The Press. — London, England, 1858-10-23 00:00:00

THE PRESS, OCTOBER 23, 1858 thinking, Lord Palmerston's all but total defi ciency in those higher qualities which are ne cessary for a Prime Minister of England in time of peace : Taorlughly acquainted with the Foreign Department,he was ignorant, in a degree hardly to be credited except upon a careful observation, of our domestic affairs. He regarded them with something of the supercilious temper to which he gave vent during the Indian debates with respect to the Court of Directors, as mercantile and vulgar. Few of the speeches he delivered as Minister on questions of legislative procedure or executive government were received otherwise than with a shrug, a smile, or a sigh; not one of them will ever be consulted as a magazine stored with facts or arguments, or will render aid to those who may hereafter have occasion either to state or to determine similar points. He had not, like Lord John Russell, learned the letter or imbibed the spirit of our history; he had not, like Sir Robert Peel, the gifts—whether from nature or art—of comprehensiveness or sagacity in apprehending public interests, or in directing the great organ on whose action it depends whether they shall be made or marred. His long administration of foreign affairs, keeping him practically out of contact with British institutions, appeared to have rendered him incapable of appreciating the rights and dignities of Parliament, in which every wise Minister seeks to be strong by identi fying himself with it in sentiment, sympathy, and interest. The benefits which ought to have resulted froth his great knowledge of one great department were more than neutralized by the spirit of mingled turbulence and levity which he carried, as its head, into the administration of its affairs, and which, as first Minister of the Crown, he transferred into them with yet fuller effect through the supple and unresisting medium of Lord Clarendon. Thus his stock-in-trade as a Peace-Minister was wholly inade quate, or rather nearly null. It followed that ho could only be a Peace-Minister by keeping ali• - e the passions, maintaining the semblances, and thus ever walking on the brink, of war. Accordingly, his two years of peace administration were agitated by abundant quarrels both of ink and blood. With America we had the most serious quarrel since the war of 1815. With Naples we were embroiled up to a point to which we could not be justified in proceeding unless by reasons that would have justified and required our going farther. With France we contrived to fall into 7epextett collision ; and only two months before the grand humiliation of last January, the Miuisterhimself, with an incredible, and at the same time a vulgar, rash ness, boasted in public of his ability to encounter her in arms if she should attempt invasion. Thus came about one of the very greatest publics evils ; the spirit of war was carried into the relations of peace : it gave the tone to the ordinary course and administration of our affairs, even within those precincts of European civilization which are subject to the restraints of public law and usage, and of the most enlightened body of opinion in the world. Beyond those precincts, these inconvenient manacles were entirely shuffled off. The wretched war with Persia remains among the records of the Palmerston administration, while among its legacies was inherited the quarrel with Chinn, far more deeply tainted in its origin, if now approaching to a more successful conclusion. It became sufficiently plain, and the proof has been made more complete by the negative evidence of the last six months, that under the incubus of the late Administration, thoughl we might have the name of peace, we could not have the substance of tranquillity; for, as the inveterate brawler and duellist finds all society quarrelsome, so a Palmerston Ministry had continually to lament the diffioulties they encountered in bringing foreign nations to anything like reason and justice. For the character and interests of England abroad, this mode of action was injurious beyond descrip tion, and many long years must pass before we cease to suffer from its effects. At home, as an affair of party in terests, it was simply a game of neck or nothing. If and while it succeeded, it must succeed brilliantly, for it im plied a state of sustained excitement in the notional mind ; hut it was unlikely to succeed for any considerable time ; and, whether the effervescence were long or short in its duration, it was certain to he followed by that (Barnet ra ection which waits upon political not less than upon phy sisal excess. In support of this view of the character of Lord Palmerston as a Minister, the reviewer relics not merely on those startling evidences of a more recent date which at length opened the eyes of Parliament and the country ; he adduces earlier instances of " the unskilful mixture of bullying " and fear" which marked the foreign policy of England under the late Administration. The peremptory refusal, in 