28 - ENGLISH SAGA

the Bow Street runners in pitched battle and assert their ancient
privileges. A yeoman farmer of the same place left a sum of
money to cover his grave with spikes pointing upwards, swearing
that he had never been trodden on when alive and would not be so
when dead.

Such a type was well content with its own forms of .life: it
had no wish to oppress others but had small use for foreigners or
their ways. At the Egham races William IV called out to Lord
Albemarle to tell him the name of a passing dandy whose face was
unfamiliar. Albemarle replied that it was Count D'Orsay.- "I had
no notion it was," replied the King: then, mustering all his
energy, gave vent to the natural feelings of an honest English
sailor in a loud "Damn him." "If the French attempt to bully
and intimidate us," wrote the Foreign Secretary to the Prime
Minister in 1840, "the only way of meeting their menaces is by
quietly- telling them we are not afraid, and by showing them,
first, that we are stronger than they are and, secondly, that they
have more vulnerable points than we have." And to the British
Ambassador in Paris, the same organ voice of England spoke
more expressly, "If Thiers should again hold to you the language
of menace . . . convey to him in the most friendly and in-
offensive manner possible, that if France . . . begins a war, she
will to a certainty lose her ships, colonies and commerce before
she sees the end of it; that her army of Algiers will cease to
give her anxiety and that Mehemet Ali"—the French prot6g&—
"will just be chucked into the Nile."1

To a man like Palmerston—and his very Englishness made
him the idol of England—abuse of the foreigner was no more than
a national prerogative which only a scoundrelly trouble-seeker
would take amiss. When he favoured his Devonshire constituents
with his views on French colonisation he was cheered to the iecho.

"There is a contrast of which we may have reason to be
proud, between the progress of our arms in the East, and the
operations which a neighbouring power, France, is now
carrying on in Africa. The progress of the British Army in
Asia has been marked by a scrupulous reference to justice,
an inviolable respect for property, an abstinence from any-
thing which could tend to wound the feelings and prejudices
of the people . . . The different system pursued in Africa

XJ?«% Pdmersten, /,