The Press.
London, England, 1854-12-02 00:00:00

March, and received at the Foreign-office on the
15th April, in which he informs Lord CLA,RENDON
" that fresh orders have been received in Bessarabia
" to prepare for the passage of troops, and to get
" waggons ready for the transport of baggage." "It
" is said," he adds (and such appears to ba the case
from the amount of preparation ordered) " that
" two corps d'armee, upwards of 200,000 men, will
" pass, and waggons are ordered for the 10Lh ay."
He had likewise before him the letter of Consul
YeastEs to Colonel ROSE, from Odessa, of March 22,
which is stated to have been received at the Foreign-
office on the 11th April, in which the Consul, after
describing the assembling and hastening of large
bodies of troops, as he considers, for the occupation
of the Principalities, adds " great exertions continue
" to be made by the Admiralty at Nicolaieff, and
" Sebastopol to have everything that can swim, ready
" for sea."
We cannot ask our readers to follow us through
this correspondence, but let any of them who may be
so disposed peruse the paper iu Part I. of the Turkey
correspondence presented last session, from No. 62,
received at the Foreign-office on January 11, 1853,
to No. 137, received on the 15th of April; and we
venture to affirm that he will find in those documents,
then before the Cabinet, abundant proofs that the
peace of Europe was in imminent danger, and that
the elements of a mighty struggle, in which Great
Britain must inevitably be engaged, were fast col-
lecting. And that it was the duty, therefore, to the
public and to himself, of an honest Finance Minister,
on the 18th of April, 1853,—instead of proposing and
propounding a peace budget, with actual remissions
of taxation, which, under the real circumstances of
the country, were most improper, and promised
remissions which he must have known to be decep-
tive—to have made vigorous preparations for war.
We say, then, that with the knowledge at that time
possessed by Mr. GLADSTONE of the designs and
movements of the Russian autocrat—a knowledge
possessed then by the Cabinet alone—it was a
delusion upon the public to propose a budget
founded upon the supposition that our peace was to
be uninterupted. And we further say that after
having resisted Mr. DISRAELI'S modification of the
property and income tax in Dec., 1852, instead of
dealing with its admitted difficulties when he came
into power himself, he glossed over its inequalities
and injustices, under the plea and pretext that it
was to be got rid of in 1860 ; while he knew that
events were in progress which in all probability
would, or at least might, involve Great Britain in a
struggle with one of the mightiest empires in Europe,
and thereby perpetuate this unjust tax during the
present generation.
We adverted on a former occasion to the want of
moral rectitude in political matters which charac
tenses the party of which Mr. GLADSTONE is the
the ornament. We are constrained to believe that
to carry his first Budget through the House of
Commons being his paramount object, he lost sight
of the means by which that object was to be attained.
Perhaps he even gloried in the ignorance of the
House of Commons with regard to the real position
of affairs and smiled at the simplicity with which
his promise of exemption from property tax in 1800
was received. We give him every credit for having
since co operated with Lord ABERDEEN in his efforts
to preserve peace, and we are fully convinced that
from his unwillingness to contemplate the possibility
of war, he has been mentally and morally unable to
make adequate provision for the present lamentable
emergency.
Well might the Czar felicitate himself on the ac-
cession of the Peelite Administration. Doubtless, in
Mr. GLADSTONE'S Budget of April, 1853—even more
than in Lord CLatEsnos's despatches—the Emperor
detected then a settled intention on the part of the
British Cabinet to let him have his own way; and
doubtless, therefore, to Mr. GLArnaose, no less than
to Lord ABERDEEN, are we justified in attributing the
horrors and the costs of this war.
Mr. GLADSTONE, on the meeting of Parliament,
will have to propose another financial plan, involving
necessarily increased taxation. On this occasion we
have confined ourselves to his Budget of 1853, and
showed that he obtained for it the sanction of Par-
liament under false pretences, which false pretences
were calculated equally to mislead the British public
and the Emperor of the RussiAs. We have heard it
said, "if a man deceives you once, blame the de-
ceiver ; if again, blame yourself." Will the House
of Commons trust Mr. GLADSTONE when he again
„te. I makes one of his brilliant, but deceptive, speeches
to be

THE UNITED STATES AND CUBA.
THE New York Herald has recently informed us
that the chief subject discussed at the late Con-
ference of American diplomatists held at Ostend
was the conduct of Spain in heaping insults on the
American flag. According to the representations of
a certain portion of the American press, Spain will
not let Jonathan rest; with her invincible armadas