1855, to rule the questions of the Isle of Serpents and the Bessarahian fron tier otherwise than by force, and the consequent despatch of the British fleet to the Black Sea, contrary to the Treaty of Paris, followed by acquiescence in the adjudication of a Contbrence ; the irritating quarrel with America on the sub ject of Ruatan and the Mosquito territory, fol lowed by an abandonment of pretensions which ought never to have been advanced; the shabby manoeuvres for evading the municipal law of America against foreign recruiting, followed by tame submission to the insulting expulsion of Sir John Crampton and three or four British Consuls in his train,—are all cited as instances of political delinquency which, with many others of loss note, might, but for the Palmerston infatua tion which for a time possessed Parliament and the country, have proved fatal to the late Premier, 1033 Nor is it altogether and only to the vices of his foreign policy that the noble Viscount's downfall is attributed by the reviewer : the bill of indict ment which he has drawn up against him con tains sundry counts relative to his domestic domestic policy,—less numerous only because one of the chief counts is the absence of anything like energetic Parliamentary action, until the last year—the year in which, through a monstrous abuse of dictatorial power over the House of Commons, the statute-book was defaced by the introduction of the Divorce Act, and by a series of gross blunders and jobs in the passing of the Act for the transfer of testamentary jurisdiction from the ecclesiastical to the civil courts, a host of inexperienced and incompetent functionaries was substituted in the place of the existing staff of experienced and competent officers, and that at a cost to the country of an annuity of 200,0001. payable to the displaced ecclesiastical officers. In the catalogue of Lord Palmerston's domestic sins the history of the Crimean inquiry, with its glaring inconsistencies, its mean shifts, and its cruel scandals, is, as might be expected, not preter mitted. Amidst such an abundance of materials for impeaching the fallen Minister before the tribunal of public opinion, it is not surprisince that some even of his most palpable misdeeds should have escaped the attention of the reviewer. There is one omission, however, which we feel bound to notice, because we believe that, although not immediately connected with his loss of office, Lord Palmerston's conduct in the particular to which we allude has had as large a share as any of the numerous other causes, in permanently dis crediting the noble Viscount in the minds of' the English people, and rendering him henceforward impossible as a Minister—we mean his episcopal appointments. We have no wish to particularize names, or to reopen sores which the salve of time has, however slightly, skinned over ; and we shall, therefore, say no more on this point than express our conviction that not even Lord John Russell's desperate determination to force upon the Church, in one or two instances, rulers whose title to such preferment was the notorious fact of their being obnoxious to the Church, gave such deep offence to the religious feeling of' the country as the recklessness and levity with which Lord Palmerston abandoned one of the most responsible functions devolving upon a British Minister to his personal entourage. One more point, adverted to by the reviewer, which contributed materially to the downfall of Lord Palmerston, is too important to be passed over in silence,—the fact that he derived no strength from his colleagues ; that in the compo sition of his Ministry, though positive absence of respectability was the exception, decent medi ocrity was most assuredly the rule : The great bulk of its members (stip; the reviewer) were men who of themselves never would have gained its éclat, and never would have perpetrated its misdeeds. But the tone and will of the First Minister determined the whole complexion and the whole action of the body. As to Lord Palmerston himself, he reminds us of the strange antithesis in some words of Rousseau, who says of a parth miler personage, " ae n'etait assurement pas an homme sans merite quoique ce tilt un grand vilain." He has his great and signal gifts, but England his cause to be glad that she is quit of him as her guide. With so many elements of weakness, so many causes tending to inevitable ruin, it is not sur prising that the Administration of Lord Palmers ton was eventually overthrown : the wonder is that it lasted so long. But it was more than a mere casual effect, it was a signal instance of moral retribution,—a point scarcely brought into sufficient relief by the writer from whom we are quoting,—that it should be a Parliament elected to the cry of " Palmerston for ever" that pronounced his disgrace, and in scribed upon the tablets of its own and the country's heart the sentence, " Come what may, Lord Palmerston shall not again be Minister." With that deter mination fixed in the minds of' the great body of his own too long deluded