The Express.
London, England, 1860-07-07 00:00:00

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LONDON, SATURDAY, JULY 7.

It is a serious thought that a Minister who per-
'macs the political indifferentism of the times so
felicitously u our present PRIME MINISTER is, in
years at least, one of the most venerable of our
public men. Everyone asks who among the many
disciples and converts of his debonnair philosophy
is to succeed in the course of nature to the supre-
macy of this ancient political EPICURUS. There is
no lack of lassitude and love of ease among the
younger men ; but it is rather the affectation of
premature exhaustion, the trick of a young man
who, at the mature age of four-and-twenty, has
lost all his illusions, than that profound philosophy
of life applied to the science of politics which be-
comes a second nature to a highbred gentleman
who for half-a-century has sported vigorously and
successfully with public affairs. The insouciance
of a man like Lord P&L/Ertl-411)N, whom we all like
for his failings rather than for his virtues
as a Minister, is not futility ; it is a curious and
carefully composed quintessence of and a kindly
contempt for his fellow creatures, a manly fondness
for all forms of activity, a judicious horror of
strong convictions, and a smiling impatience of
first principles. AU these delightful qualifica-
tions, tempered with the caution and confidence of
long familiarity with the stage and the side-scenes
of the world's theatre, make Lord PaImERSTON the
idol of a generation of early Sybarites, who for-
get that the surprising gaietyof threescore and ten
is a sickly mannerism at thirty. The number of
mistaken imitators of the PIIEMIRE'S pleasant
playfulness not of his indefatigable capa-
city for work—among the sprouting statesmen
whose hereditary aptitude for office is to shine
upon England a few years hence, seems to defy
all the efforts of the "earnest " school. In this
difficulty, for instance, between the Lords and
the Commons, Lord PALMERSTON is only anxious
for peace and quiet. " For goodness' sake," he
would say, " let us have no sounding the gong or
beating the big drum. Your first impulse may be
to sound an alarum in the name of the Commons
of England ; but beware of first impulses; they
are generally good. The public outside don't
care a jot about your rights or your privileges ;
they will only laugh at you if you make a fuss;
and if you quote history or talk of patriotism
in connexion with Tax-Bills you may be con-
doned as bores in the House, but you
will go down as humbugs to that contemporary
posterity which consists of the readers of to-
morrow morning's paper." This is the sense and
spirit of Lord PA immtroN's "satisfaction," when
be announces that he shall be perfectly content if his
Resolutions are carried, and that he has no idea of
taking any steps beyond. When some zealous
Radical, who has freshness enough of feeling to
take the matter to heart, shows, text in hand,
that our ancestors in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries—not to speak of the crucial epoch of the
livcsarii—held to the inalienable and indivisible
taxing powers of the Commons with a religious and
unsleeping jealousy ; or when some conscientious

Liberal sifts and sorts a bundle of so-called pre-
cedents in favour of the Lords, and finds them to
he, almost without exception, as rotten and
treacherous as a pack of Admiralty gunboats—
trivial, irrelevant, imperfect, or contradictory; or
when some Parliamentary enthusiast lifts up his
voice, and appeals to the memory of great men
of old—the House sits languidly gaping like •
congregation of schoolboys at a sermon. At the
sound of such a word as "patriot," perhaps, the
young gentlemen opposite feebly laugh and faintly
sneer, as they might at any other innocent vulgarity.
And yet the patience of the House is proverbial ;
it will leiten for a couple of hours to the grievance
of a poor old Irishwoman deported from Maryle-
bone to her own country in the last
stage of destitution and disease, by the reck-
less order of a couple of unpaid magistrates;
its romantic sympathy, too, with Savoyard, and
Kwiss 14 most interesting. But it cannot be per-
suaded to le in earnest about • trumpery Tax-Rill,
or to be angry with the other House for relieving
it of a troublesome though immemorial responsi-
bility. The present House of Commons, it is
true, is the rare product of a crisis of reaction.
It has bit upon a " mission "—the last resource
of cynics and charlatans. Its mission is to in-
crease the power of two estates of the realm,
and to arrest the dangerous predominance of
the third. It has already put down Refonn ;
it has handed over to the Lords the tales and
supplies, and the privilege of cbaattelog its
Chancellor of the Exchequer ; it has tossed a•
Empire to the Horse Guards, and in • seeniorable
instance it has eagerly applauded a flagrant abuse
of patronage. _

By sa•e;ting to Lord P*Lmansrrom's Resolutions