Meanwhile there were other complications further afield which required attention. The Crimean war was hardly over before England found herself involved in two little wars in the East. One of them was a direct consequence of the great struggle with the Czar in 1854-55. While it was still in progress, the Shah of Persia had behaved with scant courtesy to the British minister at his court, thinking that England was too much engrossed in the strife in Europe to resent his conduct. Finally, he had invaded Afghanistan and taken Herat, though warned that such action meant war, for, as Persia was now under Russian influence, this advance toward India could not be tolerated. In the autumn of 1856 Lord Palmerston thought that England was at leisure to chastise the Persians. An army from India was landed at Bushire; it beat the Shah's troops at the battle of Kooshaub, and occupied most of the ports of Southern Persia. Thus brought to reason, Nasr-ud-din asked for peace, and obtained it on evacuating Herat (March, 1857). That he chose to sue for terms at this moment chanced to be most fortunate for England, for the army which returned from Persia was sorely needed in India, to take part in subduing the great mutiny in that country, which we shall have to notice in another chapter.

The second little war in which the English were engaged in 1857 was with China. The mandarins of Canton had seized a small trading vessel, the Arrow, flying the British flag, and imprisoned the crew. Lord Palmerston never endured for a moment high-handed acts committed by a barbarous power. He declared war, sent an army and fleet against China, and seized first the forts which command Canton, and afterwards the more important Taku forts, which guard the way to Pekin up the Pei-Ho river. In the end the British troops, aided by a French force, compelled the Emperor of China to pay an indemnity of £4,000,000, and to open several ports to English commerce (1860). The length of the second Chinese war resulted from the distraction of the English arms to the great mutiny in India. If that struggle had not been raging, the forces of the effete Eastern power would have been crushed much sooner.

Long before the end of this weary little war, the attention of the English government was called back to affairs in Europe. The disturbing element was Louis Napoleon, who was once more striving to win personal profit by fostering the old quarrels of other nations. He had half promised to do something to deliver the Italians from the bitter bondage to Austria which they had endured since 1848. But he was weak and vacillating, and dallied so long that some Italian exiles, headed by one Orsini, tried in revenge to murder him by throwing a bomb into his carriage.

This attempted assassination led, strange as it may appear, to the temporary displacement of Palmerston from power. Orsini had formed his plot and made his bombs in London, and the French government hotly pressed for the seizure and extradition of his accomplices, as would-be murderers. The prime minister, who wished to keep on good terms with the Emperor, replied by proposing to the English Parliament the "Conspiracy to Murder Bill," which placed political assassination-plots among the offences punishable by penal servitude for life, whether the crime took place in or out of England. But, unfortunately for Palmerston, the French press, and more especially the French army, were using at the time very threatening language, which was deeply resented on this side of the Channel. Special offence was given by an address to the Emperor by certain French colonels, which asked him to permit his army to "destroy the infamous haunt in which machinations so infernal are hatched." The opposition charged Palmerston with cringing to the angry clamour of France, though the Conspiracy Bill in itself was a rational measure enough. The unfounded charge shook for a moment the confidence which the nation and the House of Commons felt in the old minister. His bill was thrown out, and he resigned (February, 1858).

No Liberal ministry could be formed without Palmerston's aid; so the Queen sent for the Conservatives. Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli took office, as they had done in 1852, though they had not a majority in Parliament to back them. As on the previous occasion, their ministry was merely a stop-gap, doomed from the first to a speedy end. They clung to office till 1858 had passed by, and well into the following year. Disraeli, who was, as he said, trying hard to "educate his party," strove to win popular favour by showing that the Conservatives could be friends of domestic reform and progress as much as the Liberals. He brought in a Reform Bill, extending the household franchise both in town and country, but giving extra votes to persons of education and property. This very rational measure was greeted with derision by the Liberals, who called the new qualifications for voters which Disraeli wished to introduce "fancy franchises," and insisted on keeping to the old idea, which made householding alone the test of citizenship.