supporters, it is less difficult to understand, than it would appear at first sight, how it came to pass that Lord Derby was able not only to maintain himself, after he had—not without great deliberation both on his own part and that of his Sovereign—accepted the responsibility of filling the vacant Premiership, but to carry on the business of the country efficiently, successfully, and satistlictorily. The parliamentary position of the new Miniitr7 19 well described by the reviewer : Two afths of the House of Commons, to been with, spa rills Mend* of the ctoterment. Two two Me i sit4oßglig a poor, maudlin, love•lorn fool . Whatever I may feel, I w ill act as become s a man ! ' And, from that day, Helen's name was not mentioned. This state of the plot is arrived at about the middle of the story, and the interest then be comes stronger. The bride does not find happi ness, and after many personal anxieties, and after having long suspected that her husband wa s addicted to intoxication, the truth at last bursts upon her that she has been married to a man who is fast tending to insanity! We shall not disclose what then becomes of Helen, but we must refer our readers to the volume itself for the conclusion. The volume is informed throughout with a fine religious spirit, not obtrusively put forward, but indicated at the right place. There is a genuine strain of womanly sentiment in the writing which cannot fail to be appreciated, and " Quicksands " is certainly an excellent " tale," and at times abundant proofs are given that with a wider survey of human nature, and with more study of the characters of men, Miss Lisle could put forth pretensions to being a novelist of a high order. The Quarterly Review. October. London : Murray. THERE cannot be much question, we think, on which of the dishes in the unusually tempting bill of fare prefixed to the present number of the Quarterly its readers will fall to first. Palmers ton and Derby, "The Past and Present Admi nistrations," served up under the same dishcover, is an "idea," as poor Soyer used to call his culinary combinations, of considerable promise. Nor has the artiste fallen short of the expecta tions which that promise is calculated to raise. Ile has "done" the two statesmen a la sauce piquante in excellent style, and presented us with a highly-flavoured political ragout. There arc, indeed, between the characters of the two Premiers who so unexpectedly changed places at the beginning of the present year, points of contrast sufficiently striking to interest the reader by the simple fact of their being exhibited in juxtaposition. But it is not on this that the reviewer mainly relies, nor is mere effect his aim. He approaches his subject not only with the quick eye of the keen observer, who readily seizes and thoroughly appreciates traits of character, but with the calm vision of the thoughtful philosopher, who looks for the deeper causes that underlie the phenomena of life—who loves to dwell on its riddles, and to attempt their solution. And, certainly, to a mind on this oc cupation bent, a more paradoxical state of affairs could hardly have presented itself than the par liamentary history of the last session. The sin gular features which it exhibited were, according to the writer's own mode of stating his problem, on the one hand, " the precipitation of a public " favourite from the highest pinnacle of popu " larity and power into that Tartarus of politics " which is as far below the surface of the earth " and the common walk of men as his former " elevation was above them" ; on the other hand, "the regular, the undisputed, the gene " rally successful administration of public affairs " by a Government which is, or is supposed to " be, opposed to the large majority of the House "of Commons." How are events and facts like these to be reconciled with that " vital and fun damental" rule of our popular Constitution that " the sense of the Ministry should be in accord " ance with that of the majority of the House of " Commons" ? Or, if they cannot he so recon ciled, are we to conclude that our Constitution has undergone a radical change, and that "go " vernment by majorities" is one of those notions which, with the lapse of time, have passed away ? This is the problem the solution of which the reviewer proposes to himself. His answer, which he works out with great shrewdness and ability, is, that in reality " the majority has, during the " late session, been exercising its will and choice" not less truly than in former years, though in a " fashion which had not been until now invented." For the invention of this fashion the House of Commons is, it appears, indebted, not to the suc cessful Minister Lord Derby, but to the unsuc cessful Minister, Lord Palmerston. The inquiry into the m eans by which the last-named states man brought about a resnit so astonishing, and so little anticipated by himself, occupies a con side vra.d .e, and certainly not the least pungent, Portion of the essay. In the course of it, the writer establishes most conclusively, to our