The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1855-10-09 00:00:00

FROM OUR LONDON CORRESPONDENT.

MONDAY MORNING.
THE past week has been one pre-eminentlydevoted to speech-
making—to fanfaronade, and to bluster. The ball may be said
to have been begun by an elaborate address, delivered by Sir
G. COENEWALL LEWIS, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to
his constituents at Knighton, in Radnorshire, on Monday ; to
have been followed up by Mr.,IGHT, at Rochdale, on Wed-
nesday; to have been continued by M. M. KOSSUTH, LEDEU
Rommf, and MAzzINI, in Belgium ; and to have culminated
at Romsey, on Friday evening, in a harangue from Lord PAX,-
MEESTON; the diapason having been fully completed by the
barrel-organ treble of Sir JOSEPH PAXTON, at Coventry; the
manly tenor of Sir E. B. LYTTON, at Buntingford, in Herts ;
and the deep bass of the London journals—morning and even-
ing—which have growled out theirsonorous gutturals through-
out the week. The beginning and the end have been alike
devoted to a justification of the mode in which our military
affairs have been and are conducted in the East—the middle
to a smart though conflicting condemnation of the means em-
ployed and the objects attained through the prosecution of
those affairs ; while the growling accompaniment has been de-
voted now to a support of the one, and anon of the other of
those views.

The CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER, a statesman by pro-
fession, and a logician by choice, undertook, very unnecessarily
as it is thought by some, and most unhappily as it is considered
by others, a defence of British generalship in the Crimea. In
his vicarious task of defending the conduct of the Crimean
war, Sir GEORGE volunteered the enunciation of " an opinion
not fOunded on superficial grounds," that a great portion of
the sufferings endured by our army in the Crimea was owing
"rather to the manner in which it ( the expedition) was under-
taken, rather to the failure of immediate success," than to any
deficiency of skill on the part of our commanders. A plain
individual, who had never troubled his head with the subtleties
of metaphysics, nor addled his brain with the "Study Of
'Logic," might have arrived at the conclusion that au expe-
dition which partially failed on account of the manner in which
it was undertaken must in some way or other be looked on as
indicative of the " want of ability" on the part of those com-
manders who made the faulty dispositions for its undertaking.
True to the instincts of a metaphysical logician, the right
hon. gentleman, having discovered that some naughty con-
ductors of the public press hm:e freely censured the military
arrangements of those commanders, turns round, and having
valorously assumed that those censures ought to be rebutted,
he assigns to himself the easier task of defending the honour
and applauding the courage of the British Army.. "I have
observed," he says, " with great regret, during the past week,
the comments made by critics in our own country on the
share which our gallant army has borne in the attack upon
Sebastopol." In condemnation of those critics, he quotes the
observations of a French military critic, who speaks in highly
commendatory terms of the conduct of our men in the attack
upon the Redan. The same line of argument is taken up
and enforced by the Globe, the latter quoting the French
military authority relied on as Colonel SAINT AGNE, who
sums up his commentary with the annexed expression of ap-
proval—" Notwithstanding this want of success, their glory
is intact, for there are no troops in the world who could have
done more under such circumstances 7" All sorts of critics,
civilian and military, agree in the justness of this conclusion.
The question still remains why were the troops placed " under
such circumstances" that none in the world could have done
more than submit to useless slaughter, or, to brave men,
the scarcely less horrifying alternative, of running away !
The British attack we are told was only an affair of diversion,
and that its ultimate success was not essential to the fate of

the day. If that is admitted to its fullest extent, Sir GEORGE
LEWIS, and his coadjutor, the Globe, have both shrunk
from declaring that the sacrifice of the whole British
column of attack was essential to the object of the feint ;
and if that were not so, the question still remains in full force
why were not sufficient means adopted for supporting those
whom it was not meant to sacrifice ? and if supports could not
be sent to them, why were they not recalled ? If the British
attacking party had not at the end taken its own safety into
its own hand, and retreated without orders, would a single
living man of it have ever reached the trenches ? These are
unpleasant questions to put and more upleasant still to answer ;
but the questions and their answers both are forced upon an
indignant public by the lame and inconsiderate apologists of
the men whose want of capacity originated the fatal blunders
which it is vainly sought to hide or palliate.
Another ground of apology put forward by the defenders of
our military system is, that from the first the Redan was
known to be untenable, and that in point of fact its retention
was unnecessary ; the French success against the Malakhoff in-
cluding as a necessary and inevitable consequence the almost
immediate capture of the Redan, all that was wanted from our
troops being such an assault upon the Redan after the French
had succeeded in this attack as would attract the Russian
attention while our Allies secured themselves in possession of
the more important and less easily defended Malakhoff. The
plan as thus explained, and as our Commander-in-Chief en-
deavoured to carry it out, amounted pretty much to such an
invitation as the following : that the French being about to
engage in forcing a shattered door, we should precipitate our
heads against a solid wall to assist them, after they had suc-
ceeded in forcing the door.

