The Sun.
London, England, 1860-12-15 00:00:00

THE STIN.

8,18 CO.
LONDON', SATURDAY, BEG. 1 ,

It has often been remarked of late how many of
our leading statesmen hare a ed at that period
of life when we might presume that their ta„,t
favourite reading among the elas3ies would be,
let us say, CICERO'S De ,S'e neetute. ,In
the ordinary
course of nature but a brief interval of time can be
reasonably expected to elapse, now before the
majority of them must have disappeared. The
historic names of this memorable majority will start
at once to redollecticn. It requires from us in this
place nothing so invidious, or at any rate so inde-
corous as a distinct enumeration, It is a catalogue
of famous names, already beginning to diminish
rapidly. Another has just dropped out of the list.
To the record of his career there has now been
added at a single breath—his last—the closing
motto for the lives of us all, the-Finis Coronet. The
venerable Earl of ABERDEEN—born on the 28th of
Janutiry, 1774, died'on the 13th of Decembar, 1860
—has passed away for ever from, the scene of his
labours in the Rouse of Lords, to assume his
place in effigy, 411 Ch, O. place as he may. e found to

have won for himself, in the National Walhalla.
As with so many of our peers, his names, style,
and title, as recounted by the heralds, ring
grandiosely enough upon the ear—the deceased
being designated the Right Hon. GEORGE HA3IIL-
TON GORDON, Earl of ABERDEEN, Viscount FoR-
MANTINE, Baron HADDO, METIILICK, TARVER,
and KELLIE, in the peerage of Scotland, Viscount
GORDON of ABERDEEN in that of the United
Kingdom, and (a bit of an anti-climax this, it
sounds to us) a Baronet of Nova Scotia. Stately
though the appellations, however, what a mockery
it all seems when the dead patrician lies in his
coffin, and the wand is broken and the fragments of
it cast after the coffin into the open grave.
It is not, however, by any means as a
member of the patrician order in this country
that Lord ABERDEEN'S name appears before us
as one in any way worthy of remembrance.
Though of an ancient race and an illustrious,
Lord ABERDEEN stood forth among his peers
as one in no particular so especially conspicuous.
He was only the fourth possessor of the Earldom.
It is as a diplomatist and as an administrator
that Lord ABERDEEN is entitled to consideration
from his fellow countrymen. In both these capa-
cities his labours, during the first half of this nine-
teenth century, had been so frequent and so
remarkable, they were at some periods so protracted
and at others were invested with such an awful
responsibility, that it is incumbent upon us to cast,
however cursorily, a retrospect glance over the
career of the departed statesman—conscious,
when doing so, that while by his public
labours he was unquestionably one of the foremost

men of his age, by his individual capacities he was,

beyond a doubt, all the time a man of the merest
mediocrity. He was no orator. He was a diplo-
matist without finesse. He was a leader of men
without any commanding ability. • As a statesman

he was deficient in sagacity. As an administrator

he lacked courage, he lacked forethought. It was
during the period of his longest continuous

tenure of office as Foreign Secretary, under
Sir ROBERT PEEL'S Administration,that he allowed
himself to, be cozened by the wiliest of all the
huckstering Monarchs that ever sat upon an
European throne—Hence the Spanish marriages—
hence the downfall of Louis PHILIPPE—hence the
convulsion of all Europe by the consequent outbreak
of the February Revolution. For all which the
late Earl of ABERDEEN was directly in a very great
measure responsible. History will infallibly say
this. We are only anticipating its inevitable

