THE. FIGHT ING FIFTIES 121

Hshed authorities on behalf of discontented radical minorities.
Behind the convenient cloak of parliamentary forms, British
politicians in opposition, and sometimes In office* did a good
deal of this.

* ••**•*•

In his bold, confident and even dashing behaviour towards
foreign rulers, one English statesman of the time above all others
represented the moral feelings, prejudices and generous if narrow
sympathies of his countrymen, Palmerston, who with one brief
break was Whig Foreign Secretary from 1830 to 1841, and again
from 1846 to 1852, was the pride of Britain and the enfant terrible
of Europe. In all that he said and did. In which there was much
shrewdness and an incontestable love of his country and her
institutions, he was animated by a belief that he was 'exposing
the powers of darkness. Except for a few over-travelled and
superior persons, every Englishman shared his faith and most
of them applauded the steps he took to give it effect. That these
were as often as not tactless, impetuous and needlessly pro-
vocative did not trouble them. However much they pained the
meticulous Prince Albert and Palmerston's own colleagues—it
was his rollicking practice to act first and consult afterwards—
they well suited the mood of England, rustic, middle-class or
proletarian. When In 1850 the honest draymen of Barclay's
Brewery chased an Austrian general, who was reputed to have
flogged some rebel Hungarian ladies, down Bankside into good
Mrs. Benfield's bedroom in the George public-house, and bom-
barded him with mud pies and cries of "Cut off his beard!'* they
were only enacting in' their own rough' way the familiar
Palmerstonian technique. They meant no harm but they wished
a foreign scoundrel to learn what an Englishman thought of him.

Rebukes and scrapes only enhanced Palinerston's popularity
and stimulated him to new outrages on the authoritarian pro-
prieties of Europe. Like a true Englishman he was irresistible
in recoil. His famous Civis Romanus sum speech In the summer
of 1850, after a vote of censure on his high-handed Don Padfico
policy, won the House round In spite of itself and made him,
not for the last time, the hero of his country. When eighteen
months later he was forced to resign after a further outrage on
the royal prerogative and the rights of his colleagues, the London
urchins, voicing the universal feeling of the common people*
paraded the streets singing;