The Press. — London, England, 1855-01-20 00:00:00

• JANUARY 20, 1855. MR. COBDEN AT LEEDS , Ox Wednesday the member for the West Riding appeared by appointment before a public meeting at Leeds, in order to give an account of his opinions in reference to the war. It was known that a vast ma jority of the electors differed altogether from the hon. member on that point, and viewed with much disapprobation the course he had adopted in Parlia ment respecting it.. Many other hon. representatives and influential gentlemen connected with the West Riding were also expected to attend the gathering ; and it was anticipated that, atter Mr. Cobden had spoken, addresses would be delivered, and resolu tions proposed, expressing the popular enthusiasm for the prosecution of the war. An immense assem blage was accordingly attracted to the Leeds Music hall, which had been appointed as the place of meeting, insomuch that a concourse tilled the place to overflowing long before the hour fixed for com mencing proceedings. An adjournment was therefore made to the Cloth-hall-yard, where, in the open air, and in spite of repeated showers of snow, a crowd estimated at between five and six thousand persons patiently listened to the successive speeches during a period of four hours and a half. Mr. COBDEN opened the proceeding with an ad dress which lasted an hour and a half. He began by defining the responsibilities under which he him. self stood with regard to the war, which be held up also to his hearers as the source of immense and indefinite. expenditure have, as a member of the House of Commons, to pro- vide for you the sinews of war. I cannot avoid voting the money necessary to carry on the war, if it is to be carried on. The most important question in the nett session is, how and in what manlier are we to carry on the war? And I agree that if England is to have a war, you cannot have a little war; but you must carry it on with that vigour and energy which becomes such a nation as this. But to do this will require money, mid not a farthing will come except by a vote of the House of Commons. I think your Government, and even Mr. Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, much as I respect his character, have rather lent themselves to the delusion that they could indulge the people of this country in a cheap war. Mr. Gladstone told the House of Commons that he wanted but ten millions. We voted him ten millions. You have had an opportunity of judging how that money has been spent; and you can judge now, if we are to carry on the war, what that money will do, and how long that money will last. Why, gentle men, it is gone already. What, then, are we to do for the future? It is a provision of Providence itself that there should be difficulty surrounding a war—that hardships, and dangers, and sacrifices, are necessary to and inse parable from war—so that every country may feel it to be beneficial to avoid these difficulties. You must, however, raise the money to carry on the war. If yon come to the question of direct taxation, I have no hesitation in saying tost in theory I would have this money raised by direct taxation, bemuse that money is raised at the least possible expense in collecting. It does, I believe, the least injury to trade and commerce. But we all know that on the present scale of the income tax you cannot raise sufficient to carry on the war; but you must lower the range of the tax ; you must tax lower incomes, and you must divide it b tween direct and indirect taxation. But I should be very sorry to see taxes laid on those commodities which are required in the production of manufactures, or neces• sary for the commerce of this country. I should be very sorry to see that ; and I tell you frankly that I shall, in every case where possible, vote for direct taxation instead of indirect taxation. Mr. Cobden passed on to another branch of the subject, and carried the sympathies of the audience with him while severely criticising the military pro ceedings and management of the war : I think with all parties here there will be no difference of opinion about this—that all will agree that a more wretched expose of our system of administration in mili tary affairs, a more clear illustration of the total break down of the aristocratic system of routine when brought to any strain or stress, could not have been illustrated. (" Hear, hear," and cheers.) We have the admission o;' the represent. tive of Government in the House of Com mons that a great mistake had been made in sending an army to the Crimea to take Sebastopol; and I heard a Minister of the Crown say that all parties were mistaken — the generals were mistaken, the Government was mistaken, in estimating the strength of Sebastopol. I heard it treated with as much nonchalance as though the specula tion of hazard involved only a couple of shillings in the result. A " mistake " involving the homicide of thousands and tens of thousands of men 1 Why was there such a " mistake," which was in every way so deplorable? Why was not all the information obtained with respect to the actual condition and strength of Sebastopol? I will un dertake to say that a shrewd Leeds man, intrusted with 10,0001. and sent to Constantinople, would find the means of getting information of every kind—information of every gun, of every man—they might obtain even the muster-roll and drawings of the whole place, if the proper pr 'cautions were taken to get at them. The idea of send in; such an army was a leap in the dark, and throughout " a mistake." Now, 1 am of opinion that the mistake was not merely in estimating the strength of Sebastopol; it was a inisudce to go to Sebastopol at all, under any cir cumstances. (Hear, hear.) We have gone three thousand miles to attack an empire containing 60,000,000 of people, and with an army of 000,000 or 700,000 men, and send 2' 1 .000 or 50.000 men. I must think—and I believe you will all think, with a fulsome self-gratification—as that with which some organs of the press talked abont annihi lating that umpire —as frivolous and childish. t Cheers.) THE PRESS. My opinion is that the extinguishment of Sebastopol was a mistake; it is acknowledged to be mistaken so far that it was a " leap in the dark," and I think the principal question for Englishmen to deal with now is, how yen are best to get out of that mistake. (Hear, hear.) If we are going to tight it out there, then 1 say the course hitherto pursued by the Government is wholly inadequate to the object in ♦iew. (Cheers.) We must raise an immense army—we must find an immense amount of treasure— and must carry on the war in the Crimea on a very dif ferent scale to what we have hitherto done. ( Hear.) Now, I think there is another way by which our brave men may be removed from that position in which, by mis take, they have been placed; and I think, without consult. ing oueown passions, and looking too much to exaggerated hopes and expectations, we are bound in all fairness to consider the position of those brave men, and not throw any obstacle in the way of restoring peace to this country and those brave men to their homes. (Hear, hear.) I would treat them, when brought from Sebastopol. with all the consolation and honour as if they had succeeded, be cause we may depend upon it they have suffered ten times as much in the abortive effort to besiege that place than if we had succeeded by a coup de main in taking it. Mr. Cobden afterwards expressed his belief that re solutions in favour of vigorously carrying on the war would interfere with the negotiations for peace ; and in answer to the charge that Russia had acquired territory, he pointed to our own acquisitions in India. In conclusion the hon. member referred to the im• possibility of keeping back Russian aggression by our present mode of warfare, attacking him in his own territory, citing the failure of Napoleon's expe dition to Russia in proof of his views, and dwelt upon the miserable condition of Turkey as ground for belief that even if Russia did succeed in conquering Turkey, of which, single-handed, there appeared very little chance, the country would have required so much internal care and management, that at all events, for the next generation, which was thirty years, we had nothing to fear from Russia; and be should like to know from some actuary, taking into consideration the contingencies which now sur• rounded the whole question, and which might arise during the next thirty years, what risk we ran from a Russian aggression on England. Mr. Cobden was followed by Mr. G. J. MARSHALL, who moved the following war resolution, which was seconded in a war speech by Mt. BAINES : That in the opinion of this meeting the war in which England and France are now engaged with Russia is a great contest, forced upon them by the outrageous aggres• sion of the latter power upon the Turkish empire, and is intended to create a spirit of aggrandisement on the part of the Czar which threatens the independence of other nations; and this meeting is of opinion that the war ought to be prosecuted with the utmost vigour until safe and honourable terms of peace can be obtained. A Mr. JOWETT, with the view, as he said, of taking the sense of the meeting in another form, moved the following as an amendment to the resolution : That this meeting, without giving any opinion on the origin or conduct of the war, earnestly desires that the pre- sent negotiations for peace may he carried to a successful issue, and the further evils of a protracted contest spared to this country, to Europe, and to the world. Mr. PRIESTMAN, from Bradford, seconded the amendment, which Major-General THOMPSON, better known as Colonel Peyronnet Thompson, once M.P. for Bradford, also supported. Mr. R. M. MILNES, M.P., made a vigorous speech in support of the original resolution, and on the show of hands the amendment was negatived, and the mo tion for vigorously prosecuting the war adopted by an overwhelming majority. Obituart Miss Mrriraftn, the authoress of " Our Village," died on the 10th inst., at Swallowfleld, near Reading, after a long period of decline and suffering. The deceased was born in 1789 at Alresford, in Hamp shire. Her mother was an heiress, and the daughter of Dr. Russell, of Ashe, in that county, a man of scholarship and letters. Her father, belonging to the Mitfords of Northumberland, was, as her own " Reminiscences" have recorded, a sanguine, cheer ful, and speculative man, who tried physic, played at whist, spent every one's money, and something more, and made every living creature about him love him, lend to him, and forgive him. To this love and to his extravagance his daughter's life was sacrificed. Every fortune that came in his way, in cluding a 20,( 00/. prize won in the lottery, wa s wasted, gaily and plausibly, by Dr. Mitford; and while yet a girl, with all the impulses of a poetess, but with all the reserve of an old-tashioned gentle woman strong within her, his daughter was placed i❑ the position of one who had to " stave off" want and sorrow from the parent to whom she was devoted, by turning her choice and peculiar gifts to account in authorship. Educated in a London boarding-school—which seems to have had the pecu liar gift of " bringing out " poetesses—Miss Mitford first presented herself to the public in three volumes of poetry—one a South Sea romance, after the fashion of Scott. It was by chance that she after wards fell on the veins of country life, scenery, and manners, on the one hand—and on the other, of high tragic passion and action, which "Our Village " and her plays in verse severally represent. The story of these has been told too frequently and too minutely by herself in late publications for it to be necessary to dwell more minutely on them now, or to enumerate the works that made a labourer's cottage with a duchess's "flower garden," three miles from Reading, a place of pilgrimage to some of the highest and most accomplished persons in Europe. But Miss Mitford's works did not represent all her gifts, produced as they were under sharp pressure, and at moments when it was titter that the body of a delicate woman should have been at rest, rather than that her fancy should have been goaded into exertion. Her letters were charming; her conversa tion was shrewd, racy, and elegant, full of pertinence in its allusions, full of anecdote in it' recollections. She was a faithful and cheering friend to those she loved. She bore up against the trials of a hard and ill-understood life with a sweetness and vivacity such as could have made strangers imagine that there was nothing to bear. She was well read in old English and French literature. Not long after her father's death, her own health, which had been shaken by the dutiful attendance on him, began to fail ; and the illness which carried her away was slow, painful, and dispiriting. But her sweetness of temper and her brightness of mind never failed her to the last. There are few of whom surviving friends will long think so affectionately and so cheerfully as of Mary Russell Alitford. Her name has an honoured place in the library of English literature. SIR GEORGE. WOMB'S ELL died very suddenly on Sunday morning last, &this town residence in George street, Hanover-square. The deceased baronet re tired to rest at ten o'clock on the previous night, apparently in his usual health and cheerful spirits ; but next morning his servant, who went as customary to his chamber to call him, discovered his master quite dead. It was thought life must have been extinct at least three hours before the discovery was made. Sir George was well known in the circles of fashion, and his sudden dissolution will be regretted by a numerous body of friends. The deceased was second son of Sir George, 2nd baronet, by Anne, daughter of Henry, Earl Falconberg, and was born 13th April, 1792. He married first, 23rd June, 1824, Georgians, youngest daughter of Mr. Orby Hunter, of Crowland Abbey, Lincolnshire; and secondly, Eliza, daughter of Mr. J. E. Little, of Hampton. The deceased succeeded to the baronetcy on the death of his father, 29th October, 1846, and the baronetcy and family estates now devolve on his son, Lieutenant George Wombwell, of the 17th Lancers ; the other son of the deceased baronet is also serving with his regiment, the 62nd, in the Crimea. The present gallant baronet has only recently been promoted for his distinguished gal lantry at the memorable cavalry charge of' Major- General the Earl of Cardigan, at the battle of Balaklava, when he had his horse killed under him, and was taken prisoner by a Russian trooper ; while being carried off the field he succeeded in unhorsing his captor, fired his pistol and wounded bim, and then rapidly mounting the horse of the Russian soldier made his escape back to his comrades, by whom he was loudly and heartily commended for his bravery. For this gallant act he was promoted, a few days since, to a lieutenancy in his regiment. We have to announce the death of REAR-AriarnAL SIR RICHARD O'Conoa, who died at his residence in London, on Wednesday last, after a lengthened illness. Sir Richard saw much service during the last American war, and was superintendent of the naval yards on the Canadian lakes during the war, and was officially mentioned for his services at the capture of Oswego in 1814. The deceased admiral was nominated a Knight Commander of the Royal Hanoverian Guelphie order by the late King William IV., the 25th January, 1836. His commis sions bore date as follows :—Lieutenant, Ist Feb., 1806 ; commander, 7th August., 1810; captain, 16th August, 1814; rear-admiral (retired), 2nd Septem ber, 1850. We regret to announce the death of' Major-General Sir James Dennis, K.C.8., late of the 3rd Buffs, which took place on the 14th instant at Pall mall. Sir James was seventy-eight years of age, no less than sixty of which he spent in the military service of his country. His last service was at the battle of Maliarajpore, 20th December, 1843, when he com manded a division, and for which he was appointed a K.C.B. Mr. George Moir has been appointed a Sheriff of Ross-shire, in succession to Mr. Thomas Mackenzie, lately appointed Solicitor-General for Scotland. Mr. Sergeant D'Oyl6y died at his seat neat Rottingdean on Tuesday, at the advanced age of eighty. He was fcr many years Chairman of the Sussex Quarter Se,sions, and was brother to Major- General D'Oyley, late of the Grenadier Guards, and the late Rev. Charles D'Oyley, rector of Lambeth.