How can we discuss with fairness, I might say with common sense, any transactions, unless in reference to the object which was in the view of those who carried them on? I repeat it, whether gentlemen in this House do or do not consider the question to be one of peace or war, the Ministers could not take a single step in the late negotiations, till they had well weighed that question; till they had determined what direction ought to be given to those negotiations, so far as that question was concerned. We determined that it was our duty, in the first instance, to endeavour to preserve peace if possible for all the world: next, to endeavour to preserve peace between the nations whose pacific relations appeared most particularly exposed to hazard; and failing in this, to preserve at all events peace for this country; but a peace consistent with the good faith, the interests, and the honour of the nation.
I am far from intending to assert that our decision in this respect is not a fit subject of examination. Undoubtedly the conduct of the Government is liable to a twofold trial. First, was the object of Ministers a right object? Secondly, did they pursue it in a right way? The first of these questions, whether Ministers did right in aiming at the preservation of peace, I postpone. I will return to the consideration of it hereafter. My first inquiry is as to the merits or demerits of the negotiations: and, in order to enter into that inquiry, I must set out with assuming, for the time, that peace is the object which we ought to have pursued.
With this assumption, I proceed to examine, whether the papers on the table show that the best means were employed for attaining the given object? If the object was unfit, there is an end of any discussion as to the negotiations;—they must necessarily be wrong from the beginning to the end; it is only in reference to their fitness for the end proposed, that the papers themselves can be matter worthy of discussion.
In reviewing, then, the course of these negotiations, as directed to maintain, first, the peace of Europe; secondly, the peace between France and Spain; and lastly, peace for this country, they divide themselves naturally into three heads:—first, the negotiations at Verona; secondly, those with France; and thirdly, those with Spain. Of each of these in their order.
I say, emphatically, in their order; because there can be no greater fallacy than that which has pervaded the arguments of many honourable gentlemen, who have taken up expressions used in one stage of these negotiations, and applied them to another. An honourable baronet (Sir F. Burdett), for instance, who addressed the House last night, employed—or, I should rather say, adopted—a fallacy of this sort, with respect to an expression of mine in the extract of a dispatch to the Duke of Wellington, which stands second in the first series of papers. It is but just to the honourable baronet to admit that his observation was adopted, not original; because, in a speech eminent for its ability and for its fairness of reasoning (however I may disagree both with its principles and its conclusions), this, which he condescended to borrow, was in truth the only very weak and ill-reasoned part. By my dispatch of the 27th of September the Duke of Wellington was instructed to declare, that 'to any interference by force or menace on the part of the allies against Spain, come what may, His Majesty will not be party'. Upon this the honourable baronet, borrowing, as I have said, the remark itself, and borrowing also the air of astonishment, which, as I am informed, was assumed by the noble proprietor of the remark, in another place, exclaimed '"Come what may"! What is the meaning of this ambiguous menace, this mighty phrase, "that thunders in the index"?—"Come what may!" Surely a denunciation of war is to follow. But no—no such thing. Only—come what may—"His Majesty will be no party to such proceedings." Was ever such a bathos! Such a specimen of sinking in policy? "Quid dignum tanto feret hic promissor hiatu?"'
Undoubtedly, Sir, if the honourable baronet could show that this declaration was applicable to the whole course of the negotiations, or to a more advanced stage of them, there would be something in the remark, and in the inference which he wished to be drawn from it. But, before the declaration is condemned as utterly feeble and inconclusive, let us consider what was the question to which it was intended as an answer. That question, Sir, was not as to what England would do in a war between France and Spain, but as to what part she would take if, in the Congress at Verona, a determination should be avowed by the allies to interfere forcibly in the affairs of Spain. What then was the meaning of the answer to that proposition,—that, 'come what might, His Majesty would be no party to such a project'? Why, plainly that His Majesty would not concur in such a determination, even though a difference with his allies, even though the dissolution of the alliance, should be the consequence of his refusal. The answer, therefore, was exactly adapted to the question. This specimen of the bathos, this instance of perfection in the art of sinking, as it has been described to be, had its effect; and the Congress separated without determining in favour of any joint operation of a hostile character against Spain.
Sir, it is as true in politics as in mechanics, that the test of skill and of success is to achieve the greatest purpose with the least power. If, then, it be found that, by this little intimation, we gained the object that we sought for, where was the necessity for greater flourish or greater pomp of words? An idle waste of effort would only have risked the loss of the object which by temperance we gained!
But where is the testimony in favour of the effect which this intimation produced? I have it, both written and oral. My first witness is the Duke Mathieu de Montmorency, who states, in his official note of the 26th of December, that the measures conceived and proposed at Verona 'would, have been completely successful, if England had thought herself at liberty to concur in them'. Such was the opinion entertained, by the Plenipotentiary of France of the failure at Verona, and of the cause of that failure. What was the opinion of Spain? My voucher for that opinion is the dispatch from Sir W. A'Court, of the 7th of January; in which he describes the comfort and relief that were felt by the Spanish Government, when they learnt that the Congress at Verona had broken up with no other result than the bruta fulmina of the three dispatches from the courts in alliance with France. The third witness whom I produce, and not the least important, because an unwilling and most unexpected, and in this case surely a most unsuspected witness, is the honourable member for Westminster (Mr. Hobhouse), who seems to have had particular sources of information as to what was passing at the Congress. According to the antechamber reports which were furnished to the honourable member (and which, though not always the most authentic, were in this instance tolerably correct), it appears that there was to be no joint declaration against Spain; and it was, it seems, generally understood at Verona, that the instructions given to His Majesty's Plenipotentiary, by the Liberal—I beg pardon, to be quite accurate I am afraid I must say, the Radical—Foreign Minister of England, were the cause. Now the essence of those instructions was comprised in that little sentence, which has been so much criticized for meagreness and insufficiency.
In this case, then, the English Government is impeached, not for failure, but for success; and the honourable baronet, with taste not his own, has expressed himself dissatisfied with that success, only because the machinery employed to produce it did not make noise enough in its operation.
I contend, Sir, that whatever might grow out of a separate conflict between Spain and France (though matter for grave consideration) was less to be dreaded, than that all the Great Powers of the Continent should have been arrayed together against Spain; and that although the first object, in point of importance, indeed, was to keep the peace altogether—to prevent any war against Spain—the first, in point of time, was to prevent a general war; to change the question from a question between the allies on one side and Spain on the other, to a question between nation and nation. This, whatever the result might be, would reduce the quarrel to the size of ordinary events, and bring it within the scope of ordinary diplomacy. The immediate object of England, therefore, was to hinder the impress of a joint character from being affixed to the war—if war there must be—with Spain; to take care that the war should not grow out of an assumed jurisdiction of the Congress; to keep within reasonable bounds that predominating areopagitical spirit, which the memorandum of the British Cabinet of May, 1820, describes as 'beyond the sphere of the original conception, and understood principles of the alliance',—'an alliance never intended as a union for the government of the world, or for the superintendence of the internal affairs of other States.' And this, I say, was accomplished.