The Press.
London, England, 1858-10-23 00:00:00

THE PRESS, OCTOBER 23, 1858

thinking, Lord Palmerston's all but total defi-
ciency in those higher qualities which are ne-
cessary for a Prime Minister of England in time
of peace :
Taorlughly acquainted with the Foreign Department,he
was ignorant, in a degree hardly to be credited except
upon a careful observation, of our domestic affairs. He
regarded them with something of the supercilious temper
to which he gave vent during the Indian debates with
respect to the Court of Directors, as mercantile and vulgar.
Few of the speeches he delivered as Minister on questions
of legislative procedure or executive government were
received otherwise than with a shrug, a smile, or a sigh;
not one of them will ever be consulted as a magazine stored
with facts or arguments, or will render aid to those who
may hereafter have occasion either to state or to determine
similar points. He had not, like Lord John Russell,
learned the letter or imbibed the spirit of our history; he
had not, like Sir Robert Peel, the gifts—whether from
nature or art—of comprehensiveness or sagacity in
apprehending public interests, or in directing the great
organ on whose action it depends whether they shall be
made or marred. His long administration of foreign
affairs, keeping him practically out of contact with British
institutions, appeared to have rendered him incapable of
appreciating the rights and dignities of Parliament, in
which every wise Minister seeks to be strong by identi-
fying himself with it in sentiment, sympathy, and interest.
The benefits which ought to have resulted froth his great
knowledge of one great department were more than
neutralized by the spirit of mingled turbulence and levity
which he carried, as its head, into the administration of its
affairs, and which, as first Minister of the Crown, he
transferred into them with yet fuller effect through the
supple and unresisting medium of Lord Clarendon. Thus
his stock-in-trade as a Peace-Minister was wholly inade-
quate, or rather nearly null. It followed that ho could
only be a Peace-Minister by keeping ali•-e the passions,
maintaining the semblances, and thus ever walking on the
brink, of war. Accordingly, his two years of peace-
administration were agitated by abundant quarrels both
of ink and blood. With America we had the most serious
quarrel since the war of 1815. With Naples we were
embroiled up to a point to which we could not be justified
in proceeding unless by reasons that would have justified
and required our going farther. With France we contrived
to fall into 7epextett collision ; and only two months before
the grand humiliation of last January, the Miuisterhimself,
with an incredible, and at the same time a vulgar, rash-
ness, boasted in public of his ability to encounter her in
arms if she should attempt invasion. Thus came about
one of the very greatest publics evils ; the spirit of war was
carried into the relations of peace : it gave the tone to the
ordinary course and administration of our affairs, even
within those precincts of European civilization which are
subject to the restraints of public law and usage, and of
the most enlightened body of opinion in the world. Beyond
those precincts, these inconvenient manacles were entirely
shuffled off. The wretched war with Persia remains among
the records of the Palmerston administration, while
among its legacies was inherited the quarrel with Chinn,
far more deeply tainted in its origin, if now approaching
to a more successful conclusion. It became sufficiently
plain, and the proof has been made more complete by the
negative evidence of the last six months, that under the
incubus of the late Administration, thoughl we might have
the name of peace, we could not have the substance of
tranquillity; for, as the inveterate brawler and duellist
finds all society quarrelsome, so a Palmerston Ministry
had continually to lament the diffioulties they encountered
in bringing foreign nations to anything like reason and
justice. For the character and interests of England
abroad, this mode of action was injurious beyond descrip-
tion, and many long years must pass before we cease to
suffer from its effects. At home, as an affair of party in-
terests, it was simply a game of neck or nothing. If and
while it succeeded, it must succeed brilliantly, for it im-
plied a state of sustained excitement in the notional mind ;
hut it was unlikely to succeed for any considerable time ;
and, whether the effervescence were long or short in its
duration, it was certain to he followed by that (Barnet ra-
ection which waits upon political not less than upon phy-
sisal excess.
In support of this view of the character of Lord
Palmerston as a Minister, the reviewer relics not
merely on those startling evidences of a more
recent date which at length opened the eyes of
Parliament and the country ; he adduces earlier
instances of " the unskilful mixture of bullying
" and fear" which marked the foreign policy of
England under the late Administration. The
peremptory refusal, in 1855, to rule the questions
of the Isle of Serpents and the Bessarahian fron-
tier otherwise than by force, and the consequent
despatch of the British fleet to the Black Sea,
contrary to the Treaty of Paris, followed by
acquiescence in the adjudication of a Contbrence ;
the irritating quarrel with America on the sub-
ject of Ruatan and the Mosquito territory, fol-
lowed by an abandonment of pretensions which
ought never to have been advanced; the shabby
manoeuvres for evading the municipal law of
America against foreign recruiting, followed by
tame submission to the insulting expulsion of
Sir John Crampton and three or four British
Consuls in his train,—are all cited as instances of
political delinquency which, with many others of
loss note, might, but for the Palmerston infatua-
tion which for a time possessed Parliament and
the country, have proved fatal to the late
Premier,

