Lord Palmerston, by whom our foreign policy for the last twenty years has been mainly conducted, is a man of great talent, both for eloquence and business, and of extraordinary energy and powers of application. The charm and grace of his manners are such that they disarm the most hostile of his opponents in the intercourse of private society; and such was the vigour of his application, that he conducted nearly the whole business of the Foreign Office himself, and reduced the labour of his secretaries and clerks to the mere copying of despatches and answering routine letters. He was perfectly master of all the details of his department, and is probably better acquainted than any man alive with the intricacies of a diplomacy, which, from the commanding position of England, has come to embrace the whole civilised world. No man, when called to account in Parliament for any of his acts which had brought the country to the very verge of hostility, could defend himself with more intrepidity, or carry away the House by a more eloquent and intrepid assertion of the principles, or appeal to the feelings, which find a responsive echo in the most moving, because the noblest and most disinterested, chords of the British heart.
Yet, with all this, he was one of the most dangerous Ministers that ever held the portfolio of the Foreign Office in Great Britain; and at the period he was displaced, his removal had become, in a manner, a matter of necessity, if we would avoid an immediate rupture with the principal Continental powers. The reason was, that his ideas were entirely at variance with the policy of the ruling party in the country; and his ambition for his country not less inconsistent with the situation into which, by the general policy of the Cabinet, it had been brought, and the views which he himself entertained on the social institutions of the world. He had been bred in the school of Mr Pitt and Lord Castlereagh, and his ideas of the position and influence of England were founded on the state of the country when it had a million of men in arms and a thousand vessels of war in the royal navy. He forgot that this was not the condition of the country after thirty years of unbroken peace; that the spirit which called forth such vast armaments had expired with the necessities which created it; that 1851 was not 1815, nor the school of Mr Cobden that of Mr Pitt. The consequence was, that by his dignified and patriotic, but withal imprudent and ill-timed assertion of national demands, he brought us repeatedly to the very verge of hostility with the most formidable powers on the Continent, at the very time when, from the total want of any preparation for hostilities in the country, and the pitiable state of weakness to which our defensive establishments had been reduced, nothing but disaster was to be anticipated from their commencement.