The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1878-06-01 00:00:00

DEATH OF EARL RUSSELL.

- We regret to announce the death of Earl Russell,
whioh took place at Pembroke Lodge, Richmond-
park, on Tuesday night, at a few minutes to eleven
o'clock, alarming symptoms having set in some hours
previously.
The statesman who has thus closed a life long in the
public service almost without precedent in modern
times, was born in August, 1792, and was thus within
a few weeks of completing his 66th year. He was the
third and youngest son of the sixth Duke of Bedford,
and when only 21 years of age entered Parliament in
1813 for the borough of Tavistock. He represented
also successively Huntingdonshire, the borough of
Bandon, and the undivided county of Devon in the
unreformed Parliament, and after the passing of
the Reform Act sat first for South Devon, then
for Stroud, and afterwards for the City of London,
retaining the seat for the last mentioned con-
stituency twenty years—namely, from 1841 until
1861, when he was elevated to the Peerage. He
was Paymaster of the Forces from 1830 to Novem-
ber, 1834; Secretary of State for the Home Depart-
ment from April, 1835, to 1839; Secretary of State
for the Colonies from 1839 to 1841; First Lord
of the Treasury from July, 1846, to March: 1852;
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs from Decem-
ber, 1852, to February, 1853; held a seat in the
Cabinet without office from the last date till June,
1854; was President of the Council from June, 1854,
to February, 1855; Secretary of State for the Colonies
from March to November, 1855; re-appointed Secre-
tary of State for Foreign Affairs in June, 1859; and
upon the death of Lord Palmerston in October, 1865,
he was reappointed Prime Minister, retiring from
office in June, 1866, on the defeat of the Reform Bill
in the House of Commons.

The Times of Wednesday has the following leader on
the political career of the distinguished statesman,
whose name will be imperishably associated with the
history of civil and religious liberty :

