When we look back upon the affairs of that time, we see that there were two policies open.  Lord Palmerston’s was one, Cobden and Bright’s the other.  If we are to compare Lord Palmerston’s statesmanship and insight in the Eastern Question with that of his two great adversaries, it is hard, in the light of all that has happened since, to resist the conclusion that Cobden and Mr. Bright were right, and Lord Palmerston was disastrously wrong.  It is easy to plead extenuating circumstances for the egregious mistakes in Lord Palmerston’s policy about the Eastern Question, the Suez Canal, and some other important subjects; but the plea can only be allowed after it has been frankly recognized that they really were mistakes, and that these abused men exposed and avoided them.  Lord Palmerston, for instance, asked why the Czar could not be “satisfied, as we all are, with the progressively liberal system of Turkey.”  Cobden, in his pamphlet twenty years before, insisted that this progressively liberal system of Turkey had no existence.  Which of these two propositions was true may be left to the decision of those who lent to the Turk many millions of money on the strength of Lord Palmerston’s ignorant and delusive assurances.  It was mainly owing to Lord Palmerston, again, that the efforts of the war were concentrated at Sebastopol.  Sixty thousand English and French troops, he said, with the co-operation of the fleets, would take Sebastopol in six weeks.  Cobden gave reasons for thinking very differently, and urged that the destruction of Sebastopol, even when it was achieved, would neither inflict a crushing blow to Russia, nor prevent future attacks upon Turkey.  Lord Palmerston’s error may have been intelligible and venial; nevertheless, as a fact, he was in error and Cobden was not, and the error cost the nation one of the most unfortunate, mortifying, and absolutely useless campaigns in English history.  Cobden held that if we were to defend Turkey against Russia, the true policy was to use our navy, and not to send a land force to the Crimea.  Would any serious politician now be found to deny it?  We might prolong the list of propositions, general and particular, which Lord Palmerston maintained and Cobden traversed, from the beginning to the end of the Russian War.  There is not one of these propositions in which later events have not shown that Cobden’s knowledge was greater, his judgment cooler, his insight more penetrating and comprehensive.  The bankruptcy of the Turkish Government, the further dismemberment of its Empire by the Treaty of Berlin, the abrogation of the Black Sea Treaty, have already done something to convince people that the two leaders saw much further ahead in 1854 and 1855 than men who had passed all their lives in foreign chanceries and the purlieus of Downing Street.

It is startling to look back upon the bullying contempt which the man who was blind permitted himself to show to the men who could see.