Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/488

476 Polignac, his objection to constitutional government in Poland on the ground that it would imperil the tranquillity of Europe at a time, September 1814, when there was too much liberalism about. While Canning was straining all his resources to stay the invasion of Spain, the duke showed his fidelity as a colleague by exhorting I the French Government to push on boldly and defy him ; and when the first faltering steps were taken towards popular education, Wellington gives the measure of his superiority to the narrowness of party feeling by the dictum "that money ought not to be levied upon the subject, or granted by Parliament, for the purpose of educating the people in popery, in the tenets of the Unitarians, in those of the Anabaptists, in those of any sect not in communion with the Church of England ; or at all, excepting in the tenets of the Church of England." In Peel's great administration — great because it included ten men of the rank and substance of premier — he ceased to be listened to, and came to be treated as an august bore.

Masters of expediency and compromise, like Peel and Palmerston, are convenient to the political historian who writes for all readers. Lord Palmerston especially, as a sort of medium Englishman, fares well at his hands. He deems that he was prejudiced in his judgments and material in his aims, and in a characteristic paragraph on the war for the sale of "a noxious and poisonous drug," austere morality wrestles uneasily with an acquiescent patriotism. The garbled Portuguese and Afghan despatches he does not touch. It is only from 1835 onwards that he makes Lord Palmerston prominent as the manager of our foreign policy. "In the period between November 1830 and the autumn of 1834 it was much governed by the then prime minister, Lord Grey." When Kinglake wrote those words there were men living who could bear witness that they were not only true, but considerably within the mark. Too much is made of the British triumph in the fall and submission of Mehemet Ali. To be in perfect keeping it should be said that, having been deposed by the sultan, he was formally