It was the duty and interest of a country such as Great Britain to encourage progress among all other nations. But for this purpose the foreign policy of Great Britain should be none the less marked by justice, moderation, and self-respect, and avoid any undue attempt to enforce her own ideas by hostile threats.... They did not attach to the expression 'non-intervention' the meaning implied by some who used it, viz., that diplomacy is become obsolete, and that it is unnecessary for this country to know or to take part in what pa.s.ses in other countries....

With respect to the internal affairs of other countries, such as the establishment of Liberal inst.i.tutions and the reduction of tariffs in which this country has an interest, H.M.'s representatives ought to be furnished with the views of H.M.'s Government ... but they should be instructed to press those views only when fitting opportunities occurred, and only when their advice and a.s.sistance would be welcome or be effectual.... With the countries which have adopted inst.i.tutions similar in liberality to our own, it ought to be the endeavour of H.M.'s Government to cultivate the most intimate relations ... and also to exert its influence to dissuade other Powers from encroaching on their territory or attempting to subvert their inst.i.tutions. Cases might occur in which the honour and good faith of this country would require that it should support such allies with more than merely friendly a.s.surances.”[273] This was the policy of the Government, composed partly of Whigs and {217} partly of Peelites, which replaced the short-lived Government of Lord Derby in 1852.