The Sun.
London, England, 1864-11-21 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

THE "SPECTATOR" ON THE HOME OFFICE.—
Out of the seven great offices through rhich the
administration of the British Empire is conducted
two have of late years greatly declined in intport.
once. The Treasury is, as it has always been, the
nexus of the departments, the fitting seat for the
officer whose existence the Constitution does not
recognise, but who in in fact as well as in name
Premier of England, first among equals in the great
hierarchy of power. Since kings ceased to declare
war and peace, in fact as well as in form, and the
'public began to be interested in all foreign rela-
tions, the importance of the Foreign Office has
greatly increased, so increased that the mercantile
world, with Air W. E. Forster at its head, is now
loudly demanding a separate and working repre-
sentation with the office itself. The War Office,
since its severance from the government of the Co-
lonies, has grown into a great department, so
powerful that the old theory which reserves the
army as a peculium under the Crown seems occa-
sionally in danger of being forgotten. With the
new finance and the new interest of the nation not
only in taxation, but in the science of laying on
taxes, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, once a
clerk, has become the second officer of the State. A.
bad budget destroys a Ministry—a good one is held
to compensate for almost all other blunders. The
Secretary of State for India, once a mere " Presi-
dent" of a Board, only raised above second-class
officials by his seat in the Cabinet and his extensive
patronage, has ripened into the greatest of mag-
nates, sits avowedly in the seat of the great Mogul.
There is no human being alive, except the Emperor
of China, who can directly afect the welfare of so
many millions as the able but attorney-like person
who sits as senior member for Halifax. The Colo.
nial Office' on the other hand, has somewhat de-
creased in dignity. The concession of self-govern•
meat to the English settlements robbed it of half
its prerogatives—" I do not," said the Duke of
Newcastle, " write a despatch to Canada once a
twelvemonth,"—and the affairs of the remaining
30 or so possessions excite, except in times of crisis,
very little public attention. The most conspicu-
ous change for the worse, however, is that
which has passed over the Home Office,
once the most powerful of all, and even
recently i 33 laborious that Sir James Graham, by
nature a glutton of work, declared the fatigue and
anxiety almost insupportable. Nominally it still
administers the internal executive of Great Britain,
practically it has sunk into a kind of Goad of Re-
visal. No particular change has of late years taken
place in its jurisdiction except that branches like
the care of the poor, of schools, and of trade have
escaped from the weight of its shadow. The office
is still an arsenal of latent powers, but the country
has for years been so quiet, official interference so
limited, and administrative improvement sosluggish,
that the Home Secretary regards a gaol row as a
formidable affair, holds an order on prison diet a
high act of legislation, and is half inclined to issue
a bulletin on his victory over disorderly lads. in
Surrey. Except when a strike leads to a local riot,
or philanthropists remonstrate against an execution,
or some local magnate sentences a boy to six months'
imprisonment for stealing fruit, nobody ever hears
of the Home Secretary. He is in general referee for
the police, the magistracy, the governors of prisons,
and the municipalities, but there his utility appears
to end, and even in that capacity the present occu-
pant of the office appears content with revisal, and
seldom takes the initiative which his position
demands. The last general measure of any im-
portance carried by a Home Secretary was Lord
Palmerston'a Act prohibiting intramural burial, one
of a hundred municipal reforms demanded by the
progress of civilisation. The business of a great par-
liamentary officer is not to wait till measures are
forced upon him by pressure, but to take the initia-
tive, not indeed in the formation of opinion, but in
giving to the most intelligent opinion of the country
the force of concrete law. That was what Lord Pal-
merston did, the masses being on the whole indiffea
rent to his measure, the clergy decidedly opposed to
it, and none but men of science and the medical pro-
fession recognising its full importance. The Home
Secretary should, Ive conceive, take a decided lead
in working out the convictions at which society one
by one arrives, should, while abstaining carefully
from movement too far ahead of opinion, still make
his influence felt as a distinct moving power. Here,
for example, is this question which looks so small
and is so indefinitely great—the disposal of the
sewage of towns. A slight change in the habits of
Englishmen, a mere modification in their notions of
decency and comfort, has diverted the entire sewage
of towns from the land into the rivers. The night.-
men who cleared the old cesspools sold the manure
they collected like stable manure to the farmers,
but modern arrangemeats require a close pipe which
must communicate with a sewer, which again must
