The Sun.
London, England, 1863-02-02 00:00:00

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LONDON, MONDAY: FEBRUARY 2, 1863.

As noble a personage as any numbered amongst
the patricians of England during more than the
last two generations has but just now passed from
the midst of us. When Parliament shall have met
within a very few days, his place will be the first
noticed as vacant, Ma name will be the first hon-
oured with the respectful and affectionate tributes
of all parties alike—Whig or Tory, Liberal or Con-
servative--,tributes of admiration not less earnestly
accorded to his memory by her MAJESTY'S Opposi-
tion than by those intimate personal friends and
Ministerial colleagues of the departed Statesman,
some of whom have been alternately at
intervals during more than half a century the
leaders of her MAJESTY'S Government. And yet
the distinguished nobleman, whose fair fame all
parties in both Houses will thus delight to honour,
Was essentially himself, throughout his long life,
though in no invidious sense, essentially a party
man. As the NESTOR. of the Whigs, he was revered
down to the moment of his demise by the surviving
chiefs and the diminished ranks of that once
powerful and, indeed, long dominant Party.
A Whig of the old school the deceased Peer
was so avowedly and undeniably that he carried
about with him the colours of his political party in
his very raiment. He was as recognisably Whig
in his buff waistcoat and his blue coat garnished
with its burnished brass buttons,as the blue-and-buff
papering outside the Edinburgh _Review yet adver-
tises the honest fact of itsbeing also still thoroughly
Whig as of old. No new-fangled or modernised
Whig in any way was the good and almost great
man whom we are now lamenting. HENRY PETTY
Was a Whig as CHARLES Fox was a Whig— Whig
(as we have already expressed it) of the Old School
—the champion of every liberal measure of his time,
the consistent and unflinching advocate from
first to last of every principle of social and
mercantile, of political and religious toleration.
As signally illustrative of the amplitude of the
scope of his liberalism, it would almost be sufficient
of itself to point, in Lord LANSDOWNE'S instance,
to the significant circumstance, that he almost
alone, among the great Whig leaders of his age,
was from the very outset a cordial and resolute up-
holder of the doctrines of Free Trade—thinking
upon that head, from the very commencement,
himself, as ADAM SMITH wrote and as WILLIAM
HUSICISSON spoke and voted. Exceptional this
fact was in his instance in no particular. It may
as simply typical of
be regarded, on the contrary,
the clear and distinct prevision generally of his
sound and long ripened judgment. Calmly and
without any fretting whatever at delays in the
recognition by others of truths he himself
had years and years previously come quite fully
to recognise, the late Marquis of LANSDOWNE was a
man,, very many respects long before his time.
He was so, that is to my, exactly as in the in-
stance but jest now particularised. He was a
Free Trader when nearly all the world besides--
including amongst that overwhelming majority his
associates and intimates the Whigs—was Protec-
tionist. As an enlightened Political Economist
he has for sixty years stood in the foremost rank.
As an upholder of the cause of fiscal, financial,
legal, and legislative reforms, he has never, during
all that lengthened interval, occupied, in the esti-
mation of his countrymen, a subordinate position.
Yet he has throughout the whole of this long public
life resolutely maintained that position with a
• we might say, un-
very, rare and nearly,
paralleled unselfishness.
Himself not without ambition, he has,
nevertheless, always disdained his own ad-
vancement. The interests not so much of his
party as of his cause, as of the principles embodied
in that cause and championed by that party'
have been, invariably, unhesitatingly with him the
foremost, indeed, the one paramount consideration.
Again and again Lord LANSDOWNE might have
been installed in power as Prime Minister of Eng-

land. Again and again he has refrained from

grasping that coveted responsibility, when placed
within his reach, time after time, by

the confidence of his SOVEREIGN. Once,
in the earlier part of his career, tie refrained
—solely by reason of the same magnanimous dictate
of self-abnegation—from assuming, what he then
might quite readily have assumed, the next golden
prize to the supreme prize of all in this country
(the Premiership)—the Leader of the British House
of Commons ! Himself, again, the worthy and noble
descendan t of that large-hearted and keen-witted Sir
WILLIAM PETTY—son of a Romsey clothier, in the
Days of the Commonwealth, founder of the
fortunes of his house, and originator of the
science of :Political Arithmetic, the basis of the
fiscal and financial systems since that age so
wondrously elaborated—the departed statesman,
less in the spirit of his father, the first Marquis,
than in th e spirit, we might suppose, of his ancestor
the clothier of the days of the Commonwealth,
declined a Dukedom ! Not a man amongst all his
contemporaries during the eighty-three years
of his honoured life but would have recognised in
the garland of strawberry leaves a symbol
honoured by, rather than honouring, the brow
it encircled, had the ducal coronet been accepted in-
stead of being, as it was, declined by the Marquis
of LANSDOWNE.