Gazeti

To-day we announce the end of a great career. Earl
Russell died last night, at ten minutes to eleven o'clock.
His death had for some time been daily expected, and for
years he had almost disappeared from public view : but the
end will none the less be profoundly impressive, for in him
we have lost a man who illustrates the history of England
for half a century better, perhaps, than any other person of
his time. During his long season of toil there were more bril-
liant political intellects, more striking masters of debate, and
men moregifted with the various qualities of party leadership.
There were, on the whole, statesmen of greater foresight and
more executive ability. There were statesmen who exercised a
far more powerful fascination on the minds of the rich and
poor. But there was no other man so closely indentified
with all the political movements which will make fifty or
sixty years of our history memorable to the future. The
best work of that period was the execution of the reforms
dictated by the principles of the Whig creed. By the time
that the nation had hazarded bolder ways of meeting the perils
of the future, Lord Russell's wonderful store of effective
energy was spent, and he left the work to younger men.
He represented from first to last that moderated but still
glowing passion for the destruction of abuses which grew
up in England while France was passing throuth the
tempest of her Revolution. Born in the midst of that storm,
reared In a family which was justly proud of what it had
done for the cause of liberty, and sent to a Scotch University
whose brilliant teachers regarded the Toryism of Oxford
with intellectual scorn, he had been taught to look upon the
Whig creed as a kind of religion—the Gospel of English
freedom. The gmatest of its teachers, he had learnt to
think, was Charles James Fox. He lived in the midst of
men who had seen with their own eyes the recklessness
of misrule in France; who had visited that Court in
which the nobles had trifled away the precious years
that might have been devoted to the appeasement of
popular discontent; and who had gone to the philosophic
gatherings in which the most brilliant intellects had made
all the sanctities of life and the stabilities of society the
sport of destructive epigrams. He had been the companion
of Englishmen who had cheated themselves into the belief
that the French Revolution was to open a kind of political
millennium, and who had been passionately eager that
their own land should copy the reforming zeal of France.
It is a little startling to remember what kind of propositions
found favour from great peers. The excesses of the Parisians
were too many of then,' a terrible awakening, and they sepa-
rated themselves from the demagogues who throughout the
Reign of Terror and the wars of Napoleon preached the old
creed that reform meant destruction. Nevertheless, the Whig
principles of L )rd John Russell, when he first entered Parlia-
ment, must have seemed dangerously like Radicalism to all
who had listened to the diatribes of Burke. He could speak
and vote in favour of peace at a time when England was as
much agitated as the Continent itself by the news that
Napoleon had broken out of Elba, that he was again gather.
big a gigantic army, and that the fabric of the Bourbon
Monarchy was falling like a house of cards. It needed a
faith touched partly by pedantry and partly by fanaticism
ty remain cool in the midst of an excitement which is but
feebly reflected by the Turkish and the anti-Turkish passions
of these days. The same temper was seen in one ef the
earliest of his literary productions—the tragedy of "Don
Carlos." That ambitions piece of blank verse—which, in
spite of the satire it provoked, is quite as good at the first
fruits of most young authors—is a rhythmical plea for the
removal of religious disabilities. Its fiery declamation about
the iniquities of the Inquisition is apt to suggest that the
writer was thinking of the tame tyranny of the Test and Cor-
poration Acts. Such fervour for the common-places of Whig
freedom is apt to seem a little stilted now that our petty
monuments of ecclesiastical intolerance have been left far
behind, and that Liberals find themselves still a good way
from their ideals. But the England of Lord John Russell's
youth was oppressed by laws which would be intolerable
now, and by such a temper in high places as most men found
more galling than actual injustice.
In these days it is not easy for us to measure the force of
the political passions which were awakened in the earlier
part of his political life by the social state and the laws of
England. The long and tremendous strain of the war with
France had left a heritage of disordered finances' heavy
taxation, depressed trade, and fierce discontent. The Revolu-
tionary party, which had been silenced during the war, again
came to the front, with complaints that the rich and the
powerful, Parliament and the Court, were responsible for
the miseries of the kingdom. Cobbett was using all his
mastery over homely English and effective illustration to
Inflame the agricultural and the manufacturing poor
against their common masters. A plot was formed
to seize the members of the Government, to capture
the Tower, and set up a Committee of Public Safety. Even
the Corporation of London plunged into the fray with such a
recital of public grievances as would teem in these days of
smooth speech to be an incentive to civil war. Stones were
flung at the carriage of the Prince Regent, who was already
on the high way to that unbearable unpopularity which drove
him into retirement when he was King. There was a slight,
but significant, rising at Derby. Indescribable bitterness of
feeling was let loose by the charge of the dragoons at
" Peterloo." The Cato-street conspiracy showed what
desperate passions were at work beneath the surface
of society. The trial of Queen Caroline had alienated
a great part of the people from the Royal family.
Amid all that political commotion trade was suffer-
ing, the country banks were breaking, the Bank
of England itself was strained, and the misery of the people
was expressing itself by the burning of ricks and the destruc-
tion of machines. Meanwhile, corn was made artiflcally
dear by fiscal regulations, which were masterpieces of per-
verted ingenuity; the Catholics of Ireland were denied
political rights at the bidding of prejudices which were the
remnants of the penal laws; the colonies were disgraced by
slavery; and the representative institutions of England were
so much at the mercy of corrupt corporations and great fami-
lies as to be little better than a mockery. Such was England
from the morrow of Waterloo till nearly the eve of 1830. Most
of the attempts to reform the laws had been baffled bya power-
ful Tory party, knit together by the fear that, if one stone of
the Constitutional fabric should be loosened, the whole
structure might share the fate of the French Monarchy.
But the tide of popular impatience was fast rising, and it
began to be irresistible when the Liberals of Paris overthrew
the reactionary Government and the dynasty of Charles X.
As Prince Polignac was supposed to have been favoured by
the Duke of Wellington, the destruction of the Bourbon
Government was popularly regarded in England as a blow
struck at English Toryism. Soon the mass meetings at
Birmingham, the menacing attitude of a large part of the
people, and the energy of the Whig leaders made Parlia-
mentary reform inevitable. By a great and peaceful Revo-
lution the balance of power was shifted irons the aristocracy
to the middle class, and thus the way was prepared for the
crowd of other legislative reforms which are the historical
landmarks of the intermediate time.
It is necessary to recall the features and the events of that
season in order to do justice to the labours of Lord John
Russell. The strain on the historic institutions of England
had never been so dangerous since the Revolution of 1588,
and he did more than any other man to prevent a catas-
trophe. He had many qualifications for the task of destroy-
ing the more glaring inequalities wbich found shelter with-
in the broad shadow of the Constitution. As his own nature
had a healthy vein of common-place, he was able, without
taxing his reflective or imaginative faculties, to put him-
self in the position of an average Englishman. He
had no taste or aptitude for the discussion of philo-
sophical subtleties. At the same time he had an intellectual
courage which amazed his friends as well as his rivals, and
which lathe theme of well-known witticisms. No man was
ever more free from that mental cowardice which often
paralyzes fine intellects when they have to act. But his
chief qualification for the place of a reformer was his trust
In the good sense of the English people. He never lost
sight of the fact that they were exactly the same people
as they had been when they established the precedents of the
Constitution. He showed his belief in their unbroken unity by
his constant habit of referring to the common places of their
history, and to the opinions of the great Whig leaders. His
gravest speeches were often, indeed, like the historical essays
which most men cease to write when they leave the debating
society. Still his youthful faith in the sufficiency of Whig
principles to draw forth the good qualities of the English
people bore admirable results in the Bills which gave votes
to the whole of the middle class and enabled the ratepayers
o elect their own municipalities. He would have accom-
plished a priceless service if he had done no more than
destroy all grounds for the deep-rooted and dangerous belief
that the country was ruled by a small and corrupt oli-
garchy. The same impatience of artificial restraints made
him an enemy of the Corn Laws; and it was little more than an
awbsorlei asht
inl gint ho or
es e
hboasnt
ielfeutl
oe
tnhaec trme
lei
gnitosu.
accident that prevented him, instead of Sir Robert Peel, from
s sa
b‘i IThi eg s
wp rhi
inechi pl
hases
been Imposed on Dissent during the reaction f
fanaticism; and so long ago s 1835, when he carried a
motion in favour of applyingaan
Irish Church to the Purposes y surplus revenues of the
sectrifin education, he
struck the first great blow at an
which it was left for Mr. Gladstoneeco esoastical monoply
t destroy. rut,
although a Whig in his detestation of the praetical griev-
ances which are the result of bigotry, he
was nat less a
ertag in the emphasis of his attachment to Protes
tantism, and on one memorable occasion, he dia.-
played the prejudices of an ordinary Englishman. His
letter to the Bishop of Durham did more than any other
public utterance to excite the storm about thlsPepal Acgres-
gon. If we did not remember how much of Lord Russell's
creed was a matter of pure inheritance, we should find it
difficult to understand how he could have believed the Pro-
testantism of the country to hemn danger because the Pope
had given some of his bishops territorial titles which could
carry no power in an English court of law. The speech in
which he introduced the first Reform Bill and the Durham
Letter show him at his best and his worst, with his trust in