discharge itself into a river or other body of water
in movement, The entire sewage is lost, and the
rivers are ruined. The tegnspeople are just awak-
ing to the mischief civilisation has produced, scien-
tific men are studying how they may best deodorise
sewage (what on earth is the objection to the good
English word " sweeten ?") and the tribe of specu-
lators who accept to a man Vespasian'e motto,
Aurum non olet,"' are settling down like flies. The
City claims the sewage of London, the Board of
Works, which seems, like the Roman Conclave, to
believe that it is eternal, talks with the glib auda-
city of granting a concession of all London
sewage for fifty years, and it seems probable
that the whole matter will be left to settle
itself, and the municipalities will lose what
might be a most valuable source of revenue. If
there is one thing the great cities of England need
more than another it is a revenue not derived from
taxation, which can be devoted to planned im-
provements, yet when one comes up literally out of
the dirt, the Home Secretary makes no effort to
secure it. Every dirty little interest is in move-
ment, every petty clique of jobbers rabid with ex-
pectation, but the constituency which the Home
Secretary is supposed to represent, viz., the nation,
has no mouthpiece except the press. Whoeveawins
in the contest must apply to Parliament, and if
the Home-office had studied the question, obtained
a final verdict from science—which Government
can get and vestries cannot—and framed a measure
for the whole country, agricultural and municipal
life might alike receive a new impetus. Sir George
Grey will probably allow the whole question to
exhale in angry row in a committee-room upon the
clauses of a private bill. We do not know and do
not say that his weakness is specially his fault. It
is the besetting sin of Home Secretaries, who seem
to have accepted Walpole's eternal quotation,
" Quieta non movers," as the sum of political wis-
dom. What can be more imbecile than the way in
which possibilities of municipal improvement have
been flung aside in our legislation on gas and water ?
We are compelled in those matters to depart from
free trade and allow monopolies in order to secure
the streets from incessant obstruction, but instead
of granting them to the boroughs we grant them to
greedy speculators, If the great boroughs supplied
their own gas and water we should have better light
and purer drink, and the means of either reducing
a taxation annoyingly heavy, or of carrying out
improvements which should compensate for the
burden. Imagine a human being paying six or
seven shillings in the pound on his rental for the
privilege of living in Clerkenwell, or that populated
cemetery, Islington ? We are happy to perceive
that this mode of obtaining a revenue has been
mooted in the City, and as the monopolists, to save
half per cent. on their dividend, are poisoning us all
with needless sulphur, and as the "City" will in a
year or two lose some thousands a year by the falling
in of a lease, there is some chance of the Home-office
being whipped by private interests into movement.
There is nothing in the whole circuit of political
thought which needs reform so much as the condi-
tion of our great cities, it is just the kind of progress
which the voting mind is ready to appreciate, it is
strictly within the province of the Homo Office,
yet the Secretary who should take the lead
in making the growing opinion on the subject
concrete, lags behind in the rear, quite satisfied
apparently that as the air is pure at Falloden it
may be pure enough in Shadwell or the wynds of
Glasgow. Here is Edinburgh just aroused to the
fact that its poorest quarter is a pest-house, a place
where no man can live his appointed term, or keep
clean, or be commonly decent, and half disposed to
ameliorate that state of things. So, again, at Man-
chester, a local journal publishes this week facts
which would make a South Sea Islander wince, and
which Manchester would very gladly improve, but
what are the boroughs to do ? They want powers
to lend money, and act sharply and sternly against
the vested interests which protect that state of
affairs, and no man alleges that they ought not to
have them. But there is no leader to whom they
can look for cool official guidance ; corporations
are slow to move, and so the matter waits till
some local calamity, such as an outburst of putrid
fever, spurs on the rich to spur on the Home Office
to spur on Parliament to give them a local bill.
Suppose the profits of the gas monopolies granted
to the Town Councils as the leases expire, and de-
voted to municipal schemes for the better lodging
of the poor. Would that be too revolutionary for
the Home C)ffice ? We do not suggest that particu-
lar plan as the best, though something of the same
kind has been tried in several towns, but we affirm
that there is a vast field of labour open to any effi-
cient Herne Secretary, which every occupant of the
office neglects, and which Sir George Grey in par-
ticular never even attempts to see. There is leader-
ship wanted everywhere in the ne iv war against dirt,
and yioe, and disease, and men look for it every.

where rather than the place where it ought to be
found—the Home Secretariat.
