The Sun.
London, England, 1869-03-20 00:00:00

Bl'lnaiCF TEE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

The Saturday Review is severe in its strictures on Mr.
Disraeli's speech, which it declares to be one of the worst
sever made on a great occasion in Parliament. The
Saturday Review, moreover, laments:the continuance:of the
debate, since it holds there is nothing really to say on the
bill which can be worth hearing. It is voting, not talking,
that i 4 now wanted. The action of the Conservatives
upon the second reading is doubtful, though it is possible
the whole party may concur in thinking that the sooner
the Irish Church is out of the way the better. So long as
the question is before Parliament the Liberal majority is
not assailable ; but Mr. Disraeli may calculate that there
would be some prospect of the majority breaking up if
other questions of which the country and the party had so
thoroughly made up its mind were brought up into promi•
nonce. The day will probably come, for example, when
Gladston will try his hand at a scheme for settling
the chronic disputes as to Irish land ; and to deal with
the land is more dangerous to him as the leader of a
party than to deal with the Church, because his followers
have not arrived at the stage of taking it as settled that
to introduce exceptional measures with regard to land in
Ireland is safe for Englishmen. There are, then, plenty of
masons to be found, without seeking very far, why the
Conservatives should be inclined to let the second reading
pgsa, and to avoid having it recorded by how great a
inalerAity the principles of the bill are supported.
But, en the other hand, the Conservative party would feel
itself almost hustled out of existence if it did not divide
against a bill which it has opposed as it has opposed this
bill—which it has denounced as a scheme for sacrilegious
;robbery, dangerous to the Church and to religion, and to
the security of private property. It is difficult to believe
that Conservative members will decide to stultify them-
selves so far as not to protest by a vote, even though it be
the vote of a minority, against a measure they think so
wicked and so dangerous. The party, too, would be
greatly disappointed throughout the country if their
leaders were timid and easily beaten on so momentous an
occasion. What would all the Lancashire and Shropshire
Clergy, who worked themselves up into assuring their
parishioners that if Mr. Gladstone had a majority, Pro-
testants would again be burned at Smithfield, think when
they saw the men whom they had worked so hard to
return adopting in silence the principles of a bill which
would be the beginning of a new martyrology? There is
apparently no help for it. The Conservatives must divide
and get beaten, and then they need offer no further oppo-
sition to the bill, except such as is warranted and necessi•
tated by the discussion of its details.

The Spectator declares that Mr. Disraeli's speech at the
opening of the debate on Thursday was a "brilliant
failure " in a political sense, but that "as a literary man
he surpassed himself." His speech was a miracle of poll-
tical artfulness and literary antithesis ; we say political
artfulness, not art, because a great man in his place would
at least have faced the Irish position in this matter, that
ground for complaining of injustice which on other occa•
sions Mr. Disraeli has so completely and candidly appre-
ciated, but which in the great speech of Thursday night
he kept hidden away out of sight from his first sentence
to his last. A stranger to the great conflict listening to
him would never even have guessed that a national. C,,t1:0-lic
lic Church in Ireland had once been robbed to c:. ~11 a

sectarian Protestant Church, and that the nation ,:ow
asking to resume what it holds to be trulynational wealth.
That cardinal fact of the whole controversy was lying, we
suppose, in some one of Mr. Disraeli's numerous mental
pouches, whence he would " resume " it, with much greater
ease than the Irish nation is allowed to resume its ows
property, if ever it fell to him to attempt Mr. Gladatone's
work. On Thursday night, however, Mr. Disraeli's " his tori•
cal conscience "had conveniently got rid of it, and his speech
was as fresh with surprise and indignation at the policy of
" forfeiture without a pretext "—that old policy "of
tyranny and oppression in the darkest ages "—as if he
himself had never enforced with his usual lucidity in Par
liament the gross injustice of an " alien Church." it is
not the art of true statesmanship to keep the cardinal fad
to a great controversy wholly out of view. But for the pur•
poses of a single speech there may be great political art•
fulness in such a feat ; and it is doubtless a :marvellous, ii
a somewhat undesirable power certainly one which
scarcely any man in the House save Mr. Disraeli possesses
—to be able at will, and for a purpose, to disembarrass a
wide and powerful intellect so completely of all reference
to the moral centre and pivot of a great national conflict.
This was the exploit, however, which Mr. Disraeli
achieved, and, for the period of his speech, he effected in
the House the same kind of feat which the electro biologists
are said to achieve over their patients when they make
them taste senna in drinking good wine, or find the fumes
of the most pungent salts in a bouquet of violets. While
he spoke, the listener felt nothing but the suddenness,
the hardships, the apparent anomalies of the bill ; when
he sat down, the effect of his speech melted away insen•
sibly, like the effect of a mere charm or incantation villa
has no solid basis in reason.

