Page:Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy, 1738-1914 - ed. Jones - 1914.djvu/131

 cause. Now the essence of those instructions was comprised in that little sentence, which has been so much criticized for meagreness and insufficiency.

In this case, then, the English Government is impeached, not for failure, but for success; and the honourable baronet, with taste not his own, has expressed himself dissatisfied with that success, only because the machinery employed to produce it did not make noise enough in its operation.

I contend, Sir, that whatever might grow out of a separate conflict between Spain and France (though matter for grave consideration) was less to be dreaded, than that all the Great Powers of the Continent should have been arrayed together against Spain; and that although the first object, in point of importance, indeed, was to keep the peace altogether—to prevent any war against Spain—the first, in point of time, was to prevent a general war; to change the question from a question between the allies on one side and Spain on the other, to a question between nation and nation. This, whatever the result might be, would reduce the quarrel to the size of ordinary events, and bring it within the scope of ordinary diplomacy. The immediate object of England, therefore, was to hinder the impress of a joint character from being affixed to the war—if war there must be—with Spain; to take care that the war should not grow out of an assumed jurisdiction of the Congress; to keep within reasonable bounds that predominating areopagitical spirit, which the memorandum of the British Cabinet of May, 1820, describes as 'beyond the sphere of the original conception, and understood principles