THE "EXAMINER" ON RUSSIA'S CRIMES BEINO
CONDONED.—Lord Napier has been making a fare-
well speech to English traders resident in Russia,
in which he has taken upon him to give absolution
to the Government of that country for its recent
conduct towards Poland. Thorough-bred diplo-
macy is true to its mission. No man spilt more
truthful ink than the British Envoy at St. Peters•
burg about Muscovite bad faith and cruelty to-
wards the Poles ; but finding it not suitable to the
taste of certain critics, he has literally taken
Sterne's advice, and resolved " to wipe it up and
say no more about it." We have heard more than
enough of late, of the irresponsible power to fore
give sins claimed by High Church parsons, j but
what is it compared to the pretensions set up by
High State functionaries to pardon the crimes of
empire ? We are certainly not disposed to palliate
the presumption and folly of priestcraft in any
shape or way, but this at least wo must own it has
to say in deft nce of its arrogant claim, that it re-
fuses to grant sinners an acquittance in full w ith-
out previous confession of guilt, present profession
of sorrow, and for the future a promise to make
restitution. Diplomatic imposture scorns these
plausible conditions. Tyranny disdains to walk in
a white sheet, but with its garments " red with the
blood of the slain," receives its condonation. Vio-
lence disdains to lower its tone, even daring the
ceremony; yet it receives its blessing all the same.
Confiscation cannot hold for laughter as it rattles
and counts its spoil ; whereupon diplomacy, with
smug face, shrives its impenitent soul and bids it
go in peace. And this is what is called exercising
the moral influence of England to promote the
blessings of freedom and civilisation ! Had we
never professed ourselves indignant at the provoca-
tion of Poland to rebel; had we never denounced
Russia's misrule of that country as a breach of in•
ternational faith ; had we never declared her title to
Polish obedience forfeited, unless Polish rights were
restored ; had we never averred that the peace and
orderof Christendom wereendangered by Muscovite
cruelty and oppression ; there would be less indecency
in the flatteries and compliments of an English
Minister on the eve of his departure from St. Peters-
burg. Were it even conceivable that the mood of
the nation had suddenly changed, or the policy of
our foreign office had suddenly swung round from
sympathy with justifiable revolt, to adulation of
Cossack power, it would stili have been more
seemly to have left the performance of the rite of
recantation to another celebrant of diplomatic mys-
teries. If Lord Napier's despatches of 1862 and
1863 were still remembered with irritation by Alex-
ander 11. and Prince Gortzchakoff, and for certain
inexplicably deep reasons it was thought better to
transfer him to Berlin, surely that ought to have
been concession enough to the wounded pride of the
Autocrat, and the exacting insolence of his chief
Minister. We cannot believe that Lord Russell
ever expected, far less that he ever prompted, the
shifted plenipotentiary to go on all fours in this
fashion at parting. The bears themselves know how
to assume a worthier attitude; they ape the upright
mien of humanity in their salutations. Could not
Lord Napier have kept his stock of flummery for
the other " good monarch" to whom he was hence.
forth to be accredited, and the other "wise Minis-
ter" with whom he must hereafter have to do ?
was it necessary for him to drain the cup of humi-
liation to the dregs ? Did he grudge his successor
the duty of shouting in the fainting ear of scourged
and exiled Poland English felicitations of Russia's
triumph and praises of Russia's rule ? Or was it
necessary to the completeness of his Lordship's
-,self-stultification that it should take place in the
presence of his countrymen resident in St. Peters-
burg? Would it not have been pleasanter for them,
to say the least of it, to have been suffered to retain
the belief that the diplomatic representatives of
England understood national pride and national
selferespect, and that these were in no danger of
being compromised in diplomatic hands ? It might
be an illusion ; but there are illusions we had best
leave strangers to dispel. Lord Napier thanks the
Czar for the "reserve shown of late in the expansive
policy of Russia in the East ;" and he builds upon
such forbearance the innocent hope that internee
tional friendship may be cordial, even though it
should not last for ever. It is good to be grateful
for small favours; and if Russia is not yet quite
ready to cause us new trouble or anxiety in Asia,
we ought, it appears, to break forth into singing
her praise and take to clapping our hands. What a
commanding attitude and tone for a great empire to
take in the presence of a rival ! We should be curia
ous to know what his Excellency would think of
saying if to-morrow cr next day the benignant
policy of reserve seemed about to be laid aside by
a despotic ally. The vocabulary of abjectness is
said to be inexhaustible; if not we should cherish
the hope that Lord Napier would find himself
bankrupt of unworthy blandishments on reaching
Berlin. And yet Von Bismark will have some right
to complain if he and his master have not the same
compliments strewn in their path by the un-English
Minister there. All the evil they have done in the
Duchies is as nought compared with that which the
Muscovites have perpetrated in Poland. 11, hat,
then, is to be our diplomatic tone at Berlin P

THE "LONDON REVIEW" ON THE PRESENT
WATER MAYORALTY.—The present Lord Mayor
has opened his reign by presiding in public over
the National Temperance League, a society at the
bare mention of whose name both Gog and Magog
shudder. 'the aldermen of the day seem to be try-
ing strange experiments upon their persons, and to
be tampering with their bodily comfort in a way
never before heard of. First, there is Alderman
Mechi, who abstains from sugar and gets out of his
bed every morning into a cold pair of scales, The
notion is enough to send a chill through the British
public as they read, and to connect more closely in
idea than before the name of Mr Banting and dis-
comfort. To live from day to the next in hopes of
being weighed in a wintry balance, and being found
wanting, is a course of conduct that must throw a
frosty feeling into life, compared with which the loss
of butter and of sugar is a trifle. There seems to be
something in the elements that is converting the
Aldermen of London into abstemious philosophers.