Eighty-three years, marked by the love and re-
spect of all who approached him, lengthened out the
span of Lord LANSDOWNE'S almost enviable exist-
ence. Sixty of those years have chequered wit h
the interests of public life, the charms distinguish-
ing at every turn the private life of this eminently
zefined and intellectual patrician. Born at Shel-
burne house on the 2d July, 1780—it was in the
midst of the flames and. bloodshed of the
infamous No Popery riots led on by Lord
GEORGE GORDON, that wicked and most fantastic
of crack-brained fanatics—Lord HENRY PETTY
has survived for the enjoyment of a life of ease
and honour, during a period of from eighty-two
to eighty-three years (a strangely momentous
period in the world's history !) breathing his last
calmly and without ;pain on Saturday evening,
the 31st of January, 1863, at his well-
known country seat of Bowood in Wiltshire.
An accidental stumble, occurring less than a fort-
night since, while crossing the threshold of his
house at Bowood from the garden-terrace,
appears to have been tho immediate cause of death.
It was not merely that the head of the marquis
was cut by this fall, an artery was actually divided,
the rupture of that artery resulting at the moment,
of course, in a violent hemorrhage. Five days after
the stumble the venerable statesman expired. Not
struck down by any protracted or painful disesse,
but quietly sinking into death as into a sleep.
Scarcely of age when he entered the House of Com-
mons, Lord HENRY PETTY, there took his seat first
of all as M.P. for the borough of Caine. His chosen
metier was Finance. His maiden speech was on
the Irish Bank Protection Bill. During those first
years of his career as a legislator, the daring young
political athlete frequently contended there, in that
conspicous arena of the House of Commons, with no
less formidable an antagonist than Mr. PITT him-
self, then the JUPITER TONANS of debate and
the most potent master of the Science of Fi-
nance in the three kingdoms—in all Christen-
dom. On the impeachment of Lord MEL-
VILLE, the young member for Caine, the future
Marquis of LANSDOWNE, delivered the most brilliant
oration he had then uttered, an oration which, in re-
gard to its effectiveness, he never afterwards sur-
passed. In his twenty-sixth year he became—after
the death of PlTT—Chancellor of the Exchequer.
At the period of his assuming office in that capa-
city, Lord HENRY PETTY stood as a candidate for
the University of Cambridge--Roming off as con-
queror in that still memorable tontest, in which
he was opposed by Lord ATHORPE and
the now Premier, Viscount PALMERSTON.
Home Secretary in Mr. CANNING'S' dministration
—Foreign Secretary in the Cabinet of CANNING'S
successor—the late Marquis of LANSDOWNE held
offices in the four famous Ministries presided over
at different times by Earl GREY, by Viscount MEL
BOURNE, by Lord JOHN RUSSELL, and by Viscount
PALMERSTON. It would be idle, however, to at-
tempt any detailed record of this remarkable life
in these leading columns of The Sun—quoting, as
we do in another part of our impression of
this evening, the brilliant and masterly
biography of Lord LANSDOWNE, which to-
day adorns the pages of our ohief morning
contemporary. Al ways looked up to by the most
distinguished of his colleagues as a man of enlarged
intellect and of the soundest judgment, the Marquis
of LANSDOWNE has been regarded all the while with
implicit confidence in his liberalism by the People,
and with equally implicit confidence in his loyalty
by the SOVEREIGN. A true man, a wise admini-
strator, a sagacious statesman, a consistent Refor-
mer, a man of letters, an orator, pre-eminently a
man of taste, open handed, open hearted, beloved,
revered—Lord LANSDOWNE leaves behind him a
reputation that will long be cherished with respect
and affection, both of them unstinted.

By the " Navy List" for January, 1863, we find
that there are upwards of one thousand ships of one
denomination or other mounting from one to 131
guns. Among these a new class of vessels has re-
cently been introduced which bids fair, in due time,
to supersede the others. This class has of late ab-
sorbed public attention almost exclusively. Hitherto
hearts of oak were our ships, as jolly tars were our
men, but now bard iron, and harder steel, are to
form the future of our navy. Not only is the
I change from wood to iron working wonders in the
quality of our ships, but exciting admiration at
their size. Old "salts" shake their heads with
scrutinising doubt at a novelty so " prodigious"—a
tonnage too enormous to be " handy" in a rough
seaway—but there the mammoth ships are, riding
in beautiful symmetry, and steadiness of trim.

