ow used
his domestic enemies to further his own designs of national
aggrandisement. How war broke out between the small power and the two
great powers of Austria and Prussia, and how the small power was
ruthlessly crushed; by what infinite and complex machinations the
diplomacy of Europe found itself paralysed; how Prussia audaciously
possessed herself of territory that would give her a deep-water port, and
the head of a channel that would unite two great seas; how all this ended
in Prussia, "the Piedmont of the north," doing what Cavour in his Piedmont
of the south had foretold that she would be glad to do; how at Sadowa
(July 3, 1866) Austria was driven out of her long hegemony, and Hanover
incorporated; and to what a train of amazing conflicts in western Europe,
to what unexpected victories, territorial change, dynastic ruin, this so
resistlessly led up--here is a narrative that belongs to the province of
history. Yet it has a place in any political biography of the Palmerston
administration.

In such an era of general confusion, the English cabinet found no powerful
or noble part to play. Still they went far--almost too far to
recede--towards embarking in a continental war on behalf of Denmark, that
would have been full of mischief to herself, of little profit to her
client, and could hardly have ended otherwise than in widespread disaster.
Here is one of the very few instances in which the public opinion of the
country at the eleventh hour reined back a warlike minister. Lord
Palmerston told the House of Commons in the summer of 1863 that, if any
violent attempt were made to overthrow the rights of Denmark or to
interfere with its independence and integrity, he was convinced that those
who made the attempt would find in the result that "it would not be
Denmark alone with which they would have to contend."(87) This did indeed
sound like a compromising declaration of quite sufficient emphasis.

It seems, says Mr. Gladstone,(88) that this statement was
generally and not unnaturally interpreted as a promise of support
from England. Lord Palmerston does not seem to have added any
condition or reservation. Strange as it may appear, he had spoken
entirely of his own motion and without the authority or knowledge
of his cabinet, in which indeed, so far as my memory serves,
nothing had happened to render likely any declaration of any kind
on the subject. I have no means of knowing whether h