utterance. Again—it was during his subsequent
three years' power as Prime Minister of England,
as chief of the great Omnium Gatherunt Coalition,
at the Head of All the Talents and of
All the Mediocrities—Ethe Premier himself
at the head of the latter' class—he who was in
truth, with all submission to Mr. DISRAELI,
more undoubtedly than even JENKINSON,
Lord LIVERPOOL, the Arch Mediocrity !]—it was
during Lord ABERDEEN'S three years' Premier-
ship that England, France, Turkey, and Sardinia
"drifted" into that miserable war in the Crimea—
that sanguinary and deplorable struggle with the
Autocrat of All the Russian—causing (quite
unnecessarily) the destruction of thousands upon
thousands of lives, end the squandering of mil-
lions upon millions of gold. All these calamities
being attributable, we do believe firmly in our
conscience, to that constitutional timidity which
was Lord ABERDEEN'S most conspicuous charac-
teristic—a timidity that dimmed All the shining
Talents of all his illustrious colleagues—that
paralysed the collective energies of the Coali-
tion, that palsied even for the tiie
being the lofty resolution of such men as Lord JOHN
RUSSELL and Viscount PALMERSTON. It were
criminal to "hush up" the truth in this matter—it
were criminal to gloss over the frightful and
lamentable fact that to the enervating influence of
this deplorable timidity of Lord ABERDEEN, at the
head of the last Coalition Government, the death
of a whole army was mainly attributable. Lot us
speak the truth right out, though the heavens ruin
down upon us. Had the Government of the late Earl
of ABERDEEN, that deplorable and cumbrous Coali-
tion, avowed plainly and betimes to the late Russian
Emperor NICHOLAS "Pause ! Cross not the
Pruth ! Dare not to advance one step further in
the direction of Constantinople—oß,a collision with
the Allied Powers of Western Europe will be the
one inevitable consequence !"—the Crimean war
would never have come to pass-100,000 men would
never have perished—Xloo,ooo,ooo would never have
been squandered in working out the terrible task
of their destruction. We are not prophets after
the -event in thus speaking. We repeat now (in
these columns) only what was said then.(in these
columns) before that dreadful war had commenced.
The Coalition, nevertheless, under the bane, under
the curse of Lord ABERDEEN'S hesitating and timo-
rous Premiership, allowed. England, in spite of all

remonstrance, to drift, drift, drift into the war.
Et hint illce lachrymm. Hence the crash of that
appalling collision, of that collision between the
East and the West, that (but for Lord. ABERDEEN)
was in very truth so easily avoidable.' The best,
indeed, that w© can say of Lord ABERDEEN as an
administrator may be condensed into those few
words; He meant well, those few fatal words that
have but too often • implied, as they unquestion-
ably imply in this present instance, such a world
of unintentional disasters, such an appalling mass
of undesigned destructiveness.

The Liberals of Northampton have had their
annual show—their two members being, of course,
the prize speakers, and as one, Mr. GILPIN, was a
Minister, 'and tha other a Lord, the fete ought
not to be unworthy of, home notice. Mr. GILPIN,
indeed, declined to speak as Minister when alittle
pressed by Mr. VERNON on the subject of the
Poor-laws and' out-door relief, and gave almost
such a Delphic answer as he would have done to
a deputation—The 'Poor-law was the law of the
land, but 'no doubt it was susceptible of modera-
tion,-and those who had the charge of it were
desirous of its being administered with all possible

humanity. •
NoV,so :Delphic was his lasguage on the French
treaty—that was an equivocal good. Instead of
defending it, however, himself he preferred to quote
the honourable recantation of a Tory paper in the
North of the largest circulation :—" The Munches
ter Guardiaia, following the lead of the Times,
far from
opposed Mr. COBDE-N, and said, with many terms
complimentary to the Emperor of the
FRENCII, that our glorious freetrader had been taken
in by him. 1Y
ow, the .3fanchester Guardian, after
commenting upon the treaty, says, For this good
r2sult• we are indebted to the intelligence and
zeal' of Mr. COBDEN, aided by active depntatiOns
the enlightened
.We feel that,
from this country, and
views of the French Governmiceet
in our fear lest our redoubtable Manchester free-
trader should
r injustice an
be
was Bono by us
ipractised upon
by our astute
e
neighbour,
to that
gentleman, and so far from hesitating to make, the'
aPI zende hcnorabk, we gladly embrace the oblige;
h
.1
ton to 'do so.'
Now that is honest. If people are
mistaken, owing to the press, with respect to a
.treaty 'which is worthy of all praise, it is but honest
o the part of the press to acknowledge their mia-
,