The Sun.
London, England, 1870-06-18 00:00:00

LONDON, SA7URDAY, JUNE 18, 1870.

Seated on the Treasury Bench are two adminis-
trators who avail themselves of every possible oppor-
tunity of snubbing the House of Commons. And,
wonderful to relate, the House by its toleration of
this favourite proceeding on the part of each, seems
rather to like it than otherwise. Both of them are
right honourables. Each in turn has knelt on that
embarrassingly soft cushion and kissed hands on his
enrolment as a Privy Councillor. One is of the august
inner circle of Ministers, constituting what is called
the Cabinet. The other is of the outer circle of
Ministers, an administrator of lesser, but for all that
of considerable importance. They have, between
them a wonderful capacity of aggravation. Let any
member—it don't matter much on which side of the
House he sits, whether he is seated above or below
the gangway—let any member, Liberal or Conser-
vative, Ultra-radical, or true-blue Tory, ask any
question he pleases, under any conceivable conditions
of time or of circumstance, and he is safe for two
things from the hands or rather from the lips of these
two members of the Government. He is safe not
to be answered in any way satisfactorily. And he
is equally safe to be insulted—insulted by something
in look, bearing, and words, amounting to what
common people, who are not right honourables,
are in the habit of calling impertinence—or by a
dogged, dull pertinacity in error, that is cer-
tainly an insult to the querist's understanding.
Mr. AYETON is the former and Mr. BRUCE the
latter, as everyone will at once have recognized. The
Chief Commissioner has carried his act as a Parlia-
mentary irritant, it must be said in simple justice,
to a high degree of perfection. His is not the
aptitude to—

assent with civil leer

And without sneering teach the rest to sneer.
On the lines of his supercilious countenance,
in the droop of the eyelids, in the scorn
of the nostrils, in the adroitly mingled petu-
lance and exhaustion expressed by the inflex-
ions of the voice, are visible and audible to the
meanest capacity (for taking offence) an undisguised
readiness, to accept literally the humourous sugges-
tion of THACKERAY, and to act upon it, " When your
neighbours tenderest corn is before you—tread upon
it !" With Mr. AYRTON'S colleague, Mr. BRUCE, it
is otherwise. While with Mr. AYRTON the imperti-
nence is so piercing that it almost attains the
poignancy of wit—with Mr. BRUCE the obstinate
doggedness is such that it almost assumes to itself
the attribute of stupidity. Of the fact that it is as
we say, in regard to the Home Secretary, Parliament
has recently had two rather flagrant, and of them-
selves, as it seems to us, perfectly conclusive illustra-
tions. The more recent of these two stupendous
evidences of dull and stolid obstinacy on the part
of Mr. BRUCE occurred only as recently as
on Thursday evening, when the Home Secretary
was only in a more conspicuous way than usual
what he is consistently and systematically upon
occasions of a similar kind—
" Stiff in opinions—always in the wrong."
An innocent man (we have all read the case in those
letters in the 7iznes signed A. MATHIEU) is haled
through the public streets as a suspected pickpocket,
is locked up for two or three days to be eventually
discharged by the magistrate, but—for all that—
the detectives in plain clothes, who have perpetrated
this wrong, have, according to Mr. BRUCE, acted
throughout in a manner the most exemplary. The
incident is entirely of a piece with that earlier inci-
dent about the poor, half-witted man who had not
stolen a couple of ducks, but whose continued incar-
ceration as having been suspected of helping the two
rascals who did, Mr. BRUCE, justified by that addi-
tional atrocity, a dull man's attempt at a joke—don't
we all smart under the remembrance of it?—that lum-
bering effort at a pleasantry, about the possibility of
three men stealing two ducks ? Painfully conscious
of the presence, there, to the right band of Mr.
SPEAKER, of Messrs. AYRTON and BRUCE, our long-
suffering representatives in the Commons House of
Parliament assembled, may mournfully cry out to
one another, Quousque tandem abzaere patientia nostra?

MR. GLADSTONE will certainly one day do himself
and his colleagues some serious injury by his ex-
cessive verbosity. A cautious statesman, havingbefore
him the difficult task of settling the Education
question—a problem of many years—during the few
weeks that remain before the long vacation, would
have been careful not to alarm Parliament by pro-
claiming an organic change of policy. He would
have made as light as possible of the obstacles before
him in order that he might persuade his hearers that
they were light. He would have announced his
amendments in the fewest possible words.
Not so Mr. GLADSTONE. He could not
resist the temptation to make an oration,
with exordium, middle, and peroration all complete.
He took seventy minutes to explain the changes
which he proposed to make. For sixty-five minutes
he was eloquent as usual, but the House clearly did
not understand his scheme, and it was not until the
last five minutes, when he recapitulated the arrange-
ments in a few succinct words, that they became
intelligible. It would have been well if the preceding
period had been only wasted. It was far worse than
wasted. It led members who did not understand the
question to suppose that the alterations were
fundamental, that they in reality constituted a
new bill, and other members who did understand,
and who have reasons of their own for not liking the