THE FIGHTING FIFTIES 123

than in his sturdy resistance to French projects and disregard of
French pride. A contemporary, who had returned from Paris
shortly after his retirement in 1841, believed that, had Palmerston
continued much longer at the Foreign Office, nothing could
have prevented war between the two countries, seeing "that he
intrigued against France in every part of the world and with a
tenacity of purpose that was like insanity."1 Neither he nor the
public he so ably represented saw in this anything but a proper
distrust of a dangerous and slippery customer.2

• •»•••••

The Revolution of 1848 made France once more a republic.
Before the year was out, worse had happened. In a violent
revulsion of popular opinion against disorder and Socialist
excesses, a nephew of the great Napoleon was elected President.
The alarm aroused in England coincided with a period of mis-
giving about the nation's military and naval preparedness. As
always after a long peace, the army seemed quite insufficient for
any warlike task: its most serious preoccupations were sartorial
such as the new shell jacket and the peculiar-looking shako
recently designed for its use by Prince Albert. The aged Duke
of Wellington could not sleep at night for thinking of the
defenceless state of the coasts. Worse, the Navy itself was grow-
ing rusty. The greater part of the battle fleet was laid up in
harbour, "dismantled aloft and disarmed below." And in the
new inventions which had come to revolutionise maritime war-
fare like other human activities, the volatile and nimble-witted
French had stolen a dangerous march. In 1837 they had adopted
explosive shells in place of the solid shot that had won Trafalgar,
and their pioneer efforts with steamers in the early 'forties had
been more successful than those of the statelier and more con-
servative British Admiralty.

All this combined with the events in France to cause a good
deal of surface alarm. Yet the sense of England's superiority
was so innate and the general complacence and love of peace
and comfort so deep-rooted that it quickly died away. Punch

lGrevilZe, Memoirs, Part //, Yd. //, 82.

8Lord Holland, expressing the traditional Whig minority view of friendship
to revolutionary France, remarked to Palmerston, "For God's sake, if you are so fuU
of distrust of France, if you suspect all her acts and all her words, put the worst con-
struction on all she does, and are resolved to be on bad terms with her, call Parliament
together, ask for men and money, and fight it out with her manfully. Do this or
meet her in a friendly and conciliatory spirit, and cast aside all those suspicions
which make such bad blood between the two countries." GreviUe^ Memoirs^ fart //,
Vol. /, 335.