Page:Karl Marx - The Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston - ed. Eleanor Marx Aveling (1899).pdf/47

 Rh till the 3rd of November. "Was he then," asks Sir Robert Peel, "so ignorant of what was passing in the Levant, that he must wait for a formal application?"—(House of Commons, March 17, 1834). And from November, when the formal application was made, to the latter part of February, there elapsed again four long months, and Russia did not arrive until February 20, 1833. Why did not he?

But he has better reasons in reserve.

The Pasha of Egypt was but a rebellious subject, and the Sultan was the Suzerain.

Etiquette prevented the noble lord from stopping Ibrahim's armies. Etiquette forbade his giving instructions to his consul at Alexandria to use his influence with Mehemet Ali. Like the Spanish grandee, the noble lord would rather let the Queen burn to ashes than infringe on etiquette, and interfere with her petticoats. As it happens the noble lord had already, in 1832, accredited consuls and diplomatic agents to the "subject" of the Sultan without the consent of the Sultan; he had entered into treaties with Mehemet, altering existing regulations and arrangements touching matters of trade and revenue, and establishing other ones in their stead; and he did so without having the consent of the Porte beforehand, or caring for its approbation after­wards—(House of Commons, February 23, 1848).

Accordingly, we are told by Earl Grey, the then chief of the noble viscount, that "they had at the moment extensive commercial relations with Mehemet Ali which it would not have been their interest to disturb."—(House of Lords, February 4, 1834.)

What, commercial relations with the "rebellious subject"! But the noble viscount's fleets were occupied in the Douro, and the Tagus, and blockading the Scheldt, and doing the services of midwife at the birth of the constitutional empires of Portugal, Spain, and Belgium, and he