CAPE TOWN.
Greeks were unreasonable, and that therefore, in terms of the arrangement made in London, Mr. Wyse was justified in resorting to coercion without further instructions. Mr. Wyse may have been mistaken in supposing that M. Gros retired from the negotiations in the circumstances which, according to the London Convention, would have justified a resort to coercion without further reference to Lord Palmerston. If that were the case, the Government had a good defence; for it would have been unfair to censure them for Mr. Wyse’s blunder. But was it the case? How could Mr. Wyse have blundered in interpreting the conditions of the London Convention, if no instructions in accordance with that Convention had been sent to him? The complaint was that the Foreign Secretary had neglected to send these instructions, and a close and careful examination of Palmerston’s own Blue-book, fails to bring to light the slightest proof that they ever were sent. Therefore it was clear (1), that England had broken a binding diplomatic compact with France, and (2), that this breach of faith had enabled Mr. Wyse at Athens to extort by force from a small, weak Power more onerous terms than the English Government had agreed with France to accept in London. The House of Lords took this view of the matter, and when the debate ended, in the grey dawn of a summer’s morning, it was found on division that there was a majority of 37 against the Government.
Some members of the Cabinet were for resignation. Many friends of the Government thought that Palmerston should personally offer the Queen his resignation, begging her not to accept that of his colleagues if they tendered theirs. But the Foreign Secretary made no offer to resign, and at first the Cabinet resolved to take no more notice of the vote of censure in the Upper House. Ultimately, they found that they must notice it, and as their Foreign Policy as a whole was impugned, they decided not to abandon the Foreign Secretary. On the 20th of June, Lord John Russell explained why he would not resign. He gave two reasons—one good and the other bad,—the first being one of which the Queen approved. It was that a change of Government, in consequence of a resolution of the House of Lords, would be unconstitutional, because, in his opinion, it might be dangerous even to the House of Lords to lay upon it the responsibility of controlling her Majesty’s Executive. Two precedents, one a hundred years old, and one taken from 1833, when the Peers, on the motion of the Duke of Wellington, censured Lord Grey’s Foreign Policy in Portugal, were ingeniously cited by Lord John Russell in support of this constitutional doctrine. But his second reason was characteristically Palmerstonian. He said that the House of Lords had laid it down, that it was the duty of the British Government to see that British subjects in Foreign States got full protection from the laws of those States. That was a limitation of duty which Lord John Russell refused to recognise, because, said he, a Foreign State might make bad laws, and it would be the duty of England to prevent her subjects from being injured by those laws. No principle is more clearly established in international law than this—that a Sovereign State has an absolute right to dictate the terms on which any alien shall abide on its soil.[15] If the alien does not like the law of the Foreign State, he has no business to call on his own countrymen to defend him by force of arms in refusing to obey it, seeing that it was not at their request or in their interest, but of his own free will, and in pursuit of his own fortune, he went to live or traffic abroad. In fact, to lay it down that England might levy war on any country, whose laws Englishmen residing in that country considered inequitable, was tantamount to proclaiming her hostis humani generis. Yet such was the doctrine which the House of Commons, in spite of the protests of the Tories, of Radicals like Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright, and Peelites like Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Gladstone, cheerfully accepted from the Whigs at this period. The only thing that can be said in its defence is that it is a doctrine which the House has never dared to apply to a stronger Power than Greece—never to a Power like Russia, which deports English Jews, nor like Germany, which deports English residents, personally obnoxious to Prince Bismarck, in the most arbitrary manner. It is doubtful if it would even dare to apply it to an autonomous colony like Victoria, had her Government refused, as was threatened, to permit the Irish informer, James Carey, to reside within her frontier.
Having decided to defy the House of Lords, the Government hit on an ingenious plan for neutralising the vote of censure. They put up Mr. Roebuck on the 21st of June to move a vote of confidence in them not touching the Greek dispute, but approving generally of their Foreign Policy as one likely “to preserve untarnished the honour and dignity of this country.” The debate, which lasted five days, was a veritable tournament of Titans. On both sides speeches were made that touch the highest point to which Parliamentary eloquence can reach. Mr. Cockburn, afterwards Lord Chief Justice, delivered an oration by which, at one bound, he leapt into the first rank of British orators. Peel delivered the last speech he was fated to make in the great assembly, on which for years he had played with the easy mastery of a musician on his favourite instrument. Palmerston himself spoke for four hours and a quarter with more than his usual dash and intrepidity, and with surprising moderation and good taste—basing his case virtually on the application of the civis Romanus sum doctrine to British Foreign Policy. This was the point in it which Mr. Gladstone demolished in a passionate protest, that may be said to have become classical. But in the end the Government triumphed by a majority of 46! Yet, on the face of the facts, they had absolutely no case. Why, then, were they victorious? For many reasons. In the then divided state of parties, the Government was felt to be the only possible Government. Palmerston, by adroitly spreading the report that the attack on
MR. GLADSTONE (1855).
him was really fomented by the agents of the despotic Powers, whose policy he had persistently opposed, won strong support from the Radicals. The Whigs felt that as the Foreign Policy of the Government as a whole was attacked, they were bound to defend the Ministry, quite irrespective of Palmerston’s possibly objectionable method of carrying out that policy. Moreover, it was undoubtedly a weak point in the tactics of the Opposition, that they did not venture to submit in the House of Commons, the motion of censure which they had carried in the House of Lords. But though Lord Palmerston’s triumph was complete, the Queen continued to be dissatisfied