No sooner have we got into our heads the notion
of Alderman Mechi thinning himself by the assist-
ance of matutinal scales, than we aro asked to
familiarise ourselves with the conception of a
Lord Mayor who has contracted the pernicious
habit of addicting himself to water. It would any..
where be a mark of stern resolution to an alderman
to take up with a fluid which neither cheers nor
inebriates. But in London, where, from some occult
cause or other, water, besides being cheerless,
usually tastes of gaspipes, a waterednoking Lord
Mayor is little short of a miracle. Mr Banting's
communicative and friendly accounts lead us all to
think that his pamphlet On the subject of what he
eats has had a large sale. The Lord Mayor ought
to make a literary fortune by issuing a small vo-
lume to tell us what he drinks, and how he came
to drink it. It must have been in a moody moment,
when the Corporation were all at loggerheads, and
British commerce seemed going to the dogs, that
the embryo Mayor first seized upon the water-
bottle. Often in a fit of thoughtfulness men will
rush into excesses that colour all their future
career. Circumstance is lord of human action, and
the gates of life revolve upon the hinge of chance.
The water-bottle once tasted would lead doubtless
to other water-bottles, just as it is found in the
London police courts, that a man who has once
tried to commit suicide, is generally taken up for
trying to commit suicide again. The entry on such
a course gives a low and morbid tinge to the mind,
which at last becomes affected with a perfect mania
for disagreeable subjects. If the Lord Mayor had,
at such a critical moment, been surrounded by ju-
dicious friends, the city might, in the long ran,
have been saved considerable anxiety. They would
have tried to lead him gently back from his aqueous
ways, by carefully hiding the water jugs out of
sight, and by never allowing him to go within sight
of running water, He might have been kept de-
licately on the north side of London-bridge, and
the existence of the Thames have been carefully
ignored in conversation. Anything like the society
of violent aquarians, such as the Rev. Mr Maguire,
or Mr. Newman Hall, should have been
avoided as tending to excite. In time he would
doubtless have learnt to understand that Pro-
vidence has given man water for the purposes of
ablution, not of beverage. Instead of this, a more
imprudent course has been pursued. He has been
allowed to commit himself to all sorts of Temperance
societies. What is the result ? Gog and Magog
may be said, metaphorically, to be in tears, and
half of London is agitated by an anxious, though
totally unnecessary, dread of a kind of civic deluge,
in which the whole social world is once again to
perish by water. Though his lordship has probably
not gone to such extreme lengths as is supposed, and
though he intends, no doubt, to keep up the spirits
of his acquaintances during the coming year, it is
nevertheless quite painful to a well-regulated mind
to hear the chief magistrate of the City of London
speaking of the generous liquids as ho does. Pin-
dar, it is true, tells us that water is the best element
flowing, but Pinder lived at the court of a despot,
who, doubtless, on the subject of wine denied his
subjects the privilege of free speech. But that a
Lard Mayor should talk of now and then taking a
glass of wine as it it were a dose of arsenic is lugue
brious indeed. Even when his doctor prescribes him
a glass, what does his lordship do ? What weuld
most men do ? Evidently they would throw the
doctor's medicine out of the window, and drink the
wine ordered them to the dregs. His lordship re-
verses the operation—for he flings the wine out of
the window and drinks up the medicine. He tells us
that he is always the better for it. That says more
for the Lord Mayor's doctor than we should have

thought it possible to say for any doctor liTiag,
and is a complete proof of the innocuous a"
simple character of the happy physician's
TILE " SATURDAY REVIEW" ON TIIE MoNEY-lkiAll°T.;
—The reduction of the rate of discount at the Bank 1
England to 8 per cent., and the subsequent improvemee
in the money market which must soon lead to further re;
laxation, may probably be regarded as marking the 01e5e,..,
a very gloomy and anxious period in commercial Ow:
There has, it is true, been no excessive diminution at any
time in the stock of bullion which forms the ultimate raonr3
tary reserve of the country. It stands now at between
and 14 millions, and at the worst it was very little bele/
13 millions. Nor was there any difficulty in perceivieff
that the tendency to a foreign drain, which showed ltee,
pills.
