The Sun.
London, England, 1855-07-16 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

( From the Times of this day.)
The incident which has terminated the connexion of
Lord John Russell with the present Administration, and
changed for the twentieth time in the last few years the
head of the Colonial-office, does not derive its sole or
even its chief interest from the late negotiations at
Vienna or the conduct of the war. This occurrence is
the last link in a chain of transactions which appear to
us to leave no excuse either to Parliament or to any.
party in this country for ignorance of the true character
of Lord John Russell as a public man. Our own opi-
nion of that character has long been formed, and not un-
frequently expressed ; it is now justified and confirmed
y evidence so irresistible and demonstrative that we
near no attempt to combat the conclusions which a more
correct estimate of Lord John Russell's disposition and
abilities had long ago suggested to us. Yet, so power-
ful in this country, but more especially in the House of
Commons and in what is called political society, are the
ties of old association, the fictions of party, and the in-
fluence of coteries, that it required a failure and mis-
conduct as gross as that we have recently witnessed at
Vienna on the part of Lord John Russell to drive him
from the position he still sought to retain. Nothing in
this transaction is more significant than the fact that
the fatal blow was struck at last by the subordinate
members of the Whig party in the House of Commons,
who could no longer endure to be led by a man who
had so ill served his country in the face of Europe.
It is understood that Lord John Russell had previ-
ously tendered his resignation to his colleagues in
the Cabinet, but that they declined to accept it
from that mistaken tenderness which sometimes plays
the part of weakness. The members of the Govern-
ment not being members of the Cabinet, but serv-
ing under it and voting for it in the House of
Commons, were of an opposite opinion ; and they firmly
announced to Lord John Russell himself and to the
Prime Minister that if the late Plenipotentiary to Vienna
did not withdraw from office before the debate on Sir
Bulwer Lytton's motion, they were themselves prepared
to quit office and to recerd their votes against the
ministry of which Lord John Russell still formed part.
These gentlemen appear to have acted with a spirit and
independence which does them much honour, and we
trust that there is some one to be found among them
capable of leadir'e hereafter the great Liberal party in
this country with more energy, ability, and honesty than
have been displayed while Lord Russell affected to per-
form that duty.
It is not to be supposed, however, that the fall of Lard
John Russell from the position he once occupied in the
estimation of his party and of his countrymen has been
the result of any sudden pique or extraordinary incident.
Although his conduct at Vienna and sincehis return has
roused the just indignation of Parliament, and termi-
nated, as we hope, his career as a minister of the Crown,
the decline of his influence and of his reputation has
long been perceptible. In December, 1851, he availed
himself of an event on which he had the feelings of the