The Reform Bill dropped, but the Conservatives, in their short term of power, conferred one great boon on the nation by encouraging and organizing the "Volunteer Movement." The angry language of the French army at the time of the Orsini plot had provoked both resentment and alarm in England. To guard against the peril of sudden invasion, it was felt that the small regular army and the militia were not numerous enough. Accordingly men of all classes came forward and formed themselves into volunteer corps, like the old levies of 1803. They undertook to arm and train themselves at their own expense, and to take the field for the defence of the realm, whenever peril of invasion should arise. The Derby government encouraged this patriotic scheme: 170,000 men were enrolled in the year 1859, and the Volunteer force, though at first it was hampered by the red tape of the War Office, and somewhat derided by the regulars, has taken a fixed and valuable place in the national line of defence.

Fortunately, the French scare had soon blown over. Louis Napoleon was scheming against Austria, not against England. The great Sardinian statesman Cavour had induced him to pledge himself to deliver Italy from its oppressors, and after much vacillation the Emperor declared war on Francis Joseph II., and sent his armies over the Alps. He beat the Austrians at Magenta and Solferino, and the Italians vainly hoped that he would aid them to set up a kingdom of United Italy. But he suddenly stopped short after rescuing Lombardy alone, and made peace with the Austrian enemy. Lombardy was united to Sardinia, but the selfish and greedy Emperor took Nice and Savoy from his own ally in return for his aid, and refused to free Central or Southern Italy. Abandoned by him, the Italians delivered themselves. Sudden insurrections drove out the foreign rulers of Tuscany, Parma, and Modena, and the hero Garibaldi expelled the Bourbons from Naples and Sicily. Thus a kingdom of Italy was created in spite of the French Emperor (1860-1). But he sent troops to Rome to guard the Pope, and would not permit Cavour and Garibaldi to complete their work by adding the ancient capital to the dominions of Victor Emmanuel.

Long ere the Italian war was over, Lord Derby's Conservative government had been defeated, and had retired from office. Palmerston's doings of 1858 had quickly been forgiven and forgotten by the nation, and he returned to office, which he held till his death six years later.

It was well that his strong and practised hand should be at the helm, for the years 1860-65 were full of delicate problems of foreign policy, which more than once brought England within measurable distance of war. A most formidable difficulty cropped up when the great civil war across the Atlantic broke out in 1861. The Southern States seceded from the Union, and proclaimed themselves independent under the name of the Confederate States of America. Their avowed reason for separating themselves from the North was that the Federal government, under Northern control, was infringing the rights of the individual States to self-government. But old sectional jealousies, and especially the fear of the Southern planters that the Northerners would interfere with their "great domestic institution," negro slavery, were really at the bottom of the quarrel.

English opinion was much divided on the subject of the American civil war. It was urged, on the one hand, that the North were fighting for the cause of liberty against slavery; and this idea affected many earnest-minded men to the exclusion of any other consideration. On the other side, it was urged that the Southern States were exercising an undoubted constitutional right in severing themselves from the Union, and this was true enough in itself. It was certain that the Southerners, who wished for Free Trade, were likely to be better friends of England than the protectionist North, which had always shown a bitter jealousy of English commerce. Many men were moved by the rather unworthy consideration that America was growing so strong and populous that she might one day become "the bully of the world," and welcomed a convulsion that threatened to split the Union into two hostile halves. Others illogically sympathized with the South merely because it was the weaker side, or because they thought the Southern planters better men than the hard and astute traders of the North. The Palmerston cabinet, with great wisdom, tried to steer a middle course and to avoid all interference. But when eleven powerful States joined in seceding, they thought themselves bound to recognize them as a belligerent power, and to treat them as a nation. This gave bitter offence to the North, and war nearly followed, for a United States cruiser in 1862 stopped the British steamer Trent, and took from her by force two envoys whom the Confederates were sending to Europe. This flagrant violation of the law of nations roused Lord Palmerston to vigorous action: he began sending troops to Canada, and demanded the restoration of the envoys Mason and Slidell under pain of war. President Lincoln and his advisers hesitated for a moment, but gave up their prisoners with a bad grace just as war seemed inevitable. Naturally this incident did not make the English people love the North any better.