Where will they find docks for repair ? That's
going to discuss, at the the question we are now
suggestion of a gallant officer, who has done good
service in attending her MAJESTY and the Royal
Family in many a perilous gale. Rear-Admiral the
Hon. JOSEPH DENMAN has addressed a letter to
Lord PALMERSTON "On the Pressing Necessity for
increased Docks and Basins at Portsmouth," which
has now reached a third edition, published by Mr.
RIDGWAY, Piccadilly. This is some criterion as to
the interest which the public take in naval affairs,
and the patriotic Admiral is not a day too soon with
his pressing necessity for setting our docks in
order. It certainly seems strange that our
Admiralty should have overlooked so tangible a ne-
cessity—but the "Board," in their calculation, sel-
dom take the future into account, being quite re-
gardless of the maxim " look before you leap."
Not they indeed! The " system" works by " dead-
reckoning," and the Board
.takes " observation'
afterwards. •

Admiral DENMAN says that unless we now take
time by the forelock during Peace, the remedy will
be attempted too late, if commenced only after
Levents shall have proved our defictencies. And he
is quite right. Docks and steam basins are the
measure of the force we can maintain in a seagoing
state, and if they have been proved to be inadequate
in a time of peace they must be still more so in a time
of war. Now,
the harbour of Portsmouth has capa-
city tain one half the British Nary.
sufficient to cOn

rIE SAN, LONDON

It has docks too, built for ships of large burden,
but not for auch as are now brought forward with
a tonnage so large, that one of our iron-cased
Frigates, as they are termed, would make three
first-rates of days gone by, when NELSON swayed
the oceans. The " meteor flag of England" must now
have a home to repair to, other than on the deep,
and that home is Portsmouth, with all its vast na-
tural capabilities. There is room enough to build
any number of docks, spacious and deep, for ships
of the largest burden—indeed it is not likely that
for warlike purposes any depth beyond 32 feet will
be required; but, to make assurance doubly sure,
why not construct some deeper still, say 36 feet,
or thereabouts, for any state of tide, and steam
basins to correspond. The first coat would be the
last; but coat what they will the thing must be
done—not at Portsmouth alone, but also at Devon-
port, Chatham, and Pembroke—but Portsmouth to
begin with, for that is the central port in the Chan-
nel. It should have gridirons to boot.

The question of expense will no doubt be pleaded
for delay ; but no expense can justify delay in a mat-
ter of such grave national concern as the maintenance
of our superiority at sea. If we once lose that our
independence is gone, and we cease to exist !as the
home of the free and the last hope of the forlorn
refugee. The present extent of our basins is very
limited, being scarcely one quarter the requisite
dimensions, while our docks are unfit to take in
ordinary large ships, save at spring tides. Now we
ought to have basins so capacious that half a dozen
iron ships of the largest size could enter at all
hours of the tide and find accommodation for im-
mediate and simultaneous repair alongside the
steam basins and dockyards, and that without re-
moving their guns or machinery stores. They
manage these matters better in France :
" At Keyham the basins contain 12 acres, and can be
entered by heavy ships at spring tides, and this is the whole
quay accommodation that exists for iron-plated ships (or
for screw-ships of the line) when fitted out for sea, for the
two basins at Portsmouth, 91 acres in the aggegate, from
their shallowness, can never be entered by these ships
except when lightened, and then only at spring tides.
Whereas at Cherbourg, though there is no natural har-
bour, yet the artificial basins of 48 acres supply immensely
more quay accommodation than Portsmouth Harbour.
They are accessible from the safe and convenient anchor-
age inside the breakwater every day, and six first-class docks
which open into the basins can be entered, or quitted,
every hour of every day. There is no flow of tide, nor can
there be any sea in the very heaviest weather to affect large
ships, while the extent of the basin is sufficient to contain
more than 30 such ships, of which a large number would
come in actual contact with the dockyard alongside the

