The Sun.
London, England, 1855-07-20 00:00:00

MR. ROEBUCK'S MOTION.
(From the Tiniss of this day.)
The subject of Mr. Roebuck'sanotion has received as great
a variety of treatment as the *enterprise to which it refers.
In the East the question is, " IQw are we to get into Sebas-
topol ?" and chief after chief, army after army, attempts the
solution, hitherto in vain, in thc lipase of Commons a suc-
cession of minds of no ordinary PirWei have been engaged in
informing us how the nation should follow out the finding of
the Sebastopol Committee. The _report is before us, and, as
it happens, unexpectedly to most people, it is one to which
hardly an exception can betaken, It is full; it is honest;
it is safe • it is cautiously and even kindly expressed, and
disappoints much sinister foreboding. What is more than
all, there is ,a report; the Committee did not sink under the
task, or quarrel hopelessly, or throw an undigested mass of
evidence on the table of the house somewhere about the mid-
dle of August. But, this part of the business achieved so
much better and so much earlier than was expected, what-is
the next step ? What use is the house to make of its own
work ? Every member who has yet risen to address the house*
on the subject appears to have been under the impression that
he had some key of his own which baffled everybody else.
So one has treated it as a judicial question, another as a per-
sonal question, another as a constitutional question,and others
by other tests of their own. These experimentalists appear
to have thought that on some new showing of their own,
which has hitherto escaped the ligilance of a whole nation
for the whole of this year, it would turn out that the existing
Government ought to walk out of office, or all the members
of the late Government ought
,t 6 be impeached, or possibly
some still more surprising measure to be forced on the
nation. For our part, we do .not mean to tax the con-
fidence of our readers in beltal!" of some patent escape'
from the difficulty; we ;shall. sex our brains for
an ' answer to the enigma ; reasOn:=
that we do not admit the difficulty at all, or
believe there to be any enigma. We never regarded Mr.
Roebuck's motion before Christmas as a question of confidence
till Ministers, unwisely, as we think, chose to make it such.
Wheu the Aberdeen Administration was broken up, we did
not for a moment think that anybody threatened by the in-
quiry was incapacitated for office ; in a word, wo never ex-
pected anything else from the Committee than the improve-
ment of our naval and military administration. That is all
we now expect ; and, if it is necessary for the House of Com-
mons to follow up the report by adopting resolutions, we
would rather see those resolutions divested of a political, and,
as things have turned out, as much as possible of a personal
character.
In all this diversity of treatment last night it was assumed,
for the convenience of the speakers, that the errors of the
late Government consisted in certain great Cabinet determi-
nations. Were that the case, we should certainly agree with
Mr. Whiteside that the error, or rather the crime, must fol-
low every member of the Cabinet wherever he goes. With
Lord John Russell, we should certainly hold Lord Palmer.
ston and Lord John himself quite as deeply involved as the
Duke of Newcastle and his colleagues directly concerned itt
the conduct of the war. We are aware, too, that it would
not be always easy to distinguish between the conduct and
the administration of the war ; and that, strictly speaking,
the responsibility of the whole Cabinet insist extend to both.
But throughout the whole of this lamentable story the errors
and deficiencies have been not so much in the general con-
duct of the war as in its details, and in the practice of the
several departments. We are not aware of having ever im-
pugned anything that was likely to be a Cabinet question.
So far from imagining crimes so Ministerial, so large, and
so capital as to extend from a War Minister to a Secretary
of State, and even to a Commissioner of Public Works,
we did not even think the Minister directly concerned
in the conduct of the war bound to resign, or not to
accept office in the Government founded on the overthrow of
Lord Aberdeen's. Could we now believe that the war itself
was a colossal error, that the descent on the Crimea was even
as great a folly as the Walcheren expedition, we might then
take a part in these high questions of personal responsibility
—we might even insist, with Lord John Russell, that Lord
Palmerston, too, had the taint of the Crimea. But we re-
peat, that, from first to last, we have ever laid the blame on
the system, as it is called; as, for example, on intricate and
excessive routine ; on the employment of men past learning,
and even past work; on the tyranny of cumbersome Boards
and veteran Committees; on the wanb of unity ; on certain
traditional errors reigning in departments and even over
whole branches of the service ; and, to a much less extent, on
the inexperience of the chiefs.
If an impeaehment, an ostracism, or a censure so severe as
to amount to aperpetual want of confidence were intended by
Mr. Roebuck's resolution, then we have only to say that the
nation decided the question last December, when it quietly
permitted the majority of Lord Aberdeen's Cabinet to re-
sume office in a new combination. The inference is so mani-
fest and so unavoidable that Mr. Whiteside, in order to escape
it, is obliged to maintain that the case is now different from
what it was then, and that the nation knows a great deal more
than it then did as to the mismanagement of the war. For
this purpose he quotes passages from the report, which he
describes as if they were a new revelation of horrors. For
our part, however, we cannot say that the report does more
than confirm the correspondence in our own columns—cor-
respondence, be it remembered, which not only preceded the
downfall of the Aberdeen Ministry and the return of several
of its members to office, but actually led to those changes.
We are not prepared to say that the case is now essentially
different from that which seemed in December to admit
of so ready and inoffensive a solution. It was very bad
then. Lord John Russell justly described the accounts from
the Crimea as " horrible and heartrending," as indeed they
were, though in one particular class of suffering—that from
twposure to cold --the bulk of the calamity came after Christ-
Tll2s. But while we were very anxious for a searching in-
quiry, we did not desire that the Duke of Newcastle, Mr.
Sidney Herbert, and Sir James Graham should be impeached
It seems natural, indeed, as a atter of taste, that the Duke
of Newcastle should retire from office, and he consulted his
own feelings by doing so ; but wo do not remember that any-
body of candour and common sense suggested at that time
that Lord Aberdeen's other colleagues had permanently for-
feited the confidence of the nation. We remain of the same
opinion as then. In the main we believed, and still believe,
the mismanagement of the war to have been what is called
"administrative"—that is, in the practices and customs of
office, in the routine of departments, and, above all, in that
want of a united and effective War Ministry which we had
dep`ored, and which Parliament had not sufficiently rectified
before Easter, 1854. That, we are satisfied, is the deliberate
conclusi6n which the House of Commons draws from the -Re-
vert of the Sebastopol Committee ; and it has now shown by
a decisive majority that it will not permit a document of such
national value to be used merely to assist factious ambition,
or gratify personal feeling.

