Between 1830 and 1841 Palmerston was chiefly concerned with the Iberian Peninsula and the Near East. In 1832 he very rightly sent a fleet to the Tagus to stop Miguel's abuse of British subjects, and he declined with equal propriety to prevent France from doing the same on her own behalf. He then proceeded to open negotiations for filling the thrones of both Portugal and Spain, which were inconsistent with Liberal principle and produced no result except to excite the jealousy of France. Hostility to France combined with hostility to Russia to shape his policy in Turkey and Egypt. He had at this time a belief, which he never lost, that Turkey could regenerate herself. When Mohammed Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, threw off his allegiance to the Sultan, and not only expelled the Turks from his own territory but conquered a large part of their possessions in Syria, { 211} Palmerston interfered to prevent his advance. France had shown sympathy with Egypt, Russia with Turkey. To leave the matter where it stood meant the permanent separation of the two Eastern countries, neither strong enough to stand alone, and each therefore dependent on and dominated by one of the two European Powers whom Palmerston disliked. At all costs Turkey must be kept from Russia and Egypt from France. The British fleet was therefore sent to Syria, and Mohammed Ali was stripped of his conquests and sent back to his own country. This was a clear case of the exploitation of weaker races in the interest of England's private disputes with other Powers.
The Chinese War of 1840, in which English ships and men were used to force the opium traffic upon China, was hardly Palmerston's fault, and was begun and conducted by the British diplomatic agents. In 1841 he rendered great service to the cause of international friendship by procuring the European Powers to consent to a convention for the suppression of the Slave Trade, and thus completed the work which had been begun by Wilberforce and Clarkson more than fifty years before. In 1846, after the fall of Peel, he began his second term of office by a refusal to join France and Austria in interfering by force of arms in the internal disorders of Switzerland, and procured a settlement by mediation. This was as wise and temperate a course as could be required. But immediately afterwards he began a series of extraordinary violations of Liberal principle. In July, 1846, he instructed the British Ambassador in Spain to lecture the Spanish Government on its unconstitutional domestic policy, and in order to thwart Louis Philippe of France, meddled with the marriage of the young Queen. In November he sent a fleet to Lisbon to overawe the Portuguese Junta, and re-established the Queen, who had been expelled, on condition of her giving up her absolutism and undertaking to govern with free institutions. In the next year he sent Lord Minto to Italy on a pedagogic tour among the various Governments, bidding them set their houses in order before the prevailing unrest upset them. { 212} All this was in the worst possible manner, and love of national freedom was strangely mixed with jealousy of France and Austria. In 1848, the year of Revolutions, when every country in Europe except Russia was disturbed, and even England suffered a final and sporadic outbreak of Chartism, Palmerston indulged his love of freedom to the full. Neither he nor Lord John Russell concealed their sympathy with the Poles, the Hungarians, and the Italians, and while they declined to join in Continental wars, they upheld the Sultan in his refusal to give up Hungarian refugees to Austria and Russia. No Liberal could find much cause for complaint in this sympathetic policy, even though it incurred the hostility of reactionary Governments. Contrasted with Russia assisting Austria to put down the Hungarians, and with the French Republic helping Austria to destroy the Republic of Rome, England at this time appeared conspicuously magnanimous. But in 1851 Palmerston's gay pugnacity led him into a gross blunder.