popular instincts and his occasional readiness to fight
shadows with edicts.

As a Foreign Minister Lord Russell displayed some of the
best.'qualities which he put forth in domestic legislation.
He had a healthy detestation of the despotic principles
which, in his own youth, were favoured by Castlereagh, and
which cast reproach on the name of England. He was
far more clear-sighted than some masters of foreign policy
who have left greater fame. The despatches in which he
exposed the inevitable consequences of Turkish misrule, and
the necessity of intervention in Syria, display a
saaacity which, if it had been constant at the Foreign
Office, might have saved this country from some Embar-
rassments. His historic sense, which was very keen, showed
him some of the pitfalls of a traditional Eastern policy. The
struggle of the Italians for unity found in him sagacious
sympathy; and, indeed, he must have known that all the
artificial arrangements made or sanctioned by the Congress
of Vienna must swiftly come to an end. The weakness of
his foreign policy lay in too strong a tendency to prescribe
the balm of the British Constitution for the wounds of every
Continental State. That tendency was closely connected
with his chief defect, which was a too great readiness to
trust in mere precepts. He was sometimes apt to talk
more like a man of letters than a man of the world. He
was occasionally strangely bookish for a person of his vast
practical experience Hence he now and then seemed
to lack natural sagacity. Hence, also, he was surpassed as
a party leader, by some rivals who were certainly not
superior to him in the higher gifts of statesmanship.
Nevertheless, it remains true that his long and illustrious
career was an honour to England; that he rendered services
which were surpassed by those of no other Minister of his
day; that he never stooped to use unworthy means to com-
pass party ends: and that he has enriched the history of his
country by the addition of a great character. In the
Abbey in which his remains will doubtless be laid there are
memorials of more brilliant names, but there is the record
of no more thoroughly English career.

_rt noticing the death of Earl Russell, the Pall Mall
J-azette of Wednesday remarks :—" After a last illness,
testifying in its lingering mutations to the vitality
of a man who yet hardly knew a day's robust health
till after he was forty years old, Earl Russell died
last night at Pembroke Lodge. For this event his
friends had long been prepared. Indeed, for a period
connted by years he had already passed just beyond the
pale of this noisy life ; of it, but scarcely in it; conscious
of existence, and not without a sensible appreciation
and enjoyment of its business, but active more with
memory than thought, and even his memories fining
away to thos3 not the most cherished, but the most
robust: a figure to be seen and heard, but fading into
what all hut himself felt to be a strange pathetic middle
distance in .hich a few men linger so long. This beiug so, his
death can be no shock to those about him; no more than it
could have been, happily, to him, himself. A grief it must
be; but then those who mourn for him most must look back
from his death-bed with most pride and pleasure upon a very
long and truly great career. Of that we say nothing now,
except this; that the mere record of it, as set forth in a
hundred prints this morning, can give to readers of this
generation no adequate idea of its importance. Only the
few now existing whose lives ran alongside of his from the
beginning—who at the same time were able to note, were
capable of noting, and who have not lost in the burly-
burly of later events a right appreciation of the
part he played in distant and very different days—only these
can know and feel this morning how large a space Lord John
Russell filled in the history of modern times. His death, no
doubt, will send many a man back to the study of his c.treer
and so the circle of the appreciative will be widened before
long. It is a study that will do the inquirer good—so much
good that we heartily wish it could be taken up by the whole
community; and the result must be, among other things, to
give to Earl Russell his due place in the popular mind—a
far higher one than it has lately occupied."