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of India. There it is to be hoped he will succeed in realising the object of his life, which is the restoration of the fortunes of his family. Nor is he unworthy of such success; for his decision in returning to Calcutta with the 90th Regiment and troops forming the Chinese expedition, when he heard of the commencement of the Indian Mutiny, proved of the most essential service, and was the first circumstance which turned the scales of fortune in our favour on the plains of Hindostan. He has no natural eloquence; and diplomatic training, as appeared in Lord Castlereagh's case, is the worst school for oratory: but he has an easy flow of wellconstructed agreeable sentences.

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CHAPTER XIX.

QUIET WINTER AT POSSIL-CONVERSATIONS WITH

MY SON-GENERAL REFLECTIONS.

WINTER 1862.

A and his family paid us a visit of two months this winter and spring at Possil, which we enjoyed in the highest degree. It took place at a most interesting time, when public anxiety was wound up to a very high pitch by the American civil war, the affair of the Trent, and the apparently approaching hostilities with that country. We talked on the subject for several hours each day, and we agreed in thinking that the Confederates missed their opportunity when they did not advance on Washington the day after the battle of Bull's Run, and the English theirs in not recognising the Southern Confederacy, and breaking the blockade when that aggression took place. We never had any sure confidence in the ability of the Southern States to resist the Northern, when the strength of the latter was fairly roused, unless

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foreign intervention equalised the contest by opening the Southern harbours.

It is the more extraordinary that Lord Palmerston felt himself precluded from recognising the South American Republic and breaking the blockade, when not only strong material interests in the country, but the principles which for half a century had regulated our foreign policy, concurred in recommending such a course. Essentially agricultural, possessing a boundless expanse of territory producing cotton, sugar, and so many products of the sort of which Great Britain stood in need, the Southern States were at the same time without manufactures or desire to establish them, and anxious only to secure at a moderate rate the fabrics of this country in exchange for the rude produce of their own. The Confederates offered us free trade and nominal import duties; the Federals met our advances with the Moira tariff, imposing duties on imports varying from 25 to 250 per cent,-in most cases amounting to total prohibition. Our interests, therefore, recommended alliance with the former, and their release from the domination of the latter. Besides, our invariable policy in every instance during the last forty years had been to support what we call "oppressed nationalities " everywhere, except in our own dominions. On this principle we had sent, as Lord Castlereagh said, "not regiments, but armies," to support the insurgents of South America against the Government of Old Spain; established the revolu

tionary party in Spain and Portugal by the aid of the British marines and the sword of Sir Charles Napier; sent warlike stores in 1848 to the assistance of the insurgents in Sicily; and given efficient diplomatic aid and moral support to the Sardinian Government in the war with Austria; and to the Roman and Neapolitan revolutionists in the subsequent convulsions in the Italian peninsula in 1861.

How then did it happen that Lord Palmerston, despite his known inclination to act otherwise, felt himself constrained, after Mason and Slidell were given up, to proclaim, for the first time since the battle of Waterloo, a real and bond fide neutrality between the contending parties in a neighbouring Power? How did he feel himself forced to muzzle the French, who were willing to have intervened, and to permit a ruinous and wasteful war to be prolonged beyond the Atlantic, in order to confirm a protective commonwealth in the New World which should extend over half a continent the prohibitory duties on our manufactures now in force in its Northern States? Because this had been done, not by a monarchy, but by a republic, and because in resisting it we would have been entering the lists, not with a king, but with the great democracy of the world! The idea of resisting a democracy so appalled our Liberal rulers, that it has rendered them insensible alike to the material interests and acute suffering of their own country, and to one of the most flagrant changes in national policy

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recorded in the annals of mankind. From being always the ardent well-wishers and often powerful allies of insurgents, we have suddenly become the virtual supporters of a tyrannical majority, which is striving to force an unwelcome and unsuitable government on a resisting people struggling for their lives and property; from being the apostles of free trade we have discovered that our interests are wound up with those of the greatest protective Power in existence; from being the advocates of universal peace, and the promoters of concord among nations as the main source of general prosperity, we have turned into the passive spectators of a vast aggressive warlike community, openly aspiring to subjugate a confederation struggling for its liberties and its independence. And all this has happened (1862) within two years of the time when Lord John Russell declared in an official despatch that "when the people of any country rise against their oppressors, it is the duty of the Government of Great Britain to render them any assistance in its power."

In justification of the acquiescence of Great Britain in the conquest of the free-trading Southern States of America by the protective Northern, Earl Russell in the House of Lords, and Lord Palmerston in the Commons, spoke on the great international duty of non-interference, and the illegality of one nation interposing in the domestic broils of another. These doctrines are most true, but they do not come with the best grace from a Government which had