Page:Karl Marx - The Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston - ed. Eleanor Marx Aveling (1899).pdf/83

 Rh merchant," said Lord Palmerston, "was entitled to ask Her Majesty's Government to give an opinion on questions of such sort as the right of Russia to the sovereignty of Circassia, or to establish those customs and sanitary regulations she was enforcing by the power of her arms." "If that be not your duty, what is the use of the Foreign Office at all?" asked Mr. Hume. "It is said," resumed the noble lord, "that Mr. Bell, this innocent Mr. Bell, was led into a trap by me, by the answers I gave him. The trap, if there was one, was laid, not for Mr. Bell, but by Mr. Bell," namely, by the questions he put to innocent Lord Palmerston.

In the course of these debates (June 21, 1838), out came at length the great secret. Had he been willing to resist in 1836 the claims of Russia, the noble lord had been unable to do so for the very simple reason that already, in 1831, his first act on coming into office was to acknowledge the Russian usurpation of the Caucasus, and thus, in a surreptitious way, the Treaty of Adrianople. Lord Stanley (now Lord Derby) stated that, on August 8, 1831, the Russian Cabinet informed its representative at Constantinople of its intention "to subject to sanitary regulations the communications which freely exist between the inhabitants of the Caucasus and the neighbouring Turkish provinces," and that he was "to communicate the above-mentioned regulations to the foreign missions at Constantinople, as well as to the Ottoman Government." By allowing Russia the establishment of so-called sanitary and custom-house regulations on the coast of Circassia, although existing nowhere except in the above letter, Russian claims to the Caucasus were acknowledged, and consequently the Treaty of Adrianople, on which they were grounded. "Those instructions," said Lord Stanley, "had been communicated in the most formal manner to Mr. Mandeville (Secretary to the Embassy) at Constantinople, expressly for the information of the British merchants, and transmitted to the noble Lord Palmerston." Neither did he, nor dared he, "according to the practice of former Governments, communicate to the committee at Lloyd's the fact of such