When the Reform Movement had grown irresistible, Lord Palmerston deserted the Tories, and slipped into the Whiggery camp. Although he had apprehended the danger of military despotism springing up, not from the presence of the King's German Legion on English soil, nor from keeping large standing armies, but only from the self-called reformers , he patronised, nevertheless, already in 1828, the extension of the franchise to such large industrial places as Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester. But why? Not because I am a friend to Reform, but because I am its decided enemy. He had persuaded himself that some timely concessions made to the overgrown manufacturing interest might be the surest means of escaping the introduction of general Reform. (House of Commons, June 17, 1828.) Once allied with the Whigs, he did not even pretend that their Reform Bill aimed at breaking through the narrow trammels of the Venetian Constitution, but, on the contrary, at the increase of its strength and solidity, by severing the middle classes from the people's Opposition. The feelings of the middle classes will be changed, and their dissatisfaction will be converted into that attachment to the Constitution which will give to it a vast increase of strength and solidity. He consoled the peers by telling them that the Reform Bill would neither weaken the influence of the House of Lords , nor put a stop to its interfering in elections. He told the aristocracy that the Constitution was not to lose its feudal character, the landed interest being the great foundation upon which rests the fabric of society and the institutions of the country. He allayed their fears by throwing out ironical hints that we have been charged with not being in earnest or sincere in our desire to give the people a real representation, that it was said we only proposed to give a different kind of influence to the aristocracy and the landed interest. He went even so far as to own that, besides the inevitable concessions to be made to the middle classes, disfranchisement, viz., the disfranchisement of the old Tory rotten boroughs for the benefit of new Whig boroughs, was the chief and leading principle of the Reform Bill. (House of Commons, March 24, 1831, and March 14, 1832.) It is now time to return to the performances of the noble lord in the foreign branch of policy. In 1823, when, in consequence of the resolutions of the Congress of Vienna, a French army was marched into Spain, in order to overturn the Constitution of that country, and to deliver it up to the merciless revenge of the Bourbon idiot and his suite of bigot monks, Lord Palmerston disclaimed any Quixotic crusades for abstract principles, any intervention in favour of the people, whose heroic resistance had saved England from the sway of Napoleon. The words he addressed on that occasion to his Whig adversaries are a true and lively picture of his own foreign policy, after he had become their permanent Minister for Foreign Affairs. He said: At last we arrive at the Greco-Turkish debates, which afforded Lord Palmerston the first opportunity of displaying publicly his unrivalled talents, as the unflinching and persevering advocate of Russian interests, in the Cabinet and in the House of Commons. One by one, he re-echoed all the watch-words given by Russia of Turkish monstrosities, Greek civilisation, religious liberty, Christianity, and so forth. At first we meet him repudiating, as the Minister for War, any intention of passing a censure upon the meritorious conduct of Admiral Codrington, which has caused the destruction of the Turkish fleet at Navarino, although he admits that this battle took place against a power with which we are not at war, and that it was an untoward event. (House of Commons, January 31, 1828.) Then, having retired from office, he opened the long series of his attacks upon Lord Aberdeen, by reproaching him with having been too slow in executing the orders of Russia. Prince Metternich was, as is generally known, at that time opposing the encroachments of Russia, and accordingly her diplomatic agents I remind you of the despatches of Pozzo di Borgo and Prince Lieven had been advised to represent Austria as the great enemy of Grecian emancipation and of European civilisation, the furtherance of which was the exclusive object of Russian diplomacy. The noble lord follows, of course, in the beaten track. By the narrowness of her views, the unfortunate prejudices of her policy, Austria has almost reduced herself to the level of a second-rate power ; and in consequence of the temporising policy of Aberdeen, England is represented as the keystone of that arch of which Miguel and Spain, Austria and Mahmoud are the component parts. ... People see in the delay in executing the treaty of July not so much fear of Turkish resistance, as invincible repugnance to Grecian freedom. (House of Commons, June 11, 1829.) For half a century one phrase has stood between Russia and Constantinople the phrase of the integrity of the Turkish Empire being necessary to the balance of power. I object, exclaims Palmerston on February 5, 1830, to the policy of making the integrity of the Turkish dominion in Europe an object essentially necessary to the interests of Christian and civilised Europe. Again he assails Aberdeen because of his anti-Russian diplomacy : Arrived at this point, I must recall to memory some few historical facts, in order to leave no doubt about the meaning of the noble lord's philo-Hellenic feelings. Russia having seized upon Gokcha, a strip of land bordering on the Lake of Sevan (the undisputed possession of Persia), demanded as the price of its evacuation the abandonment of Persia's claims to another portion of her own territory, the lands of Kapan. Persia not yielding, was overrun, vanquished, and forced to subscribe to the treaty of Turcomanchai, in February, 1828. According to this treaty, Persia had to pay an indemnity of two millions sterling to Russia, to cede the provinces of Erivan and Nakhitchevan, including the fortresses of Erivan and Abbassabad, the exclusive purpose of this arrangement being, as Nicholas stated, to define the common frontier by the Araxes, the only means, he pretended, of preventing any future disputes between the two empires. But at the same time he refused to give back Talish and Mogan, which are situated on the Persian bank of the Araxes. Finally, Persia pledged herself to maintain no navy on the Caspian Sea. Such were the origin and the results of the Russo-Persian war. As to the religion and the liberty of Greece, Russia cared at that epoch as much about them as the God of the Russians cares now about the keys of the Holy Sepulchre, and the famous Cupola. It was the traditional policy of Russia to excite the Greeks to revolt, and, then, to abandon them to the revenge of the Sultan. So deep was her sympathy for the regeneration of Hellas, that she treated them as rebels at the Congress of Verona, acknowledging the right of the Sultan to exclude all foreign intervention between himself and his Christian subjects. In fact, the Czar offered to aid the Porte in suppressing the rebellion ; a proposition which was, of course, rejected. Having failed in that attempt, he turned round upon the Great Powers with the opposite proposition, To march an army into Turkey, for the purpose of dictating peace under the walls of the Seraglio. In order to hold his hands bound by a sort of common action, the other Great Powers concluded a treaty with him at London, July 6, 1827, by which they mutually engaged to enforce, if need be by arms, the adjustment of the differences between the Sultan and the Greeks. A few months after she had signed that treaty, Russia concluded another treaty with Turkey, the treaty of Akerman, by which she bound herself to renounce all interference with Grecian affairs. This treaty was brought about after Russia had induced the Crown Prince of Persia to invade the Ottoman dominions, and after she had inflicted the injuries on the Porte in order to drive it to a rupture. After all this had taken place, the resolutions of the London treaty of July 6, 1827, were presented to the Porte by the English Ambassador, or in the name of Russia and the other powers. By virtue of the complications resulting from these frauds and lies Russia found at last the pretext for beginning the war of 1828 and 1829. That war terminated with the treaty of Adrianople, whose contents are summed up in the following quotations from O Neill s [Sir John O Neill, British diplomat] celebrated pamphlet on the Progress of Russia in the East : These are the facts. Now look at the picture drawn of them by the master hand of Lord Palmerston: When he became the Whig-incarnation of the Minister for Foreign Affairs, he improved upon this statement: My readers will now understand Sir Robert Peel's telling the noble lord, in a public session of the House, that he did not know whose representative he was. 
The Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston by Karl Marx