from time to time, was thoroughly amenable to control, sP'"
yielded at once to the stringent remedy of a 9 per cent. Cate;
which was imposed early in September. Many other Ola,
of uneasiness, however, led to the depression from whin?by very slow degrees, trade appears at last to be emengilw
The hopeful news that was believed only a few weeks egf'
of the growing predominance of the Peace Pal :'A
America, brought no comfort to the large speculators .•
cotton, who saw the value of their purchases—while the;
were still to a great extent unpaid for—fall, almost withet,
warning, as much as 25 per cent. The large speculatioaw
this article alone was enough, under such circumstance' t:
fill Liverpool with alarm ; and premonitory failures, beth,l;
that town and in London, gave warning that beneath im
surface of commerce there was much to excite alarm and '...,P"
prehension. The stoppage of the Leeds Bank, and the,
velations which followed, came just at a time when a Pre;
veiling nervousness about monetary affairs needed t;,
stimulus, and within a week of that time we were prebeb;
nearer to the verge of an orthodox panic than at any Wilt;
since 1857. The enormous extent to which new comp
had drawn, or threatened to draw, upon the resources of
til;
country now became a serious source of danger; and
.ti
collapse of some, and the depression of all the banking
financial companies which had been hatched in the suasim;
of prosperity, was a just retribution for the excessive Olga
ness with which these new projects had been taken al;
More immediate warnings were not wanting. Scarcell,,
day passed without recording mercantile failures to a cu.)
siderable amount. Our whole commercial organisation
trembling, and many firms which Would have tided Po l.
times of less severity fell like rotten pears from a 1,
shaken by the wind. With some few exceptions, there
little to regret in this. But for the shock which has, it %la
be hoped, removed much of the unsoundness whioh.,,,
begun to prevail in trade, matters would, in all probaht/
have culminated before long in sweeping disaster. ilitto'
was, the temptation to a rush for discount, lest worse tietof
should come (the inevitable precursor and cause of 171
our panics), was for a short time active enough te,..0
sober observers with alarm; and although actual P
never supervened, the symptoms came so near to it
show that the quiet self-command which is the
support of credit in difficult emergencies has not beello
fully acquired as the experience of the last few years
led many to believe, That there is less of senseless fear.op
times of depression, and perhaps a little more of oslittliet
when all looks bright, than have been displayed in earj
periods of inflation and collapse, is all that can fairly be'''.
of the spirit of modern commerce. Enough has beee•
ble during the past two months to show that the meresedi,
community are very far from being panic proof. Pron
if the failure of the Leeds Company had been folleavedips
the stoppage of cne or two more banking concerns/ Ay
which we can now look back upon as a past period of vor
pression would have culminated into a disastrous co o
mercial crisis. It may be that the influence which
so
been so universally felt will give a fresh start to tr
on a sounder basis than is implied by the easy ejelloit
facture of financial companies and the flood of ella
gambling which the American war has let loose. of
recent escape from worse evils than those which have C
befallen us may have been in great part due to the fact
the ordinary cycle had not come round, and that trade ;0
not had time fully to develop the elements of unsound° it
which it seems to need a decennial commercial st°lllo
sweep away. And at the same time, without indulgingoal
what seems the vain expectation of abolishing panics tae
crises altogether, it is not unreasonable to hope tha'nor
hard times of this autumn may have the effect of Peet;al
ing, if they cannot avert, the visitation of come° ea
trouble which would otherwise be due some time befer,eA le
year 1870. But in commerce, above all things, it is iu_,7,o
cast horoscopes. It must suffice to congratulate oursPJ
that the evil which seemed imminent has for the Pr7lo
been averted, and to hope that dear- bought experience
check future imprudence.