The Express.
London, England, 1855-03-06 00:00:00

A MONUMENT TO JOSEPH HUME.

Tn ruling passion of the Emperor NICHOLAS

an insatiable love of power. Yet, what power did
he really possess ? Even had his most ambitious
projects been carried into execution, he would have
been no more than a successful instrument of the
system of which he formed a part. But he was not
able to carry them into execution. He has left his
country engaged in a war that threatens to exhaust
its resources, and exposed to imminent danger from
intestine broils. There can be no doubt that his
death was accelerated by the fever and fret of anti-
cipated defeat. Contrast with his comparatively
brief and resultless career the protracted and use-
ful life of our own JOSEPH HUME. The late
member for the Forfar boroughs never held even
the most subordinate office under Government. Yet
he wu a prominent and influential actor in those
straggles which have diffused education so widely
among the people, which have to a great extent
changed the constitution of our House of Com-
mons, which have rendered administrative reform
inevitable, which have forced the adoption
of a new financial and commercial policy upon a
reluctant dominant class; and which have reduced poli-
tical proscription on account of religious belief to a
lower ebb than in any former period of English his-
tory. The private English citizen has contri-
buted to effect changes which are beneficial and
will endure. The AUTOCRAT has done nothing
to ameliorate the condition of his kind, and his
labours will leave scarcely any trace in the annals
of his country. Which of the two has exercised
most of real power—the despot or the private
citizen of a free land?

Yet the obsequies of the useless and noxious tyrant
will be performed with lavish pomp and ceremonial
by heartless slaves, while the remains of the useful
and meritorious citizen were followed to the grave
by loving hearts, but as unostentatiously as those of
the dead wife of the Patriarch who only sought to
"bury his dead out of his sight." This was in ac-
cordance with the express wishes of our regretted
friend, and was in beautiful harmony with
the whole of his life. But though it became him to
despise posthumous parade, does not England owe
it to its own reputation to express by some mo-
numental testimony its appreciation of his merits?
JOSEPH Holtz belonged to a class of public men
of whom we have too few among us. Sprung from
the people, all his efforts were for the people. The
great aim of his labours was to promote "the
greatest possible good of the greatest possible num-
ber." But his was no vague, ill-regulated sympathy ;
he never allowed his reason to be biassed by mere
sentiment or imagination. He looked the stern reali-
ties of life steadily in the face. Though a demo-
crat in the most literal acceptation of the
phrase, he never stooped to Satter the people. When
a portion of the working classes offered him a testi-
monial of their gratitude for his services in obtain-
ing the repeal of the combination laws, instead of
accepting the gift he sternly rebuked them for their
abuse of the liberty he had gained for them. Though
a democrat, he was no demagogue. Parliament was
the principal scene of his labours. He was no agi-
tator, but a statesman working by legalised and
legitimate means. He did not win upon the minds
of the populace by eloquence, and urge them on to
efforts tending more to show his power over them
than to benefit themselves. He was plain, practical,
indefatigable, inaccessible to the charms of place
or popular applause, and therefore powerful for
England has bad more than ore great Willa.:

England has had more than one great orator ; Eng.
land has had more than one great commander by
sea and land; but England has as yet had only one
JOSEPH Hoax. His steady pursuit of real predictl
good, and his superiority alike to the blandishments
of courts and mobs, mark him out ea a sample of the
kind of public men who will most be needed in the
era of extended popular power upon which we are
entering. And the English people, who have been
so lavish of their monumental trophies to CHATHAM!,
Pins, and PEELS, to WELLINGTONS, HEWN; and to
Commas, ought to mark their sense of the value
of public servants like JOSEPH HOME, by cmsecrating
a monument to him in return. The most appropriate
would be a statue of the man, preserving his linea-
ments, as he li,yed and breathed among no, to the
latest generations. The cost of the statue ought to
be defrayed by the voluntary contributions of the
people; and the appropriate site for it is in imme-
diate contiguity to the scene of his peaceful triumphs
—in the vestibule of the House of COO3lllOllB. It is
for the people to have the statue sculptured, and to
insist upon its admission to that place, let courtiers
say what they will to the contrary.—Daily News.