Li¥E OF OOBDEN.
OHAP.
swenty-six millions of armaments, principally as a defence
:against France,”
“From what I hear,” he continued, * the Cabinet is con"
cerned with the mighty question whether France is to bake 8
bit of territory from Morocco. We are, I suppose, to protest
from Gibraltar against anything so shocking to us as picking
and stealing our neighbour’s territory going on within view
of that reputable possession of ours. We have taken a whole
empire from a Mahometan sovereign in Asia, and we are
horrified at France taking a province in the same latitude
from a Mahometan sovereign in Africa. For my part, it
France took the whole of Africa, I do not see what harm
she would do us or anybody else save herself.”’*
It will one day seem incredible that two keen and
patriotic statesmen of the eminence which Lord Palmerston
and Lord John Russell held in the public esteem, should ab
this stage of our history have so misconceived the relative
importance of things, as to think the very remotest doings of
any foreign government a matter of real and primary importence,
and an extension of our trade, however vast it might
promise to be, a matter so purely secondary as hardly to be
worth an hour’s serious attention. Ata Lord Mayor’s dinner;
or ab a meeting at Manchester, each of them often uttered
the stereotyped sentences about commercial prosperity being
the basis of British greatness. But neither of them had
what religioas writers call a living sense of the extent to
which such words were true. They were really thinking
all the time of strong despatches and spirited representa-4
The source of the uneasiness in Downing Street was the dispute between
Bpain and Morocco, as to the boundaries of the Spanish territory ronnd
Ceuta. “It is plain,” Lord Palmerston wrote to Lord John Russell, that
France aims through Spain at getting fortified points on each side of the
Gut of Gibraltar ”—with the ultimate view of © shutting us out of the Mediberranean”
(Ashloy’s Life, ii. 874). The inference as to the designs of
France is a masterpiece of the perverse ingenuity of the Palmerstonis
polioy of alarm.
