The Northern Daily Times.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1857-02-05 00:00:00

THE DAY'S NEWS.

r Prom what has already taken place in the House
bf Commons, we may expect there will be a session
of no minor importance. On Tuesday the debate
gave us an insight into the probable course of
party warfare, and reflects more strongly than
might have been anticipated the feelings enter-
tained out of doors on the present pressure of
taxation, the high scale of our public expenditure,
and the character of some portions of our foreign
policy. A cotemporary says :—" After the address
had been duly moved and seconded, Mr. Gladstone
might be observed on the ministerial side of the
house, making every sort of parliamentary endea-
Vour to catch the Speaker's eye. Mr. Disraeli, how-
ever, preserved so much of his prerog tive as the
hitherto recognised leader of her Majesty's Oppo-
sition as to obtain without difficulty the right of pre-
audience. With every description of elaborate
preparation—in sentences that fell on the ear with
the slowness, though not quite with the precision,
f Minute guns—the honorable member for the
Tuileries proceeded to disburden a heart that
beats wholly for his country of all those recondite
charges with which profound study under the
chiefs of European diplomacy had filled a mind
apt to receive and skilful to reproduce, against the
' foreign policy of that great European disturber—
the present Prime Minister of England. The
fault of the whole exhibition was its want of
directness and force. Mr. Disraeli forgot the

public speaker iu the litterateur. He wasifar too
- - elaborate and complete. His audience—which
might have been powerfully impressed by a few
Vivid and telling denunciations of some of the
more salient instances of the policy he was
condemning became bewildered in the wide
sweep of his generalisation and the solemn diffuse-
ness of his platitudes. To have to begin ab ()ve—
to be spared no jot of the who!e history of all that
had happened since the termination of the war—
'was an intolerable tax upon human patience. The
speech, in fact, was the essence of circumlocution,
and if its object was to produce an effect, it merely
afforded another illustration of the science of

" How not to do it." One point, indeed, gave
.., rise for the moment to what almost amounted
to a sensation, and that was the solemn
--averment, naturally obtaining credence from the
lips of • a statesman just fresh from the
penetralia of the French Cabinet, that at the
very time Lord Clarendon was protocolling on
behalf of Italy, the Palmerston Cabinet was cog-
. nizant of a secret treaty by which France, with the
concurrence of England, had guaranteed Austria in,
the undisturbed enjoyment of all her Italian
rdpos-
sessions. It may be as well at once to supply Lo
• Palmerston's brief but energetic refutation of this
charge. There was no such treaty—there never had
been such a treaty—orif so, he at all events knew
• nothing about it. His firm conviction was, that the
whole thing was amyth, engendered in the fertile
brain of the Asiatic mystic by the wicked hints of
the arch Parisian mystifier. It would be profit-
less work to attempt to follow the sinuous
and solemn course of Mr. Disraeli's oration through
all that has intervened between Bolgrad and
Canton. Of course the Boundary blunder was not
forgotten, but the jokes were somewhat faded, and
• the subject not a little stale. The interference in
-Naples was more dexterously handled, but it
- was left for Lord John Russell to expose
in fitting terms the feebleness and vacilation
of our Italian policy. The treatment of the
Swiss affair came nearer to being an effective
hit, but somehow or other this too, missed fire ; and
It the wars in Persia and China, points on
which the sympathies of the House were
..-.:istrongly with the speaker, were passed over almost