The Sun.
London, England, 1865-10-30 00:00:00

SPIRIT OP THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

" THE SPECTATOR" ON THE NEW CABINET.--A
Palmerston Ministry without Lord Palmerston will
be about as strong as an arch without a keystone.
It is not of much use to speculate onSaturday on a
decision which by Monday must be made known to
all the world, but of this one thing we are satisfied,
that if Earl Russell has deCided to meet Parliament
with a Cabinet unchanged except by the substitu-
tion of himself for Lord . Palmerston and Lord
Clarendon for himself, he has ruined the best pro-
spect his party ever had of securing a large tenure
of power, and carying out large reforms with the
full support of the conntry. Such a Ministry will
be. moribund before it has begun to live, will
have: neither popularity, nor coherence, nor the
power of securing both by vigorous initiative. 'Earl
Russell may be and probably is deceived by the
quiescence with which the country, ,accepted Lord
Paluierston's Cabinet; but it was never' heartily
liked. It was tolerated because Mr. Gladstone and
Lord Palmerston himself were included within it,
and because the inferiority of other men did but se-
cure to Lord Palmerston the dictatorship it was
desirable he shoUld 'preserVe, but -it was never re-
spected for itself.- 'The constituencies simply bore
with Sir CharleS Wood, and Sir George Grey-, and
Mr. Cardwell, .:and-Mr. Cowper,' and Sir Robert
Peel, and the rest of-the secondrate men, who under
the careful censorship of the press and. occasional
snubs from the House contrived to carry on the
business of the' departments, but they never belieVed
in them, and will witness their return to power
without their chief with apathetic weariness. Mr..
Cardwell, with all his solid sense, has not succeeded
in New Zealand, or the British-American Colonies ;
Sir George Grey required two votes of the House to
whip him into common sense in the matter of prison
judge
with and re-tries prisoners as appellate
with a jury of able editors ; Sir Charles Wood,
though he can govern, Cannot defendhis Government,
or conciliate the governed ; Mr. Cowper is , always
trying to manage the only job the House is deter-
mined to resist, the improvement of property in
South Kensington, and as to Sit Robert Peel, the
Irish will make his removal their first condition.
The constituencies are weary of it all, yet it is with:
this dead weight upon his efforts that Mr. Glad-
stone is to face a House of Commons doubtful
whether to worship or distrust. Who is to support
him there ? He will be attacked every day of his
life by debaters like Mr. Disraeli and Lord Cran-
bourne, men who can not only give wounds, but
pour vitriol into the wounds they have made, and
though himself more than a match for both, he can
speak but. once a night. Face to face he is their
master, but who is to protect his rear ? Sir Roun-
del' Palmer will have enough to do to neutralise Sir
Hugh Cairns, Sir George Grey is no match for
Lord Cranbourne, Sir Charles Wood simply exas-
perates an audience hungering for more light, and
as to Mr. Cardwell, he is as useful as a 64 pounder
in the field, irresistible if the enemy will only stand
exactly within range. None of the subor-
dinates promise to become great debaters, and
the real work, the daily labour of reply and
explanation, and retort, and all the minor duties
of leadership will fall on a man who can perform
them all, but who has the organisation of genius, and
can when overworked grow harsh and fretful. His
one difficulty will be exaggerated as if on purpose,
and the result will be in all probability that inces-
sant collision with the House on little points which
shake a Government more than a great defeat. Mr.
Gladstone will not be injured by the irritation of
individual members, but the Government will, and
the necessity of the hour is not merely Mr. Glad-
stone, but Mr. Gladstone as a centre of a strong
administration. To risk a failure in a House in
which Liberals have an overwhelming majority in
order to consult the amour propre of two or three
individuals, is a mistake of which Earl Russell, of
all men, ought not to be guilty. He has turned
out his colleagues often enough when the resulting
advantage was his own, and might show the same
indifference to political convenance when the inte-
rest is that of his country and party. Rather than
do it he will, it is believed, sacrifice the popular
affiance which would have given his Ministry the
strength and the meaning which the country at
heart desires.
THE SATUTWAY REVIEW "ON TOM PAINE.--TOlll
Paineis one of those writers who have been, as it were,
I gibbeted by a not very remote posterity. Probably
hardly any one opens his works ; no one takes the
trouble to know much about his life ; -he survives in
the memory of men as a kind of disreputable ghost,
who, having ignominiously failed in an assault, as
hopeless as it was wicked, on all that men hold
most sacred, does not deserve even that slight amount
of respect which would be implied in calling him
Thomas. He is, and always will be, Tom—the
wretched uneducated plebeian who dared to attack
Church and State. In our days, indeed, he is