(From, the Morning _Herald of this day.)

ass
ti
ece
hhi
tt
nt beenebt
ewaha,
optedce ce
ceop nt
te
f° Guilty or not Guilty " such was the simple issue placed
(nlbuly: tltBl
ooi rs
e imm. e
before the House of Commons by Mr Roebuck's motion. As
di
such
ney Herbert, on the part of the delinquent ex-Ministers- as
James Graham and Mr. Sid
contributed so successfully to bring about. Ono would
suppose, on listening last night to the defence of Lord
eamtbheer
warof Lwohli h Atbheer;
Aberdeen's Secretary at War, that he was addressing
an audience who had still to learn all the important
facts connected with the Crimean expedition, inst:ad
of an assembly unhappily too familiar with that nar-
rative of mismanagement, misery, and disaster. Mr.
Sidney Herbert occupied himself for an hour and a
half in profitless endeavours to traverse the report
of the Sebastopol committee, on the ground that
the facts it elicited were isolated, and by no means indica-
tions of extensive neglect or disorganisation. The committee
was unquestionably defective ; it neglected many valuab'e
sources of information ; the inquiry pursued by it was not
sufficiently searching ; and evidence, on the whole, was indif-
ferently selected and arranged. But no man except one
whose public character has suffered to the extent of Mr.
Herbert's would venture to challenge admitted and indisput-
able
rotsitbdl
saans
tdr
odui sst itnhcatt,
en, uponl
etfl
not ex-
cepting that with which the name of Chatham is unhappily
facts, or attempt to deny that light has been thrown,
trethceonshdourcetsooffaEn
England, not
the
immortalised. We did not, it is true, require a Parliamentary
committee to find out for us that our troops were flung upon
the enemy's territory destitute of almost every appliance
for a campaign—that they famished in thousands for
want of food and clothing—that others perished in hospital-
ships, and on board transports, which became floating pest-
houses; that private benevolence and private charity sup-
plied those comforts and means of support for the sick and
wounded which it was the duty of the Government to pro-
vide ; that the management of the three great departments,
the commissariat, the transport, and the medical, was with-
out example for stupidity, ignorance, and recklessnsss. We
did not want a committee to find out all this for us : facts in
abundance in the simple language of the sufferers streamed
down the columns of every newspaper in the land—but we
wanted to trace the evil to its source, to know who were re-
sponsible for the ruin of our army and the waste of our re-
sources. To this inquiry the.SebastoPol committee addressed
itself. and after a patient investigation it has fixed the guilt
indiscriminately upon the Cabinet of Lord Aberdeen, each
and every of them.
It is asserted, indeed, that the responsibility in question is
departmental, and that, therefore, the censure in this respect
affects only the department of the war. The errors of the
Duke of Newcastle we really believe were errors of judgment.
It has been abundantly proved that he administered his de-
partment with unremitting industry. But the Duke of New-
castle complained that he was left at the close of the past
year—after the news of the battle of the Alma had reached
this country -to his own unaided counsel. This is the Duke
of Newcastle's defence—while he was toiling at his do..
partment, his colleagues were amusing themselves. Shall
it be said that Ministers who advised, however reluc-
tantly, the invasion of the Crimea, incurred no further re-
sponsibility in the conduct of the expedition? Shall it be
said, that, having counselled the expedition, they had
nothing further to do with it, and no concern or responsi-
bility in its success or revers )5 ? We confess with the
straightforward member for Birmingham our inability to dis-
tinguish in such a case between one adviser of the Crown and
another. Mr. Muntz does not allow his good sense to be
im-
posed upon by a distinction without a difference. We ven-
ture to say that the majority of the British public are of Mr.
Muntz's way of thinking. The censure contained in the re-
port reaches to every member of Lord Aberdeen's Cabinet, or
it touches none of them.
The feature of the debate was the powerful speech of the
member for Manchester. Since the terrible philippics of Mr.
Disraeli in 1846, directed against the great apostate, the
house has not listened to more scathing invective, or more
trenchant denunciation than was hurled last night against
Lord Palmerston from the lips of Mr. Bright.
The result of the division upon Geeeral Peel's amendment
has given Ministers a gassing triumph at the expense of those
who, like Sir James Graham and Mr. Sidney Herbert, are,
to say the least, formidable malcontents. On this occasion
the Government put forth its strength, and it may require
all it can collect before the close of the session—the stigma
contained in the report of the Sebastopol committee still
clings to those against whom it was hurled.