The Press. — London, England, 1854-12-09 00:00:00

1154 SATURDAY, time imitated in Parliamentary warfare. It is quite unnecessary to inquire who were the parties that introduced so many political Ar• nolds in 'the ranks of the " Irish Brigade?" And whit the examples in history of the folly of leaving an army and a navy subject to the Illtlisboroughs and the Norths, shall it be endured that our whole War Department should be under the control of the Duke of NEWCASTLE? Let his flatterers or his followers state, if they can, one solitary public act on his part indicative of that masterly capacity for great affairs imperatively required by the present exigencies of the War-office. He has been twenty years in the Legislature, and no public measure, or any great public question, has been associated with his name. When, with the Jesuit party in the Cabinet, his Grace espoused the cause of the Papal aggression, the mediocrity of his powers in debate were contrasted with the sinister ability End in genious sophistry of Sir JAMES GRAHAM. Holding a first class post, his Grace can point to no eminent official experience. Sir ROBERT PEEL consigned him to the Woods and Forests, and even so recently as 1646, after fourteen years' service in Parliament, he had not risen higher than the Chief Secretaryship of Ireland. Mr. MACAULAY, in his essay on " Chatham," has compared the first Duke of NEWCASTLE to the miserable miser, Sir JOHN CUTLER, immortalised by PorE. " The Duke's " avarice of power," says MACAULAY, "thwarted " itself, and, like CUTLER'S, was a penny wise " and pound foolish cupidity." And, like his ancestor, the present Duke of NEWCASTLE strives to gain a similar verdict from the historian of our times. Nor can we find compensation in tooling to the colleagues of his Grace. Not a man amongst them has military capacity or ex• perience. Last week we proved distinctly that in every Ministry it had been customary that at least one of its members should have professional military experience. This rule is flagrantly violated at the time when careful or ganisation is required. The present Cabinet composed of Ministers selected solely from political considerations. They can find room in the Cabinet for the red-tapist WOOD, and the metaphysical MoLESWORTH, for the sentimental SIDNEY HERBER r, and the youthful and i ne xperienced Duke acof ARGYLL, but not for one man practicaly quainted with the direction of fleets and armies. They act on the notion of worthy Dogberry, that, " to r ead and write, comes by nature," and would have us conclude that the mere acceptance of a department gives all the qualifications necessary to fill it with the success. ugly The world is apt in gen eral to give names of " quack " and "humbug" to persons who pretend to discharge duties they want skill and knowledge to fulfil. But the duties of Government are to bet ex from the r ule. A fellow who, pretending to medical experience, should consign his dupe to the grave through some pernicious nostrum or blundering operation, would be convicted of manslaughter, and sent to ponder over the mischief of his presumption at the treadmill but a Pelham, throug h exactl y the same species of ignorance and pret ension, may, by his of requisite knowledge a nd unskilful arranand ge ments, consign tho usands of Engl's bravest sons to destru ction, with the prospect of no worse penalty t han a sarcastic reflection in an Opposition newspaper. The old pro verb—that every man may be believed in his own art--must be reversed in the practice o f s tatesmanship. The name of Lord CRAN WORTH duly appears at everylcouncil summoned to decide what orde rs shall be issued to our fleet, and what measures are necessary to the efficiency of our arms. The whig f the Chan cellor is thought more appropriate to tlie discussion of such matters than the uniforin of the admiral or the general. But why should r Reform Cabinet hesitate to carry their pet principle of Government further '? Why not give NAPIER, on hisfreturn, the first vacant bishopric, and appoint DE LACY Ev. Ass Master of the Rolls ? The Coalition, avowedly intended to ling p ro ve our administrat ive system by filling high posts of Government with the best men, irrespective of party, has carried the pnictict! of red-tapiem to an extent unknown a c THE PRESS. the future before peace was made. The other plan open to Ministers was to carry on a war with Russia a routrance till se uccumbed. Neither of these plans, howe h ver s , was adopted. The ports of Russia were not effec was not k- all crippled, while our troops were allowed to remain inactive at Gallipoli and Varna, instead o f uniting with the Turks in the performance of the duty for which they had ostensibly been sent out. We thus inflicted no blow whatever on the enemy. The Russians were allowed to retire from the Principalities at their leisure, and they only left them when it suited their generals to withdraw them to operate against us in another field. We, moreover, allowed the Turks to be saddled with a treaty with Austria, in order to procure us what at best could be but a negative advantage, and this fatal treaty has made the carrying on the war with Russia in an effective manner an impos sibility. The Ministry, failing in war, have thus, by their diplomacy, been the cause of the destruction at Sebastopol of many thou sands of our men. Such is the manner in which the first plan open to Minsters has miscarried, and the mode they dealt with that first plan made the successful adoption of the second impossible ; for we think that there is no military man who knows anything of his professsion who will not see that the true way to humble Russia was not to run our heads against the stone walls of Sebastopol at a period of the year when, unless it was taken by a coup de main, the taking it till the spring was a thing next t o impossible, and when the approaching storms in the Euxine must necessarily deprive us of the services of the greater portion of our fleet, without the aid of which the idea of taking it at all must be a hopeless one. The on ly circumstance that could by possibility have justified such a siege at such a period would have been the fact of all the forces of Russia sufficiently near Sebastopol to be capa ble of affording aid