Now, there are revolutionists of two kinds in this world. In the first place, there are those violent, hot-headed, and unthinking men who fly to arms, who overthrow established Governments, and who recklessly, without regard to consequences and without measuring difficulties and comparing strength, deluge their country with blood, and draw down the greatest calamities on their fellow-countrymen. These are the revolutionists of one class. But there are revolutionists of another kind—blind-minded men who, animated by antiquated prejudices and daunted by ignorant apprehensions, dam up the current of human improvement until the irresistible pressure of accumulated discontent breaks down the opposing barriers, and overthrows and levels to the earth those very institutions which a timely application of renovating means would have rendered strong and lasting. Such revolutionists as these are the men who call us revolutionists....
The government of a great country like this is undoubtedly an object of fair and legitimate ambition to men of all shades of opinion. It is a noble thing to be allowed to guide the policy and to influence the destiny of such a country; and if ever it was an object of honourable ambition, more than ever must it be so at the moment at which I am speaking. For while we have seen the political earthquake rocking Europe from side to side—while we have seen thrones shaken, shattered, levelled, institutions overthrown and destroyed—while in almost every country of Europe the conflict of civil war has deluged the land with blood from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, this country has presented a spectacle honourable to the people of England, and worthy of the admiration of mankind.
We have shown that liberty is compatible with order; that individual freedom is reconcilable with obedience to the law. We have shown the example of a nation in which every class of society accepts with cheerfulness the lot which Providence has assigned to it, while at the same time every individual of such class is constantly striving to raise himself in the social scale—not by injustice and wrong, not by violence and illegality, but by persevering good conduct and by the steady and energetic exertion of the moral and intellectual faculties with which his Creator has endowed him.... I maintain that the principles which can be traced through all our foreign transactions, as the guiding rule and directing spirit of our proceedings, are such as deserve approbation. I therefore fearlessly challenge the verdict which this House, as representing a political, a commercial, a constitutional country, is to give on the question now brought before it—whether the principles on which the foreign policy of Her Majesty’s Government has been conducted, and the sense of duty which has led us to think ourselves bound to afford protection to our fellow-subjects abroad are proper and fitting guides for those who are charged with the government of England: and whether, as the Roman in days of old held himself free from indignity when he could say, “Civis Romanus sum,” so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong.
THE ROMAN CATHOLIC BISHOPRICS (1850).
Source.—The Life of Lord Palmerston, by the Hon. Evelyn Ashley, vol. i., p. 245.
(London: 1876.)
Lord Palmerston to his Brother. January 27, 1851.
The Papal aggression question will give us some trouble, and give rise to stormy debates. Our difficulty will be to find out a measure which shall satisfy reasonable Protestants without violating those principles of liberal toleration which we are pledged to. I think we shall succeed. But all the newspaper stories of divisions in the Cabinet on this or any other question are pure inventions, wholly devoid of any foundation. The Pope, I hear, and the people about him by whom at present he is guided, affect to treat lightly the excitement which his measures have produced in this country, and they represent the clamour as a thing got up by the Church—a parson agitation. They deceive themselves; the feeling is general and intense all through the nation, and the sensible Catholics themselves lament what has been done.
The thing itself, in truth, is little or nothing, and does not justify the irritation. What has goaded the nation is the manner, insolent and ostentatious, in which it has been done. The Catholics have a right to organise their Church as they like; and if staff officers called Bishops were thought better than staff officers called Vicars-Apostolic, nobody would have remarked or objected to the change if it had been made quietly and only in the bosom of the Church. But what offended—and justly—all England, was the Pope’s published Allocution and Wiseman’s announcement of his new dignities; the first representing England as a land of benighted heathens; the second proclaiming that the Pope had parcelled out England into districts—a thing that only a Sovereign has a right to do—and that he, Wiseman, and others were sent, and to be sent to govern those territorial districts, with titles belonging thereto.