chiefly an awful example. The ribaldry of Voltaire,
the polished sneer of Gibbon, and the coarse bru-
tality of Tom Paine, usually swing at one end of
the see-saw, the other' end of which supports
Locke, Boyle, and Newton, weighted also
with appropriate epithets. Paine, however, once
attracted great attention, and was a real
live monster whom it was thought creditable to
kill. Lady Hester Stanhope, if we are not mistaken,
says that her uncle Pitt used to speak of him as being
both very able and perfectly consistent •, and ho
himself boasts, in the second part of the " Rights of
Man," that between forty and fifty thousand copies
of the first part had been sold in the United King-
dom. His works have therefore something of an
historical interest, and it is worth the while of those
who care for the history of past controversies to look
a little into them. Paine's reputation, such as it is,
rests upon three performances—" Common Sense,"
published in 1776 ; the " Rights of Man," in two
parts, published respectively in 1791 and 1792 ; and
the " Age of Reason," in three parts, published in
1793, 1795, and 1807. Besides these, he published
a variety of other pamphlets of much inferior
interest, relating principally to the American
politics of the day. His most considerable perform-
ances by far are those which we have named.
Perhaps the most characteristic passage; in the
whole of his works, and certainly the one which
throws the greatest light on their nature, is to be
found in the first part of the " Age of Reason."
That strange performance was written under the
solemn sanction of imminent danger to life ; for
Paine, whilst he was writing it, expected to be guil-
lotined, and he was actually arrested within six
hours after its conclusion. Towards the end of it
he gives an account of his life and of the growth of
his opinions, and this enables us to understand
clearly enough what sort of man he was. "My
father," he says, " being of the Quaker profession,
it was my good fortune to have an exceeding good
moral education and a tolerable stock of useful
learning." He was sent to a grammar-school at
Thetfard, but learnt no Latin, " because of the
objection the Quakers have against the books in
which that language is taught." He adds, " The
natural bent of my mind was to science. I had
some turn, and I believe some talent, for poetry."
He gives, by the way, a singular specimen of
his poetical gifts in a note to another part of
the " Age of Reason," which contains an
elaborate argument to prove that the Hebrew
prophets wrote poetry. "To show that these writ-
ings are composed in poetical numbers, I will take
ten syllables as they stand in the book, and make a
line of the same number of syllables (heroic measure)
that shall rhyme with the last word. It will then
be seen that the composition of these books is
poetical measure." He speaks of mathematics with
the same awkwardness as of poetry :—" The scien-
tific principles that man employs to obtain the fore-
knowledge of an eclipse, or of anything else relating
to the motion of the heavenly bodies, are containedhd
chiefly in that part of science which is cailelch,
trigonometry, or the properties of a triangle,
call
naviea-
when applied to the study of the heavenlytndirebwcotdtiehse,
is called astronomy ; when applied
course of a ship on the ocean, it
figures
drawn
oflans of edifices,
called
d
otfoththeeemaretah:
when applied to the ccnstruction p
drtiOanw;nlbv when applied
ea papnldi ed
compass,to t he
its
construction i se
goefo
geometry
surement of any portion of t
fine, it is the soul of
it is called architecture ;
it is called land surveying. In
man speaks,
w h ehne surfaceappe
science ;itis an eternal truth ; contains the
mathematical demonstration of
andwhich the extent of its uses is unknown."
With this degree of education Paine com-
bined, from his early childhood, a profound
aversion to Christianity as commonly understood.
Thu Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light, and the
Quaker contempt for- external authority, whether
in books or men, as, being carnal ordinances, lay at
the bottom of Paine's character, and led him by an
easy transition to be a dogmatic Deist and Repub-
lican. He says himself :—" The religion that ap-
proaches the nearest of all others to true Deism in
the moral and benign part thereof is that professed
by the Quakers; but they have contracted themselves
too much by leaving the works of God out of their
system. Though I reverence their philanthropy, I
cannot help smiling at the conceit that, if the taste
of a Quaker could have been consulted at the creation,
what a silent and drab-coloured creation it would have
been." Su.ih was Paine; a vigorous, sturdy snob
(the word must be excused, for it exactly describes
the man), with a slight education, principally
mathematical, with stong conscientious feelings of
a narrow kind, and with a creed which led him to
vehemence
revolt against all established beliefs, and to cling
of ato his own views with all the
dog-
matist.

General Humphreys, late of the Confederate
Army, who was elected Governor of Mississippi by a ma-
jority of 10,000 over the Union candidate, has received his
pardon from the Pvsitteut.