quarrels alike endless and aimless; and all this with a labouring after
melodramatic stage effect, and a regardlessness of consequences
perfectly unprecedented." We were, in the words of truth and soberness,
fast losing our moral ascendency in Europe--by a series of querulous,
petty, officious, needless, undignified interpositions; by the
exhibition of a vacillating and short-sighted policy; by appearing
(novel position for Great Britain) "willing to wound, but yet afraid to
strike;" by conceiving and executing idle and preposterous schemes of
aggrandizement and conquest. To go no further in Europe than our
immediate neighbour, France, let us ask whether Lord Palmerston did not
bring us to the very verge, and keep us at it for many months, of actual
war with that power, which is always unhappily eager to "cry hurra, and
let slip the dogs of war;" and with reference to _us_, to go out of
their way to create occasions for misunderstanding, and hostilities?
Were we not really on the verge of war?--of a war which would have
instantly kindled all over Europe a war of extermination? Not, however,
to descend to the discussion of recent occurrences familiar to every
body, we shall very briefly advert to the state of our relations with
America, with China, and of our affairs in British India, when Sir
Robert Peel assumed the direction of affairs. Lord Palmerston has never
been sufficiently called to account for his long, most disgraceful, and
perilous neglect of our serious differences with America; and which had
brought us to within a hair's-breadth of a declaration of war, which,
whatever might have been its issue, (possibly not difficult to have
foreseen,) would have been disastrous to both countries, and to one of
them utterly destructive. It is notorious that within the last eighteen
or twenty months, every arrival from the west was expected to bring
intelligence of the actual commencement of hostilities. The state of
public feeling towards us in America was being every hour more
exasperated and malignant. The accession of the present Government