1033

Nor is it altogether and only to the vices of his
foreign policy that the noble Viscount's downfall
is attributed by the reviewer : the bill of indict-
ment which he has drawn up against him con-
tains sundry counts relative to his domestic
domestic policy,—less numerous only because one
of the chief counts is the absence of anything
like energetic Parliamentary action, until the
last year—the year in which, through a monstrous
abuse of dictatorial power over the House of
Commons, the statute-book was defaced by the
introduction of the Divorce Act, and by a series
of gross blunders and jobs in the passing of the
Act for the transfer of testamentary jurisdiction
from the ecclesiastical to the civil courts, a host
of inexperienced and incompetent functionaries
was substituted in the place of the existing staff
of experienced and competent officers, and that
at a cost to the country of an annuity of 200,0001.
payable to the displaced ecclesiastical officers. In
the catalogue of Lord Palmerston's domestic sins
the history of the Crimean inquiry, with its
glaring inconsistencies, its mean shifts, and its
cruel scandals, is, as might be expected, not preter-
mitted. Amidst such an abundance of materials
for impeaching the fallen Minister before the
tribunal of public opinion, it is not surprisince
that some even of his most palpable misdeeds
should have escaped the attention of the reviewer.
There is one omission, however, which we feel
bound to notice, because we believe that, although
not immediately connected with his loss of office,
Lord Palmerston's conduct in the particular to
which we allude has had as large a share as any of
the numerous other causes, in permanently dis-
crediting the noble Viscount in the minds of' the
English people, and rendering him henceforward
impossible as a Minister—we mean his episcopal
appointments. We have no wish to particularize
names, or to reopen sores which the salve of time
has, however slightly, skinned over ; and we
shall, therefore, say no more on this point than
express our conviction that not even Lord John
Russell's desperate determination to force upon
the Church, in one or two instances, rulers whose
title to such preferment was the notorious fact of
their being obnoxious to the Church, gave such
deep offence to the religious feeling of' the country
as the recklessness and levity with which Lord
Palmerston abandoned one of the most responsible
functions devolving upon a British Minister to
his personal entourage.
One more point, adverted to by the reviewer,
which contributed materially to the downfall of
Lord Palmerston, is too important to be passed
over in silence,—the fact that he derived no
strength from his colleagues ; that in the compo-
sition of his Ministry, though positive absence of
respectability was the exception, decent medi-
ocrity was most assuredly the rule :
The great bulk of its members (stip; the reviewer) were
men who of themselves never would have gained its éclat,
and never would have perpetrated its misdeeds. But the
tone and will of the First Minister determined the whole
complexion and the whole action of the body. As to
Lord Palmerston himself, he reminds us of the strange
antithesis in some words of Rousseau, who says of a parth
miler personage, " ae n'etait assurement pas an homme sans
merite quoique ce tilt un grand vilain." He has his great
and signal gifts, but England his cause to be glad that she
is quit of him as her guide.
With so many elements of weakness, so many
causes tending to inevitable ruin, it is not sur-
prising that the Administration of Lord Palmers-
ton was eventually overthrown : the wonder is
that it lasted so long. But it was more than a
mere casual effect, it was a signal instance of
moral retribution,—a point scarcely brought into
sufficient relief by the writer from whom we
are quoting,—that it should be a Parliament
elected to the cry of " Palmerston for ever" that
pronounced his disgrace, and in scribed upon the
tablets of its own and the country's heart the
sentence, " Come what may, Lord Palmerston
shall not again be Minister." With that deter-
mination fixed in the minds of' the great body of
his own too long deluded supporters, it is less
difficult to understand, than it would appear at
first sight, how it came to pass that Lord Derby
was able not only to maintain himself, after he
had—not without great deliberation both on his
own part and that of his Sovereign—accepted the
responsibility of filling the vacant Premiership,
but to carry on the business of the country
efficiently, successfully, and satistlictorily.
The parliamentary position of the new Miniitr7
19 well described by the reviewer :
Two afths of the House of Commons, to been with, spa
rills Mend* of the ctoterment. Two two Mei sit4oßglig