Page:Karl Marx - The Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston - ed. Eleanor Marx Aveling (1899).pdf/16

 10 people to put upon them, by accepting phrases for facts, phantasies for realities, and high-sounding pretexts for shabby motives.

Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, deriving his title from a peerage of Ireland, was nominated Lord of the Admiralty, in 1807, on the formation of the Duke of Portland's Administration. In 1809, he became Secretary for War, and continued to hold this office till May, 1828. In 1830, he went over, very skilfully too, to the Whigs, who made him their permanent Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Excepting the intervals of Tory administration, from November, 1834, to April, 1835, and from 1841 to 1846, he is responsible for the whole foreign policy England has pursued from the revolution of 1830 to December, 1851.

Is it not a very curious thing to find, at first view, this Quixote of "free institutions," and this Pindar of the "glories of the constitutional system," a permanent and an eminent member of the Tory administrations of Mr. Percival, the Earl of Liverpool, Mr. Canning, Lord Goderich, and the Duke of Wellington, during the long epoch when the Anti-Jacobin war was carried on, the monster debt contracted, the corn laws promulgated, foreign mercenaries stationed on the English soil, the people—to borrow an expression from his colleague, Lord Sidmouth—"bled" from time to time, the press gagged, meetings suppressed, the mass of the nation disarmed, individual liberty suspended together with regular jurisdiction, the whole country placed as it were under a state of siege—in one word, during the most infamous and most reactionary epoch of English history"

His début in Parliamentary life is a characteristic one. On February 3, 1808, he rose to defend—what?—secrecy in diplomatic negotiations, and the most disgraceful act ever committed by one nation against another nation, viz., the bombardment of Copenhagen, and the capture of the Danish fleet, at the time when England professed to be in profound peace with Denmark. As to the former point, he stated that, "in this particular case, his Majesty's ministers are pledged" by whom? "to secrecy"; but he went further: