The Press. — London, England, 1856-01-19 00:00:00

Already some of his quondam admirers talk of the Premier as "the late Lord PALMERSTON." Tho Viscount, with theatrical airs of playing the part of a great war statesman, exists no longer for these fanciful pez sons. Disenchant ment, with its chilling process, has begun. These persons asked for stimulants, and the Premier kept up to his promise by presenting them with sedatives. A practical joker to the last, not exactly a wit, but certainly a wag, Great Pam was not a year at the helm when peace was resolved on. There was once a statesman, or at least a Minister, in this coun try, of whom a humorist said that "he used "to butter his thunderbolts." Though the Premier forgot his old friend BEAU BRUMMELL when alive, it is obvious that he remembers LUTTRELL, though no more. As the war smoke clears off, the deficiencies of the Cabinet become more obvious. What has the Gower connection ever done in Par liament, that the leadership of the House of Peers and the Viceroyalty of Ireland should be assigned to it ? The President of the Council began with the buckhounds ; then he took a leap at the Board of Trade ; next to the leadership of the House of Peers. How to find out a secret was the art of TALLEY AAND ; how to let it slip out was the Gran villian boast. The celebrity of Lord GRANYILLE will resemble the materials of that structure from which his Lordship derived his noto rie His political reputation recals the Crystal Palace in its brittleness, if not in its brilliancy. The Whigs of England will scarcely consent to be ruled by Stafford-house, and its sons-in law, with their interminable tail of Scotch and Irish cousins. The Duke of ARGYLL feels con fident that they will. Why not? He is surely the descendant of that Duke of ARGYLL of whom POPE wrote— Argyll—the State's whole thunder born to wield, And shake alike the Senate and the field. We have ourselves often had the pleasure of seeing and hearing how well able the Duke of ARGYLL is "to shake the Senate" with laughter. Lord DERBY good-humoredly tries to help him out, and Lord CLARENDON wishes that the Duke would stick to " the field " of geology, and read a lecture elsewhere about quartz, veins, and specimens of " tertiary formation." No ; Stafford-house will not—cannot—rule the Whigs. Holland-house had traditions— a ritual of Whig hero-worship; it had liberal principles, lax morals, and excellent dinners. Hungry sages from the north feasted and prosed there ; there poets and " patriots " from Ireland concocted their melodious libels and fierce invectives. To rule the Whigs in the name of Fox was possible; but in the name of Stafford-house and the Gowers—the project is absurd. Lord CARLISLE'S " well "conditioned people" would smile at this notion as readily as they have laughed and yawned over his diary. What remains ? Lord CLARENDON and Sir GEORGE GREY are clever men. The Earl is artful in spite of his facility for small talk; he can he persistent, with all his petty weakness for gossip and cigarrettes. He can remember an enemy and a friend. He gave Mr. BIRCH six thousand pounds ; and the other day he helped Mr. SAUSSE to the same sum per annum in an Indian judgeship. But, like Sir GEORGE GREY, the Earl of CLARENDON is jaded. A tortuous political career draws to its close. Finance, again, has been the fatal rock on which the WhiCabinet so often splits. Since WALPOLE, the Whigs never had a financier. Their " families " nauseate at arithmetic. Already they are beginning to whisper about Sir CORNEWALL LEWIS Their dependants sig nificantly say, " But then Sir CORNEWALL is " not the real Chancellor of the Exchequer. "We all know that —" Exactly so. There is no secret about that. The thing worked well for a session. Sir CORNEWALL was bro ther-in-law to the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and explosions, seasonable to the Crimea, were not wanted anywhere else, except Cronstadt. So the finances were left to Sir CORNEWALL nominally. The commercial world in general sneered. The arrangement was extolled by the Economist in particular. Modest merit hid its head under enormous estimates. Poor Sir CORNEWALL had publicly to bear the blame THE PRESS. of the " Turkish Loan," in which the financial mistakes of a great Tory statesman were re peated. It was a comical notion for the pupils of the Anti-Corn-law League to plagiarise from Mr. Prrr. Peace being proclaimed, Lord PANMURE will be called upon to display some practical talents fur the improvement of our military system. For upwards of twenty years his Lordship has been in public life, and it would puzzle his friends to specify anything brilliant or successful in his career. Is it not a fact that for months back the Ministership of War has been virtually placed in a committee of the Cabinet? Have there not been weekly meetings of that committee to supervise Lord PANMURE, who was thus in the position of a deputy Minister for War ? The fact cannot be denied ; and the inference from it need not be drawn. Other departments, also, and their obvious deficiencies, must become subjects for popular examination. In administrative aptitude the Cabinet is notoriously deficient. Lord CRAN WORTH is a mediocre Lord Chancellor, and an utterly incompetent legislator. Mr. LABOU (IMRE will not be permitted to toy idly with the Colonies, by reason of his matrimonial connection with the Howards and the Dowers. Lord HARROWDY, the hereditary waverer, and Mr. 13ArtrEs, the superannuated official, cannot give strength to such a connection. The Bed ford Whigs await it on the flunk ; the serried ranks of the Opposition menace it in front; and there are no reserves of "popularity," for Lord PALMERSTON has used them all up. Ships that are not seaworthy are the most useless of things: worthless as stores, they are sentenced to be broken up. Their splin ters make good firewocd ; their sounder tim bers are employed in other constructions. It is thus with Cabinets. If they cannot float they must founder. The war-passion gave buoyancy to the Palmerston Cabinet, as it would have done to the weakest of Ministries, headed even by a Richard Cromwell or an Addington. But the tide of war has passed, and the Palmerston