The noble PREMIER, grown wiser in his generation than the
adventurous minister of finance, or his daring confederate of
the press, contented himself with a generally expressed ad-
miration of men and matters as he found them. He entered
not upon defences of one nor accusations of another, but
satisfied himself and delighted his auditory by glorifying the
achievements of the Allies in their arduous efforts.
against Sebastopol, which he skilfully represented as,
against the combined military and naval resources
of the Russian Empire. His lordship, however,
could not altogether avoid the luxury of self-created,
giant-killing ; so he set to work, and satisfactorily demolished
the imaginary military theories of some equally imaginary
gentlemen, whom he represented as having insisted on the
Allies invading Bessarabia, and following the vanquished
Russians through the steppes and great wilderness of Southern
Russia. It being a difficult matter to trace the friends and
advisers of a Prime Minister, and an unreasonable thing to
hold hini responsible for their nonsense, any attempt to con-
jecture where his lordship met with men who could seriously
counsel such a course of action as he here indicates would be
futile ; yet some are harsh enough to insinuate that their
parallel could only be met with in the War Department, at
the Horse Guards, or in St. Luke's Hospital. By a clever
arrangement of his subject, his lordship so contrived to evade
particulars, and to generalise the achievements of the Allies,
as to make each responsible for all—to demonstrate the suc-
cesses as common property, and, with a wonderful amount of
disinterestedness, so widely to apportion the mistakes, as to
make every one a participator in the blame. His lordship,
also, with prudent magnanimity, abstained from inculpating
any one, and even the press escaped uncensured at his hands.
In this latter respect the address of Lord PALnizitsToN
offered a striking contrast to that of Mr. BRIGHT, who was
wont to be so rampagious a stickler for an "unshackled press."
The pugnacious benignity of the great peace advocate found
utterance at Rochdale in fierce denunciations of the war, and
still fiercer invectives against that press which has, he says,
kept the warlike feeling up to fever heat. He says, " while
the newspaper sells in double quantity, to the profit of the
owner, he himself feels he is a great power in the state,—that
he is impelling ministers to do what ministers themselves
would shrink from ;" and that neither newspapers nor their
owners will bow down and worship him. In such a dilemma
what is to be done ? He frankly confesses his inability to
solve the problem. He does more than this, however. He
gives himself an excellent character for probity, candour, and
disinterestedness. He assures the world—it is all he can do—
that he never states a fact nor advances an argument which'
does not honestly bear upon the question. He, unhappily for
himself, finds himself almost alone in honesty, in the midst
of a bad world, swayed by newspaper writers, who do
not in the least sympathize in his estimate of his
own virtues, and scarcely expend a thought upon his
opinion of theirs. A certain writer upon men and man-
ners, named CHESTERFIELD, who flourished rather later
than a century ago, assures us that, whenever we find a man
exceedingly urgent to be believed as to a fact which ought to
be taken as true upon a mere statement, there is every reason
to assume that he tells a falsehood and is anxious to deceive us.
Entirely independent of public opinion, Mr. BRIGHT cares for
none of these things, but incessantly assures his hearers that
"he is honest, and that he can say so himself with truth."
The bad world in which he mixes, however, seems to have
the same effect on him which the old school copy tells us
" evil communications" have " upon good manners." He has
told an unbelieving world a thousand times that he is honest;
and he has sometimes ventured to assure the same world that
he 'has' " a feeling heart." This latter, he now tells his
Rochdale audience, is becoming obdurate. " Did they not
also observe," be continued pathetically', "and it was worth
considering—how much less we care for the destruction of
human life than we did a year and a-half ago ? He felt that
in his own case, and he thought it a most unhappy circum-
stance." So of course must every one. The humanity of
Mr. BRIGHT is oozing out of him day by day ; and at so
alarming a rate that, if the war lasts only a year or two longer,
this very dove of peace will become as blood-thirsty as the
vultures by whom he is surrounded !

If the champion of the Peace Society sees nothing but de-

generating humanity in the war, and the spread of vicious
influences in the dissemination of newspapers which repudiate
his controul, and laugh his mock-modesty to scorn, the tri-
umvirate of red-republicans, who sit in quiet security under