she would help neither the Spaniards against France and the Holy Alliance, nor the Turks against the Russians, nor the Poles against the Czar, nor the Hungarians against the Austrians, nor the Italians against the Kaiser, nor the Greeks against the Turks.  She settled all her disputes with the United States by negotiation, and showed no disposition to fight with France, except when she had all the rest of Europe on her side.  But this praise has not been deserved.  England did not quarrel with powerful countries, because she could not afford to enter upon costly warfare.  She had gone to the extent of her means when her debt had reached to four thousand million dollars, and she could not increase that debt largely until she should also have increased her wealth.  Time was required to add to her means, and to lessen her debt; and to such a state had her finances been reduced, that it is now twenty years since she began to derive a portion of her revenue from an income tax, which, imposed in the time of peace, was increased when war became inevitable.  The bonds she had given to keep the peace were too great to admit of her breaking it.  She did not fight, because she doubted her ability to fight successfully.  She had no wish to behold another suspension of cash payments by her national bank; and a general war would be sure to bring suspension.  But she was as ready as she had ever been to contend with the weak.  The Chinese and the Afghans did not find her very forbearing, though with neither of those peoples had she any just cause for war.

With the disunited States she has been as prompt to quarrel as she was slow to contend with the United States; and now she is one of the high contracting parties to the crusade against Mexico.  We say nothing of the Sepoy war, for that was a contest for ‘empire,’ as Earl Russell would say.  She could not, in the days of Clyde, give up what she had acquired in the days of Clive; and no one ought to blame her for what she did in India, though it can not be denied that the mutiny was the consequence of her own bad conduct in the East.  With Russia, Austria, and Prussia to back her, in 1840, she went to the verge of a war with France; but, in so doing, the government did that which the English nation by no means warmly approved; and the fall of the whig ministry, in 1841, was in no small part due to Lord Palmerston’s policy in the preceding year.  The Russian war was brought about by the action of the English people, who were angry with the Czar because his empire had the first place in Europe.  The government would have prevented that war from breaking out if it could, but popular pressure was too strong for it, and it had to give way.  The event has proved that the English government was wiser than were the English people, France alone having gained anything from the departure from what had become the policy of Europe; and for France to gain is not altogether for the benefit of England.