'The country which can comprehend and act upon the lessons which God has given it in the past events of its history, is secure in the most imminent crises of its fate.'
The past events of our history have taught me that the intervention of this country in European wars is not only unnecessary, but calamitous; that we have rarely come out of such intervention having succeeded in the objects we fought for; that a debt of 800,000,000_l_. sterling has been incurred by the policy which the noble Lord approves, apparently for no other reason than that it dates from the time of William III; and that, not debt alone has been incurred, but that we have left Europe at least as much in chains as before a single effort was made by us to rescue her from tyranny. I believe, if this country, seventy years ago, had adopted the principle of nonintervention in every case where her interests were not directly and obviously assailed, that she would have been saved from much of the pauperism and brutal crimes by which our Government and people have alike been disgraced. This country might have been a garden, every dwelling might have been of marble, and every person who treads its soil might have been sufficiently educated. We should indeed have had less of military glory. We might have had neither Trafalgar nor Waterloo; but we should have set the high example of a Christian nation, free in its institutions, courteous and just in its conduct towards all foreign States, and resting its policy on the unchangeable foundation of Christian morality.
* * * * *
RUSSIA.
II.
ENLISTMENT OF FOREIGNERS BILL.
HOUSE OF COMMONS, DECEMBER 22, 1854. From Hansard. At this hour of the night I shall not make a speech; but I wish to say a few things in answer to the noble Lord the Member for the City of London, who has very strangely misapprehended—I am not allowed to say 'misrepresented'—what fell from my hon. Friend the Member for the West Riding. The noble Lord began by saying that my hon. Friend had charged the Government with making war in something of a propagandist spirit in favour of nationalities throughout the Continent; but that was the exact contrary of what my hon. Friend did say. What he said was, that that portion of the people of this country who had clamoured for war, and whose opinion formed the basis whereupon the Government grounded their plea for the popularity of the war, were in favour of the setting up of nationalities; but my hon. Friend showed that the Government had no such object, and the war no such tendency. The next misrepresentation was, that my hon. Friend had spoken in favour of the status quo; but there is not the shadow of a shade of truth in that statement. What my hon. Friend said was precisely the contrary; but the noble Lord, arguing from his own misapprehension of my hon. Friend's meaning, went on then to show that it would not do to establish a peace on the status quo terms, thus knocking down a position which nobody had set up. The noble Lord was also guilty of another mistake with reference to an observation of my hon. Friend as to the character and position of the Turks. We have referred over and over again to a monstrous statement made by the noble Lord the Member for Tiverton as to the improvement of the Turks—a statement which is contradicted by all facts. Tonight, with a disingenuousness which I should be ashamed to use in argument—[Cries of 'Oh!']—it is very well for hon. Gentlemen who come down to cheer a Minister to cry 'Oh!' but is it a fact, or is it not? Is there a man who hears me who does not know perfectly well, when the noble Lord said that the Turks had improved within the last twenty years more than any other nation in Europe, that the statement referred not to the Christians, whose rights and interests we were defending, but to the character of the Mahometan population? But to-night, with a disingenuousness which I could not condescend to be guilty of, the noble Lord has assumed that the statement referred to the condition of the Christian population.
The real question was, as every hon. Gentleman knows, What was the condition of the Mahometan? and there is not a Gentleman in this House who is not aware that the Mahometan portion of the population of the Turkish Empire is in a decaying and dying condition, and that the two great Empires which have undertaken to set it on its legs again will find it about the most difficult task in which they ever were engaged. What do your own officers say? Here is an extract from a letter which appeared in the papers the other day:—
They ought to set these rascally Turks to mend them [the roads], which might easily be done, as under the clay there is plenty of capital stone. They are, I am sorry to say, bringing more of these brutes into the Crimea, which makes more mouths to feed, without being of any use.
I have seen a private letter, too, from an able and distinguished officer in the Crimea, who says—