Page:Karl Marx - The Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston - ed. Eleanor Marx Aveling (1899).pdf/31

 Rh and on the other the dissolution of the Turkish Empire became imminent, from the rebellion of Mehemet Ali, he assured the House that "affairs in general were proceeding in a satisfactory train."—(House of Commons, January 26, 1832.)

A motion for granting subsidies to the Polish refugees having been made, it was "exceedingly painful to him to oppose the grant of any money to those individuals, which the natural and spontaneous feelings of every generous man would lead him to acquiesce in; but it was not consistent with his duty to propose any grant of money to those unfortunate persons."—(House of Commons, March 25, 1834.)

This same tender-hearted man had secretly defrayed, as we shall see by and bye, the cost of Poland's fall, to a great extent, out of the pockets of the British people.

The noble lord took good care to withhold all State papers about the Polish catastrophe from Parliament. But statements made in the House of Commons which he never so much as attempted to controvert, leave no doubt as to the game he played at that fatal epoch.

After the Polish revolution had broken out, the Consul of Austria did not quit Warsaw, and the Austrian Government went so far as to send a Polish agent, M. Walewski, to Paris, with the mission of negotiating with the Governments of France and England about the re-establishment of a Polish kingdom. The Court of the Tuileries declared "it was ready to join England in case of her consenting to the project." Lord Palmerston rejected the offer. In 1831, M. de Talleyrand, the Ambassador of France at the Court of St. James, proposed a plan of combined action on the part of France and England, but met with a distinct refusal and with a note from the noble lord, stating that "an amicable intermediation on the Polish question would be declined by Russia; that the Powers had just declined a similar offer on the part of France; that the intervention of the two Courts of France and England could only be by force in case of a refusal on the part of Russia; and the amicable and satisfactory relations between the Cabinet of St. James and the Cabinet of St. Petersburg, would not allow his