Page:Karl Marx - The Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston - ed. Eleanor Marx Aveling (1899).pdf/29

 Rh ston replied, "that whatever obligations existing treaties imposed, would at all times receive the attention of the Government." Now, what sort of obligations were, in his opinion, imposed on England by existing treaties? "The claims of Russia," he tells us himself, "to the possession of Poland bear the date of the treaty of Vienna"—(House of Commons, July 9, 1833), and that treaty makes this possession dependent upon the observance of the Polish Constitution by the Czar. But from a subsequent speech we learn that "the mere fact of this country being a party to the treaty of Vienna, was not synonymous with our England’'s guaranteeing that there would be no infraction of that treaty by Russia."—(House of Commons, March 26, 1834.)

That is to say, you may guarantee a treaty without guaranteeing that it should be observed. This is the principle on which the Milanese said to the Emperor Barbarossa: "You have had our oath, but remember we did not swear to keep it."

In one respect the treaty of Vienna was good enough. It gave to the British Government, as one of the contracting parties,

He had quietly anticipated the downfall of Poland, and had availed himself of this opportunity to entertain and express an opinion on certain articles of the treaty of Vienna, persuaded as he was that the magnanimous Czar was merely waiting till he had crushed the Polish people by armed force to do homage to a Constitution he had trampled upon when they were yet possessed of unbounded means of resistance. At the same time the noble lord charged the Poles with having "taken the uncalled for, and,