Another cause of friction was destined to give trouble long after the civil war had ended. The United States ambassador in London summoned the English government to prevent the sailing from Liverpool of a vessel called the Alabama, which, as he declared, had been bought by the Confederates, and was destined to be used by them as a war-ship. The cabinet were somewhat slow in ordering the detention of the Alabama, which hurriedly put to sea, and justified the fears of the American minister by seizing and burning many scores of Northern vessels. This damage to commerce was charged to the account of England by the government of President Lincoln, and probably they had some ground for accusing the English officials of slackness. The grudge was carefully nursed in America, and put to good use when the war was over.

But the most painful form in which the American quarrel affected England was the dreadful cotton famine in Lancashire, which set in as the year 1862 wore on. The English mills had always subsisted on the cotton of the Southern States, and when the strict blockade instituted by the Northerners sealed up New Orleans, Charleston, and the other cotton ports, England suffered terribly for the want of raw material to keep her mills going. The mill-hands bore the stoppage of their work and wages with great courage and resignation, but they lived for months on the verge of starvation. A disaster as great as the Irish potato famine of 1846 was only prevented by lavish private charity, which sent £2,000,000 to the distressed districts of Lancashire, supplemented by the wise measures of the Government, who worked so well that hardly a life was lost in spite of the pinching poverty of the times. Cotton was at last brought from Egypt and India in quantities sufficient to set the mills going again, and by 1863 the worst of the trouble was over. In 1865 the Southern States were conquered, and the American cotton once more came in.

Wars nearer home were meanwhile beginning to distract the attention of the English from America. A quarrel between the King of Denmark and his German subjects in the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein led to the interference of Austria and Prussia. The inhabitants of the two duchies wished to cut themselves loose, and to join Germany. Bismarck, the iron-handed prime minister of Prussia, saw his way to make profit for his country out of the war, and induced the unwise Austrian government to join him in bringing force to bear against the Danes. The English looked upon the struggle as a mere case of bullying by the two German powers, and Palmerston used somewhat threatening language against them; but when he found that his usual ally, the Emperor of the French, was not prepared to help him, he drew back, and allowed the Austrians and Prussians to overrun the duchies. Beaten in the field, the Danish king had to consent to their cession.

To protest, and then to make no attempt to back up words with deeds, is somewhat humiliating. But this course was forced on Palmerston not only in the case of the Schleswig-Holstein war, but also in the case of Poland in the same year (1863). Treating the unfortunate Poles with even more than its usual rigour, the Russian government forced them to a fierce but hopeless insurrection. Palmerston sent a note to the Czar in favour of better treatment of Poland, but met with a rebuff, and was practically told to mind his own business. Not being ready to engage in a second Crimean war without Louis Napoleon's aid, he had to endure the affront. He was much censured for his useless interference, but it is hard to blame him either for his protest, or for his refusal to follow it up by plunging England into a dangerous war.

While these foreign affairs were engrossing most of the nation's attention, domestic matters caused little stir. After the cotton famine ended, the country entered into a cycle of very considerable growth and prosperity. Gladstone, once a Peelite, but now one of the most advanced of the progressive wing of the Liberal party, was now Chancellor of the Exchequer. Year after year he was able to announce a surplus, and to grant the remission of old taxes. His measures were judicious, but the constant growth of the revenue from increased prosperity, and the conclusion of a fortunate commercial treaty with France, were the real causes of his being able to produce his favourable budgets, and won him a financial reputation at a comparatively cheap expense of labour. But his name was rapidly growing greater, and it was beginning to be clear that he would be Palmerston's successor as leader of the Liberal party. The old premier did not view this prospect with much satisfaction. "Whenever he gets my place," he observed, "we shall have strange doings."

The succession was not long delayed. Lord Palmerston died on October 18, 1865, and, on the removal of his restraining hand, the Liberal party began to show new and rapid signs of change. For the first time it was about, under the guidance of its new leader, to frankly accept the principles of democracy, and to throw up its old alliance with the middle classes. Palmerston had been for so many years the leading figure in English politics, that his death, at the ripe age of eighty-one, seemed to end an epoch in domestic history. He was by far the most striking personage in the middle years of the century. Faults he had: somewhat over-hasty in action, somewhat flippant in language on occasion, too self-confident and too prone to self-laudation, he was yet so resourceful and so full of courage and patriotism that he won and merited the confidence of the nation more than any minister since the younger Pitt.