ighty weight upon
European statesmen at the fall of Napoleon; the natural effect of this
close contact with the vast and formidable problems of 1814-5 was to
make him regard the state-system then founded as a structure on which
only reckless or criminal unwisdom would dare to lay a finger. The
fierce storms of 1848 were not calculated to loosen this fixed idea, or
to dispose him to any new views of either the relations of Austria to
Italy, or of the uncounted mischiefs to the Peninsula of which those
relations were the nourishing and maintaining cause. In a debate in the
Lords two years before (July 20, 1849), Lord Aberdeen had sharply
criticised the British government of the day for doing the very thing
officially, which Mr. Gladstone was now bringing moral compulsion on him
to attempt unofficially. Lord Palmerston had called attention at Vienna
to the crying evils of the government of Naples, and had boldly said
that it was little wonder if men groaning for long years under such
grievances and seeing no hope of redress, should take up any scheme,
however wild, that held out any chance of relief. This and other
proceedings indicating unfriendliness to the King of Naples and a veiled
sympathy with rebellion shocked Aberdeen as much as Lamartine's
trenchant saying that the treaties of Vienna were effete. In attacking
Palmerston's foreign policy again in 1850, he protested that we had
deeply injured Austria and had represented her operations in Italy in a
completely false light. In his speech in the Pacifico debate, he had
referred to the Neapolitan government without approval but in guarded
phrases, and had urged as against Lord Palmerston that the less they
admired Neapolitan institutions and usages, the more careful ought they
to be not to impair the application of the sacred principles that govern
and harmonise the intercourse between states, from which you never can
depart without producing mischiefs a thousand fold greater than any
promised advantage. Aberdeen was too upright and deeply humane a man to
resist the dreadful evidence that was now forced upon him. Still that
evidence plainly shook down his own case of a few months earlier, and
this cannot have been pleasing. He felt the truth and the enormity of
the indictment laid before him; he saw the prejudice that would
inevitably be done to conservatism both at home and on the European
continent, by the publication of such an indictment from the lips of
such a plea