to it being held in check or defeated, and all supplies, whether of food or ammunition, being thus completely cut off ; but for this end Wallachia and Moldavia must not only have been cleared of the Russians, but the command of their resources must have been held by the allies—resources closed as it is to the Turks and to us, but of which Russia appears to have largely availed herself in moving forward troops to the seat of war. Bessarabia also must have been occupied, and the vast magazines that were organised at Odessa either destroyed—as it seems the Rus sian generals ordered they should be in case of our advance —or secured for the use of the allies. When this had been done the allies might have sent a force with safety against Sebastopol, which must then have fallen with little loss to us, being thus placed entirely beyond the reach of support. It may, to be sure, be still taken, but at what a fearful loss to the allies ? Put together the useless waste of life at Varna, the men killed and disabled in the several battles in the Crimea, and the numbers doomed to die of disease and inac tivity before the place shall fall, and it will be seen that the loss of life and the waste of money have been infinitely greater than would have served for the most triumphantly suc cessful campaign; while the only result yet gained has been a loss of prestige in the eyes of Europe and the world, which not all the individual heroism displayed by our troops can counterbalance , and a loss of money, ships, and stores, which it will take many a year's income tax to replace. There is one point in conclusion which we would notice, namely, the allegation that the a ttack on Sebastopol wa s the proposition of the allied commanders, and that for it they, and not the Ministry, are responsible. To this we would reply, that if the question of attack ing Sebastopol, or doing nothing, accompanied by an expression of the earnest hope of the Ministry that they, would do something, was the question left for the allied commande rs ' decision ; then, the matter being put to them in that shape, the suggestion was equivalent to a command, and there was nothing left for them as soldiers but to do what they have done. But if it be said that the mode of carrying on the war generally was left to their unfettered judgment, as it undoubtedly should have been, and that an unlimited command of means, whether in men, or money, or supplies, or carriage, was in the outset granted them, so as to enable thew to 04irry out any plan of campaign they !eight please to form ; then we would unhealtatinely say that nothing 1314, an admission og I,ord AMMAN'S part that *is was the case sltould oonvince the public that it was so, for no wan of military knowledge will ever bolieve ths t t ig laying siege at the season of the year he did to Sebastopol, he had any thing left to him but a choice of evils, and even of them he was not, we suspect, freely allowed to choose the least . DANGER Or )LAYING WITH EDGE TOOLS. WITH the fact before us of a Cabinet totally destitute of military or naval experience, and of the War Department entrusted to the Duke of NEWCASTLE and Mr. SIDNEY HERBERT, it may be useful to note the evils that accrued in the last century from permitting our armies to be mismanaged by mediocre officials. It is more necessary to do so, as we perceive that an outcry has been raised on Sir RICHARD ENGLAND appearing as second in command under Lord RAGLAN. It is asked indignantly what are his services, or his pre vious exploits; and we may also ask what are the special antecedents or the peculiar apti tudes of the Duke of NEWCASTLE that he should be placed FIRST in power in the War Department of the country ? His Grace has very lately achieved a new title to distinction. His secretary, Mr. Ito BEATS, undoubtedly a gentleman of capacity and diligence, is appoint,o4 to an Under- Secretaryship ; and Lord ROBERT CLINTON, his Grace's brother, is appointed to fill the post thus vacated. This young gentlemen has certainly yet given no proof of the ability which would qualify him for the discharge of duties, at this time more than commonly onerous ; and, imperfect as the management of the War-office has hitherto been, it is not d ou bted that the change will tend to make it greatly worse. The example of the American war, with its " Iliad of Blunders , " ought to be enough to teach us the folly of leaving our War Depart ments subject to minds without genius, and to statesmen without signal capacity or spe cial experience. The disgraces of our gene rals at that time may, with few exceptions, be traced to the fatuity of our Ministers. Our statesmanship in the Cabinet was even worse than our strategy in the field. The intriguing GRAFTON, the feeble HILLS BOROUGH, the incompetent WEYMOUTH, and the indolent Lord NORTH, were rivals in imbecility of administration. When the colonies re volted, Lord NORTH sought to quell them by sending over a few hastily raised Irish regi ments to fight against the American rebels. With uch men at the hel of power, neither WELL such men at the helm of power, neither WELLINOTON nor NELSON m could have gained their glorious names. We need not dwell on the disgraces of that time, or on the surrender of BURGOYNE at Sara t)ga in 1777, or of CORNWALLIS in York Town in 1781. A military member of the Pelham- Clinton family contributed his full share to the reverses of our American campaigns. The conduct of Sir HENRY CLINTON at Sandy Hook has been recorded by Lord CORNWALLIS in strong terms, and we need not repeat them. The grandson of the sixth Earl of LINCOLN displayed those peculiar tendencies which seem to be innate qualities in the Pelham- Clinton race. He sought to gain glory by sordid intrigues. He seduced General ARNOLD to be tray his post, and employed emissaries to go amongst the American troops to guarantee their full payment of arrears of pay, on condi tion of their deserting ! The only act of merit in connection with the official management of the disgraceful American war was that Sir HENRY CLINTON W aS—superseded ! His family, however, did not leave him " without a re serve." It enabled him to fall back upon the representation of Newark ! The military tac tics of Sir HENRY CLINTON have been in our •INNWIN I AI \