country with him to eject Lord Palmerston from the
Foreign-office, and although, opposed as we had been to
the foreign policy of Lcrd Palmerston in Greece, Sicily,
and elsewhere, we viewed that change without regret,
the measure was a strange act of perfidious inconsistency
on the part of Lord J. Russell against a colleague whom
he had shortly before described and defended as the British
Minister par exeellence. A very few weeks served to show
that Lord J. Russell was utterly incapable of prolonging
the existence of the Government of which he had been
the bead since the overthrow of the Cabinet of Sir Robert
Peel ; and, on looking back to that period of six years,
we must say that so inoperative and unsuccessful an
Administration has never existed for so long a period in
this country. It was kept in office mainly by the dread
of letting in the Protectionist party, and, so injuring the
grand commercial reforms of Sir Robert Peel. Yet fn
1852 the Protectionist party were restored to office,
though only long enough to compel them to abjure the
doctrines for which they had so vehemently contended.
Upon the dissolution of Lord Derby's Cabinet, after a
Parliamentary struggle in which Mr. Gladstone had
borne the most conspicuous part, the Coalition Govern-
ment was formed under Lord Aberdeen. Lord John
Russell held the office of Foreign Secretary just long
enough to write a blundering and discreditable despatch
in answer' to the propositions made by the Emperor
Nicholas to Sir Hamilton Seymour, but, on the plea of
health, he professed to prefer an unattached position, and
so he retained his seat in the Cabinet and the leadership
of the House of Commons, without any Ministerial de-
partment. It may now be said without inconvenience,
and it will be said hereafter, for it is historically true,
that the one great source of difficulty, division, and weak-
ness in Lord Aberdeen's Cabinet was Lord John Russell.
He obviously felt with great keenness the loss of that
position of First Minister of the Crown which he had oc
cupied for six years, and he watched month after month,
with the restless irritability of unsatisfied pursuit, for
an opportunity to recover it. He felt with equal
pain the oratorical superiority of Mr. Gladstone
in the House of Commons, and the growing indif-
ference of Parliament to his own speeches. His
cold and exclusive nature forbade him to contract
confidential relations with his new colleagues, and
he continued to treat all but his own immediate fol-
lowers in the Cabinet as his rivals rather than as his
colleagues. Such was the state of affairs when Parlia-
ment met in February last, and the first act of Lord
John Russell was to break up the Cabinet and denounce
those who had been carrying on the war while be had
been enjoying the rustic pleasures of Minto. It is need-
less for us to recur to the details of so recent and so
remarkable a transaction ; suffice it to say that, so far
as it is possible to judge of a man's motives from his
conduct, Lord John Russell thought that the di,asters
of the army in the Crimea gave him an opportunity of
ejecting from the Cabinet those Ministers who were su-
perior to himself in position, or independent of himself
in their opinions. But he had utterly miscalculated
the effect of this extraordinary proceeding ; for although
the country did not regret the fall of Lord Aberdeen
and the Duke of Newcastle, it viewed with indignation
the means by which this result had been obtained ; and,
although her Majesty thought it her duty to give Lord
John Russell an opportunity of forming the new Admi-
nistration, he was instantly told by his nearest political
friends that such an attempt would cover himself and
them with indelible disgrace. His conduct as a col-
league and a public man was placed by these intrigues
in a most unfavourable light ; but some reputation he
still retained for national spirit as one of the chief au-
thors and promoters of the war, and for knowledge of
the questions involved in this contest. On these
grounds, and also from a desire to give him an oppor-
tunity of repairing a damaged political character, he was
sent to Vienna with most precise instructions, based on
the views he had himself previously advocated. His mis-
sion was not unaccompanied by some hiclicrous details,
which excited the surprise of Europe, and every inci-
dent which took place at Vienna showed his utter want
of knowledge and judgment in his relations with the
society of a foreign Court. The result was that in about
three weeks he was turned completely round, like a
mariner without a compass in the navigation of unknown
water, and a British Plenipotentiary, who was at the
same time a member of the British Cabinet, found him-
self advocating the Austrian proposals and making a
conficlaot of Count Buol. Upon his return to London
the fumes of diplomatic flattery began to clear off, and
in another fortnight he had so far forgotten what had
passed at Vienna as to make a warlike tirade in the
House of Commons in answer to Mr. Disraeli's charge
that the language of the Government bad been am-
biguous. But ere long this doublefaced game was brought
to a close. Count Buol very naturally replied to Lord
John's warlike harangue by publicly reminding him that
at Vienna he stood committed to the Austrian propoF.al ;
and after having risen last February in the House of
Commons to turn King's evidence against his colleagues,
no resource remained for him on Friday week but to
plead guilty himself, and on the following Friday to
withdraw from office, convicted upon all these charges,
as he himself expressed it, by Parliament and by the
country.
We lave not attempted to heighten the effect of thin
must painful and humiliating narrative by any remarks.
The facts are already familiar to our readers, and they
admit of no exculpation. But, although our estimate
of the political character of Lord John Russell has
never been a high one, we cannot record this extinc-
tion of his public career without regret,—not so much
for himself as for the country. It is a national dis-
credit when a man who has filled so eonsiderable a
part in our affairs stands before Europe and before
England in the position which Lord John Russell
now fills. The other day the failure of a private bank
threw a stain on English credit and shook the confidence
of the world in our financial establishments ; but the
bankruptcy of a statesman in the discharge of his public
duties is a far greater disaster to the honour and autho-
rity of this country. If there be one cause more than
another to which this calamitous termination of the
career of Lord John Russell is to be attributed, it is the
unqualified selfishness and the exaggerated notion of his
own importance which have invariably marked his con-
duct. Having the honour to serve a great country and
to lead a great party, he has never risen above the most
selfish considerations, and every act of his life has been
regulated by its effect on his own prospects. Hence,
, although the principles for which he contended were
originally broad and free, he narrowed them to the ob-
jects of his own ambition ; the horizon before him was
boundless, but his own vision was contracted to a single
point ; he has passed his life in a small circle of flat-
terers, whose deceptive homage enlarged neither his mind
ncr his heart ; and even these have gradually dwindled
away until they leave him to the appropriate punishment
of his failings—alone. Politically, indeed, his opinions
on the war now appear to place him in the same class
with Mr. Gladstone and the other members of Lord
Aberdeen's Cabinet who have seceded from Lord Pal-
merston; but, as the leader of a political party, we must
conclude that Lord John Russell's authority is at an
end, and, if this nation is to maintain the position, both
in arms and in the work of human improvement, which
we believe to belong to it, we must find statesmen more
worthy to preserve our character, and more able to di-
rect our power.

(Front 4he Morning Herald of this day.)
We really feel at a very considerable loss to explain
how or by what means the Cabinet of Lord Palmerston
can expect to derive advantage in the eyes of the country
from its summary ejection of its Vienna plenipotentiary.
Many and various have been the similes which have been
applied to the conduct adopted by the Premier in the
present emergency; but we cannot think that any one
of them is thoroughly applicable to the circumstances of
the case. Some of our contemporaries have likened it
to the case of a mother casting her child to the wolves in
order to save her own life. We think, however, that
the " virulent friendship" supposed to exist between the
parties may set that supposition aside on the score of
affection alone. Others again, have bethought them-
selves of the well-known figure of casting a tub to the
whale ; but we cannot help thinking that the Premier
will find to his cost that lie has only thrown out a small

pannikin, and that the leviathan, which may in this in-
stance be supposed to represent the people of England,
will pass by the tiny offering with contempt, and will
not be diverted from the purpose of staving in the ob.
vosious barque of the Cabinet, and whelming in the
waves the veteran steersman who has hitherto- with im-

punity encountered so many threatening aspects of
affairs.