Ministry is virtually no more. The rest of its precarious existence is numbered by days, and no one is surprised at the general question—" How will Ministers " meet Parliament !" LIFE PEERAGES. WE must beg at the outset of this article to disclaim any personal allusion whatsoever to Lord WENSLEYDALE. That Sir JAMES PARKE has well earned the honour which has been awarded him we most gladly admit, while we view with equal pleasure the accession of legal knowledge thereby accruing to the House of Lords. But the question which has been raised by the Learned Judge's elevation must be decided upon broader grounds than either personal merits or legal exigencies. It is of comparatively little consequence to investigate the number of precedents which exist for the creation of life peerages. The Queen has undoubtedly the power and the right to create as many as she chooses. Nevertheless, a reference to cases of the same description does not tell very well for the ad vocates of the revival. They are few in num ber and bad in character. There are only three altogether, of whom two were women, one of them the mistress, and the other the ille gitimate child, of an ignorant foreigner. The system seems to us to be objectionable on three distinct grounds—constitutional, poli tical, and social. 'The main guarantees for the integrity of the House of Peers are to be found in their great wealth and their hereditary nobility. A tainted character will not only disgrace the past, but the future also ; and many a man who would not hesitate to degrade his own name would hesitate at degrading his eon's. Unqualified corruption is as rare,perhaps, as unqualified virtue. But that middle state of mind in which a man contrives to reconcile his conscience to his interest, without doing anything which the world could pronounce villainous, is the state of the majority. We would not be understood to insinuate SATURDAY, that no poor man is incorruptible; but we appeal to the common sense of our readers, and those universal laws of human nature which it is foolish to ignore, and we confidently ask how far it is advisable to foist upon a class which already possesses two such powerful incentives to the mainte nance of patriotism, as ample revenue and hereditary rank, an entirely new order of men who will possess neither. What the bar rister now is to the judge—what the judge holding office during the pleasure of the Crown was to the judge who held it for life—that is a peerage like Wensleydale to a peerage like Derby or Shrewsbury. One form of inference, to which all these observations converge, is simply this : that by the creation of life peels ages a dangerous and double-edged instrument is placed in the hands of a reckless Ministei— dangerous, because such noblemen will always be more or less pliable—double-edged, because fewer scruples will exist about creating new peers, should they not be pliable enough. On the ground, also, of the feudalism of the English aristocracy, we most decidedly object to the present innovation. A peer without an estate is just as great an anomaly as a bishop without a diocese. He would have privileges without duties. His only dependants would be his groom and his valet. In that softening intercourse between landlord and tenant he would have no part. We should have a set of Cockney lordlings who would make the title contemptible from their manner, and perhaps odious from their vices. The great old theory of an earl or baron as a leader of the people would be most vital.y impugned. We pass, by an easy transition, from the constitutional to the political aspects of the question before us. It would go tar to inter rupt that link between the titled and untitled gentry, the existence of which is at present one of the strongest bulwarks of the English system. A broad gulf would be created between peers and senators without estates and commoners with them. We need do no more than point out the serious charac ter of this danger. It is one which threatens a national peculiarity which has long favor ably distinguished us from continental coati: tries, and which has been the theme of admi ration to reflective foreigners for centuries. Viewed in its social aspect, however, a life peerage loses the dignity of being dangerous, and becomes ridiculous. He whose family would be too poor to support the title, would also be too poor himself. Can anything be conceived more pitiful than my Lord Ready pen, the eminent author, taking his chop at a sixpenny tavern, while an unshorn bailiff scowls savagely from the opposite box at the victim who has escaped his clutches? Fancy a community of peers, with whitey-brown linen, and hair down to the small of their backs, jabbering science, and congratulating one another on having substituted ermine for whitewash? Joking apart, what literary man of real genius but would scorn to change the name he has made so noble for a title the t could not ennoble him—the highest place in literature for the lowest place in the peerage—the laurels of wit and poetry for a dubious rank, and a tawdry coronet? As to the necessity of larger resources for recruiting the legal element in the House of Lords, we feel quite confident that this could be managed without the creation of a new order of Peers. At all events, we would rather see things go on as they are, than a pernicious precedent established for intro ducing a disturbing element into the working of the Constitution, for impairing the political efficacy of the aristocratic order, and for lower ing the character of science and literature, by holding out the allurements of unsuitable rewards. THE Comm' OF NAPLES has been seized with one of its periodical fits of modesty. The story of tie danseuses and the green tights is fresh in the minds . of most readers, "it n'y a (fun pas," &c.; and so, rci versing the apothegm, the Court of Naples darts at once from the flesh to the marble, and covers up in canvas breeches Europa, Proserpine, and the Si , bines—the three groups so well remembered in the gardens of the Villa Reale. After resting for near a century in these gardens, these "improper " grout of are to be placed under lock and key, out of the sigh of Bombe's sensitive police.