The case of Don Pacifico was the cause of a general attack upon Palmerston's conduct of foreign affairs. In the House of Lords, Stanley carried a vote of censure on the particular incident. This was answered in the Commons by Roebuck's motion of general confidence in the whole policy. The debate lasted for six days, and Palmerston defended himself in the finest speech he ever made. He claimed to have maintained the honour of England, and to have entitled every subject of the Crown to boast of his citizenship like the old Romans. He was answered as brilliantly by Peel and Gladstone, by Molesworth, and by Cobden. "I protest," said the philosophic Radical, "against the honourable and learned gentleman's doctrines, which would {214} make us the political pedagogues of the world.... I maintain that one nation has no more right to interfere with the local affairs of another nation than one man has to interfere in the private affairs of another man."[270] Gladstone was less dogmatic but equally forcible, and it is in his speech rather than in those of Radicals and Manchester men that the real Liberal view of the case was expressed. He admitted that it might sometimes be right that one nation should interfere with another, and that if England ever interfered she should interfere on the side of liberty as against despotism. But his case against Palmerston was that he interfered on behalf of revolution before it was successful. We should interfere, if at all, to protect an established constitutional Government, and not to set it up. "The difference among us arises upon this question: Are we, or are we not, to go abroad and make occasions for the propagation even of the political opinions which we consider to be sound? I say we are not.... We must remember that if we claim the right not only to accept, when they come spontaneously and by no act of ours, but to create and catch at, opportunities for spreading in other countries the opinions of our own meridian, we must allow to every other nation a similar license both of judgment and of action. What is to be the result? That if in every country the name of England is to be the symbol and the nucleus of a party, the name of France and Russia, or of Austria, may and will be the same. And are you not, then, laying the foundation of a system hostile to the real interests of freedom, and destructive of the peace of the world?... Interference in foreign countries, sir, according to my mind, should be rare, deliberate, decisive in character, and effectual for its end.... I protest against these anticipations of occasion, on every ground both of policy and of justice. The general doctrine is that we are not entitled to recognize a government, far less to suggest one, until we see it established, and have presumptive evidence that it springs from a national source."[271]