The fact is, that viewing the matter impartially, as of
course we do, the throwing over of Lord John Russell
is, on the part of his noble and right hon. colleagues,
simply the dodge of the pickpocket, who throws away a
surreptitiously-obtained watch the moment when detec-
tion has become inevitable. As we read Sir E. Bulwer
Lytton's motion, the charge is not for being in possession
of Lord John at the moment notice of motion was given,
but for having obtained and kept possession of him in
the first instance illegally—that is to say,having pocketed
him, although perfectly aware that he was a portion
of the property of the peace party. Mr. Gladstone
and Mr. Cobden have already raised the hue and cry
with regard to the petty larceny in question, and can
hardly be expected to be satisfied with the restoration
of the once-covered possession after the works have been
taken out of the pinchbeck, and the article rendered
totally valueless either for use or for sale.
Seriously, however, we may observe that the crimes
alleged against the Palmerston Cabinet are the retaining
and the fostering of one who was known to have be-
trayed the interests of his country, and who must be
held to have betrayed the interests of his colleagues,
unless they were accessories before the fact ; and not
only that, but of having aided, abetted, and encouraged
the culprit in the now manifest fraud which he perpe-
trated on the British public, by representing himself as
anxious to carry on vigorously a war which in his heart
he considered a crime. We leave it to the noble lord
to reconcile to what we must, by courtesy, call his con-
science—the relative criminality of keeping the world in
flames, to bolster up a ricketty Coalition, or of repeating
the part which he enacted in the early portion of the
session, by breaking it up.
It is now manifest that Lord Palmerston will attempt
to escape from the difficulty by falling back upon the
manly and eloquent despatches of Lord Clarendon.
With regard to the validity of this plea, we beg to point
out to our readers, and we request them particularly to
remark this fact, that after Austria had performed the
acts which called forth these very despatches, the noble
Secretary for Foreign Affairs attempted still further
to mislead the public by stating, in his place in the
House of Lords, that if we had no cause to praise
Austria, we had none to complain of her conduct.
Now, we ask our readers what confidence can be
placed in the truth of the bold words put into the
despatches, evidently for the purpose of meeting this
present emergency which the Cabinet must have fore-
seen ? and we further beg of them to put date and date
together, and see whether the boldest of these documents
was not written after the first murmurings of the storm
were heard, and after Mr. Disraeli had given his notice

condemnatory of the ambiguous language employed by
our administrators in their previously published decla-

rations.

We may further ask, whether the opinion of the
French Emperor concerning the transactions at Vienna
had not been preriot.sly and unmistakeably expressed
by the dismissal of M. Drouyn de Lhuys, and, more-
over, whether the retaining in the English Cabinet of a
statesman even more compromised in those transactions
than the French negotiator, was not virtually a perma-
manent insult to that ally whose support is of so much
consequence to us, and of whose good faith we have had
so many proofs.
That Lord Palmerston was part and parcel of all these
" subterranean transactions" is obvious from the fact
that long after Lord John's return from Vienna, and
when we must suppose, if his present statement be true,
that the peace-mongering proposals of the great plenipo-
tentiary and his Austrian confederates had been most
positively rejected in the Cabinet, the noble Premier
still continued to maintain in his place in the house that
the door was yet open to receive pacific propositions, and
did in this manner continue " spargere ambiguas votes"
up to the very moment when the unmistakeable expres-
sion of public opinion rendered it impossible any longer
to continue a course of which the acute intellect of Mr.
Disraeli had already perceived the mischief and insin-
cerity.
One word more. Are we to suppose that the Jonah
of the present emergency was alone in the Cabinet and
in his opinions? Had he no supporters? Had he no
abetters ? Had he no co-conspirators ? Had he no
prompter ? If so, we ask who and where are they I
Are they still to be permitted to clog, as they have
hitherto done, the efforts of the nation in carrying on
vigorously this great war I That there is some drag,
upon the wheel must be obvious from the following
facts :—That wo are still without a militia—that we are
still without those means of locomotion in the Crimea
which would enable us to save our army from being sa-
crificed in vain assaults, and to remove them from the
influence of the pestilence—that this army, so recklessly
misused, is still without a reserve ; and that, notwith-
standing the amazing exertions of General Williams, we
may hourly expect to hear of the fall of Bars and Erze-
roum, and the total destruction of the Turkish forces in
that country. Taking these things at their proper value
We most unhesitatingly assert that whatever may be the
difficulties which he may encounter in the Cabinet or
elsewhere, had Lord Palmerston been the sincere and
patriotic statesman which he professes to be he would
, long since have thrown off the trammels which be
has entangled himself, and would have carried out the
wishes of the nation despite of every opposition from
high quarters or from low intrigue.