The debates on these Portuguese incidents are significant, not only because they reveal an almost universal acceptance of the principle of non-interference, but because they contain the ominous expressions of dissent from that principle which fell from the lips of Palmerston. Palmerston had succeeded Canning at the Foreign Office, and he always claimed to be Canning's {153} disciple as well as his successor. He formally joined the Whig party in 1830, and with the brief interval occupied by Peel's administration of 1841, dominated the foreign policy of England until his death in 1865. He had all Canning's hatred of foreign tyranny, but, in his case, generosity was mixed with an arrogance and vanity which increased his difficulties and often defeated his objects. "If by interference," he said in the Miguel debates, "is meant interference by force of arms, such interference, the Government are right in saying, general principles and our own practice forbade us to exert. But if by interference is meant intermeddling, and intermeddling in every way, and to every extent, short of military force, then I must affirm that there is nothing in such interference which the laws of nations may not in certain cases permit.... In like manner as in a particular community any bystander is at liberty to interfere to prevent a breach of the law of that community; so also, and upon the same principle, may any nation interpose to prevent a flagrant violation of the laws of the community of nations."[192] The bystander in a street row is an exact description of Palmerston in his foreign politics. It is in these passages that we find the explanation of a foreign policy which for a whole generation afterwards disturbed, irritated, and demoralized the whole civilized world. For the time being he continued Canning's policy with success. In spite of Wellington, he assisted to liberate the Greeks from the Turks in 1829, and it was largely owing to his bold opposition to France that Belgium burst the fetters imposed upon her by the Treaty of Vienna, and wrested her independence from Holland in 1830. In foreign affairs Liberalism had thus made a great advance since 1820. The interference in French domestic policy which was involved in the war of 1793 had never been repeated, and England, while herself respecting the rights of other nations, had actively assisted at the emancipation of Portugal, South America, Greece, and Belgium.