quay."
Admiral DENMAN takes exception to the length
of our iron ships making them so. difficult to turn,
as to expose them to being run down in action—
the combination of speed and weight being irresis-
tible. No doubt, if the opponent were so much
larger in proportion—but such a contingency may
be avoided by dexterity of manoeuvring, though
not always. Still ships may be built too large for
warlike as for useful purposes. There may be too
much of a good thing—take the Great Eastern
for example, but not for copy, if you would keep
your hand out of the exchequer.
Admiral ROBINSON, the Controller of the Navy,
st eaking in reference to dock accommodation, says
that a ship disabled in action being repaired with
promptitude becomes equivalent to two in effect,
against a disabled enemy. Hence the urgent ne-
cessity for docks and basins commensurate to our
wants. In 1861 a committee of the House of Com-
mons, of which Mr. WHITBREAD was chairman, as
a Lord of the Admiralty, sat to inquire into a pro-
posed extension of Chatham dockyari4 and made a
report in which occurs the following :—"ln the
event of this country being engaged in a maritime
war, the existing means for fitting out ships, ina-
dequate as they are to even the present wants of the
vary, tro,dd render it wholly impossible fa pli4
'rapidly and safely such a fleet as wbuld be required
Apart from all question of cost and inconvenience
delay might terminate in disaster."
Nor will it mend the matter to learn that the
facilities possessed by other Powers are incompar-
ably superior to those afforded by the naval esta-
blishments of this country. The merchant service
have some docks long enough, but all, with one
exception, fall far short in the depth required.
We are adding greatly to the defences of Ports-
mouth all around, and if we mistake not, some pre-
parations are now being male for extending the
harbour towards the foot of Portsdown Hill,whether
for basins and docks time will prove. Admiral
DENMAN agrees with Mr. COBDEN i❑ his "Three
Panics," from which he quotes freely, that there
can be no possible doubt that our expenditure has
been immensely increased by the defective system
which governs naval affairs. And owing to the
great and just objections entertained to the system
of naval administration, a committee of the House
of Commons was appointed last session, says the
Admiral—

"To investigate this subject, and to report also `on the
effect of that system on the Navy.' The enquiry arose
from no personal attack or imputation, but those who had
officially conducted our naval affairs were placed on the
committee in great force. They identified themselves with
the system they had administered, and treated the question
as a matter personal to themselves. Thus it happened that
the inquiry which was intended in the public interest to
ascertain what were the defects of the system, was mainly

directed to prove its perfection.
" Every living statesman who had filled the office of First
Lord of the Admiralty (several being members of the com-
mittee, and as such judge, jury, and witnesses in their own
cause) was in his turn examined, and the evidence of
First Lords alone occupies 315 pages of the blue book, con-
sisting of 636. Among the First Lords on the committee
was Sir James Graham, who was the originator of the very
system the value and results of which were under enquiry,
and the determination to crush the enquiry was apparent
throughout the proceedings. In the face of this immense
array of official experience it was impossible for members of
the committee unacquainted with the Admiralty, but whose
opinions might be unfavourable to that system, i;c, struggle
successfully. Mr. Bentinck, who was most conversant
with naval affairs of those not connected with the profes-
sion, and was strongly opposed to the system, brought for-
ward in committee a motion to close its proceedings, on the
ground that from the composition of the committee and
other causes, no satisfactory conclusion could be arrived
at,' and his motion being defeated, he absented himself from
further attendance in despair.

"One of the primary grounds brought forward as prov-
ing the effect of the system on the Navy' to be most inju-
TiOne, was the state of the dockyards with regard to dock
and basin accommodation ; but those who were known to
hold this opinion had no opportunity given them of esta-
blishing the facts in their evidence, and it is to be feared
that the break-down of the enquiry (for no report was
made, and the committee was not re-appointed) has only
strengthened a bad system. It is of very serious concern
to the House of Commons, when it institutes enquiries on
subjects of such immense national moment, not to allow
them thus to be trifled with.
"If no amendment, however, has resulted from this
enquiry, and there is still reason to believe that naval
affairs are conducted on a mistaken system, it would be a
h
(if aura
tNevloyr spe r
oe
vvii
dl
etdo
with
tfihe suffer
resources the countryasy
ne c
etsos a
rre main in
as
the saipde:
themselves, for without them the ships we possess would be

nearly useless."
PALMERSTON, by suggesting
Lord
ahe Admiral concludes his patrioticth appealat
upo to
rts.
mthoubtuhilabe o
uexposed
into
ad
lessa n ger i t
exposedw ousl
idt
übaet
ifoanr , wiser
as Chatham, or in the Thames, and
agree with him. Portsmouth would find occupation
enough in repairing damaged ships and engines,
but first it must be enabled to do so, and the sooner
the better. we heartily