110. The choice: wielding a big stick or speaking softly

As Melbourne left the scene, so men like John Russell could step into his place. Russell had indeed been adding to his reputation as a liberal, just as his Whig Party was increasingly being transformed into the Liberal Party.

A fellow liberal, but increasingly a rival, was Lord Palmerston. He was highly critical of his successor as Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, but the behaviour Palmerston denounced as weak seems more a case of using soft speech, rather than simply wielding a big stick. How he handled tensions with America rather supports that viewpoint. By way of contrast, Aberdeen did sometimes resort to the stick, in particular in two conflicts that Palmerston had got going, in China and in Afghanistan, and in the first it was ugly, while in the second it was disastrous.

Illustration: Elizabeth Butler Remnants of an army, showing William Brydon reaching the British fort at Jalalabad, after the retreat from Kabul.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License