The London Review thinks that Sir Roundell Pelmet
skews to disadvantage when he is out of harness, but con•
siders that he mistakes the question of the University
Test Bill rather than that he is prejudiced about it. If he
believed that such God-fearing men as Mr. Morley, Mr.
Bright, and Mr. W. Fowler would be as natural products
of the universities, when thrown open, as himself and Sir
John Coleridge and Mr. Gladstone are on the present
system, he would no longer resist the change. This is a
great advance in liberality of sentiment ; but how weak is
the position, regarded in the light of fact and common
sense. What is there in Oxford and Cambridge training
to make men religious? Absolutely nothing. The men
who have kept up the religious reputation of the univer•
sities were disciples of John Henry Newman, whom Or.
ford repudiated, and of Charles Simeon, whom academic
Cambridge scorned. Had the universities been open, these
men would not have had less influence, but more. The
truth is, that vital, spiritual religion is not the product of
ecclesiastical foundations or of academic restrictions. It is
a fire which flashes from soul to soul ; and human institu•
tions never have caught, and never will catch, the secret of
the flame. It burns best in freedom. It warms the whole
heart of the nation. It dies of formal fanning. It expires
when free air is denied to it ; but it breaks forth afresh
and° afresh. It glows, beautifully lambent, over the whole
surface of this sincerely, though imperfectly, Christain
country. You may smother it with bad fuel, but you cannot
extinguish it by rude disturbance, or by leaving it to be
sustained by the breath of heaven. Can Sir Roundell
Palmer, who knows all this, who lives in the belief of it,
whose life is made happy by it—can he suppose that the
sacred fire is in danger because the universities are likely
to be prevented from forcing it into repulsive forms ? He
surely knows that no universities can sustain religion if it
is not in the heart of the people, or extinguish it if it is
cherished there. Dr. Playfair bears testimony from Scot-
land how thoroughly without irreligious effect have been
the changes in the universities of that country. So it is in
America, and (with differences arising out of the nature of
existing institutions) so it is in Canada and in Australia.
Make the universities the free resort of the nation ; and if
the nation is Christian, the universities must be so.
The John Bull fears that an Endowed Schools Bill in
some shape is a necessity. It is but too evident that for
many years past these schools have not been doing their
work. There needed a power of adaptation to the changing
wants of the nation which our foundation schools have
not possessed. The upper classes still desire a classical
education, and it is provided for them in our highest
schools ; the poorer classes have no time for more than
the most rudimental instruction, and this is furnished in
our primary schools. Latterly the ever-swelling ranks of
the middle classes have come to realise that if their
children are taught the same subjects as those who remain
several years longer at school, their acquirements will
be proportionately inferior, whilst they will remain
ignorant of much which is essential for their future
advancement in life ; and at the same time they
have learned that if their children are not better educated
than their inferiors, they will not be able to hold their
own in the great race of life. The effect of this has been
a great call for what is designated a "commercial educa-
tion." This the endowed schools have not unfrequently
failed to pro% id:: ; they have clung to their old ways,
sometimes because the masters wished to maintain the
dignity of their schools, at others because they were glad
of an excuse for doing nothing, and in consequence the
schools have become partially or wholly deserted ; and now,
when their practical working is examined into, they are
found wanting. A fair adaptation of them to the existing
state of things would delight all well wishers to their
country. The fear is that the need for some change should
lie seized upon to revolutionise the whole system of
middle-class education.

RAILWAY TRAVELLING IN THE UNITED STATES.
—A party of gentlemen who have recently arrived at
New York from California by the Pacific Railroad, give a
startling account of their suffering 3 while snowed up, and
of mistreatment at the hands of the railroad empl.oyds.
They were detained ten days at a station on the route,
where they were compeiled to pay exorbitant prices fol.
the necesslaries of life, and on arriving at f,/ )v; drifts were
compelled to shovel the snow away. Finally some of them
got out and walked ninety a.iies to Port Laramie.

SUORN SHEEP IN WINTER.—A deputation from
the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Ani•
mall, headed by the Earl of Romney, on Friday called
the attention of the City Markets Committee to the prac-
tice of exposing recently shorn sheep to the inclemency of
the weather in the Metropolitan Cattle Market. They
pointed out that at Leicester during the winter months
there was a bye-law prohibiting the practice, which,
besides being a cruel one, deteriorated the quality of the
mat. The committee promised to do what they 0.44 41
Drevcathas ittgu,tilmoacc,