LORD PALMERSTON HANDING HIS PORTFOLIO TO A SUCCESSOR.
LAST week we directed the attention of our readers to the fact, that the expenditure of money and waste of human life occasioned by Lord PALMERSTON'S interference in the proper affairs of the Ottoman empire, had, after a lapse of two years, left matters nearly as they were. MEHEMET Aar had a chance of obtaining the office of Prime Minister to the Porte at the beginning of the Syrian troubles, and he has a chance of obtaining it still. British agents complained that French emissaries were intriguing with a view to increase the influence of their nation in the Levant ; and the same complaints are now urged with, if possible, increased vehemence. Much has been unsettled in Syria, but nothing has been settled. And yet Ministers say in the queen's Speech, " that the objects for which the treaty of the 15th July 1840 was concluded have been accomplished." If that is true, the treaty must have been con- cluded merely to pass the time while our rulers were waiting to see what the chapter of accidents would cast up, for it is clear that nothing has been done. The "extraordinary expenses" occasioned by the " events in the Mediterranean" are enumerated in the Speech among the items of the excess of expenditure over income; but care is taken to conceal the fact that nothing has been got for these " extraordinary expenses." It is a current account, the close and the sum-total of which no one can conjecture. There is almost as much nonchalance in this way of dealing with the Turkish question, as in that adopted with regard to the Chinese one—" Her Majesty regrets that negotiations between her pleni- potentiaries in China and the Chinese Government have not yet been brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and that it has been ne- cessary to call into action the forces which her Majesty has sent to the China seas : but her Majesty still trusts that the Emperor of China will see the justice of the demands which her Majesty's plenipotentiaries have been instructed to make." What shadow of a ground is there for such a hope ? Has the Emperor of Chian shown any symptom of an inclination to yield ? Do Ministers ex- pect us to believe that two years bungling on the part of those em- ployed by Great Britain is a sufficient guarantee that the business of the third year will be dexterously managed ? Have they gauged the capacity of their employes for blundering and found it ex. haunted ? Do they imagine that good management is a mere ne- gation of bad management ? Only upon such assumptions can any hope of a speedy termination of the Chinese difficulties be based.
Indeed, the authors of the Speech do not venture to hint at the time that may be required to bring the Emperor to see the justice of her Majesty's demands. There is something peculiarly offen- sive in the manner in which the Speech trifles with these two important topics, and indeed upon the whole of our foreign affairs. The tone is that of languid coxcombry washing its hands of an in- tricate piece of business. It is as if Lord PALMERSTON were lisp- ing to his successor—" Well, I am rid of this perplexity ! see what you can make of it." Delighted to hand over to another the task of unravelling the knotted clue, it nowise burdens his conscience that the entanglement has been his own work.
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