The Sun.
London, England, 1869-08-14 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE runLIO JoURNALS,

A Queen's Speech, says the Saturday Review, is always
sere to provoke criticism, and at the dead season of the
year, when the interest and excitement of the session are
over, and there is not much else to criticise, the criticism
naturally becomes keen, minute, and impassioned. It is
assumed that a Queen's Speech ought to be a model of
composition in every way, with the best grammar pos-
sible, full of good sense and stirring matter, and adorned
with flowers of appropriate rhetoric. If this is the
standard by which the document read on Wednesday
last by the Chancellor is to be judged, it falls, it must be
owned, lamentably short. A more bald and jejune piece
of composition has seldom been issued by a Ministry.
This gives a splendid opening to the Conservative journals,
which find in the shortcomings of the Queen's Speech a
Tory triumph, and take a natural delight in discovering
that the Liberal Cabinet, which was said to be so very clever,
so much beyond anything the Conservatives could muster,
has shewn itself so stupid and cornmonilace in framing
the Queen's Speech. A section of the Liberal Press, on
the other hand, tries to rob this criticism of its sting
by suggesting or explaining that the very clever members
of the Cabinet had nothing to do with it. Their best
man has been ill, and so the Tories need not triumph.
As they put it in their poetical way, the Queen's
Speech bears no marks of the pen of William Ewart
Gladstone; and they go on, with a fine sense of internal
evidence as to authorship, to pronounce that the speech
was the work of Lord Hartington and Mr. Bruce. If so,
those members of the Cabinet certainly command but a
homely and unpretending style. How Lord Hartington
would frame a Queen's Speech, if he had to frame one, we
cannot even guess; but it must be acknowledged that
there is an air of probability in ascribing the composition
to Mr. Bruce. He has had exceedingly hard work lately,
and has taken a laborious part in one of the most laborious
sessions on record. A very tired man, longing for nothing
but his holiday, and thinking that if he could but just get

up enough energy to write a Queen's Speech, he might
hope to be allowed a little leisure, would, we should
imagine, compose very much in the style which is now
criticised. If we can conceive a railway pointaman,
after having stared at the signal for sixteen consecutive
hours, being called on to draw up the by-laws for a branch
line, he would probably fall naturally into some such
style. But then, after all, the Queen's Speech does per-
fectly well even if it does not satisfy criticism. It is a
mere piece of form. At the beginning of the session it
tells what the Ministry is going to do, but at the end of
the session it can only say what the Ministry has done,
and everyone knows all about it before a word of it is
read.

The Spectator declares that the great fact of this session
is, that the revolution of 1867 has been successful, that the
RefOrm Bill has worked as it was expected to work, and
that but for the Lords Parliament would be once more a
most efficient governing body. The men sent up to the
House of Commons have belonged to the same classes as
of old, but their temper has been changed. They have
desired to do things, instead of desiring to leave things
undone. The demon Content has been exorcised from
their midst, and the sovereign power once more perceives
that improvement is possible, that change is not neces-
sarily evil, that to makea political experiment, even when
not demanded with threats of revolution, is often a wise
and a profitable expenditure of energy. The secret dis-
like to every innovation because it was an innovation, the
hankering for a good long rest, which marked the Pal-
merston Administration, and was fostered without being
wholly approved by the great Sac!duce° himself, has de-
parted, and in its place we have an eager readiness to
work and to.advance. No proposal which promised
results has been too new or too radical for the House.
The main business of the session was to pass a bill the
object of which is to abolish Protestant ascendancy in
Ireland, to abrogate the system of governing that
country which has been in force for more than three hun-
dred years. It was a bill in the highest degree revolu-
tionary, for it seriously modified the Constitution, it
transferred a great mass of property from an order
to the State, and it surrendered in principle
the right of Great Britain to govern Ireland
according to the governors' good pleasure alone. Twenty
years ago, ten years ago, such a measure would have been
impossible, but this year the Commons could not be
induced to swerve from their resolution to sweep it through.
They faced menaces of civil war, they faced the resistance
of the Lords, they faced the united clergy, they faced
a minority which, in England at all events, owned half
the property of the country, and carried it through trium-
phantly in a single session. So absolute was their deter-
mination that, rather than yield, they would have
remodelled the Constitution, and the Lords felt that a
compromise which gave them nothing hut a compliment
was a welcome relief from a most dangerous situation.
The temper of the House, in fact, has been such that
Ministers have seldom had to appeal to its aid, that
immens9 interests like the Indian railway companies and
the publicans, and even the landowners, have felt that it
was safer not to oppose, to come to some understanding,
or failing that, even to obey in silence. There is not, in
fact, an interest in the country which wor:el at all like
a stand-up fight with the Cabinet, or an official nho
does not feel that there is strength enough in the
Government to call him, if need be, to a severe
account. The Householder Parliament has restored
force to the Executive, that pon er of doing disagreeable
but necessary things, which is the grand distinction
between dying governments and governments that are
effectively alive, and has restored it, as far as we can
see, consciously, with a definite wish as well as an unde-
fined willingness that Government should be strong,
should govern, and not merely reign. If that spirit lasts,
and it may last a generation, the next cycle of thirty
years may be marked by improvements far greater than
those which have distinguished the last thirty, and the
country will have ample excuse for condoning every error
Mr. Disraeli has ever committed. He is, at least, entitled

to this credit, that his measure—for Household Suffrage
was his, if the Reform Bill was not—has permitted the
formation of a Government as strong as the nation, and as
Radical as its convictions.

The John Bull says that this is the " cream '' of the
year, which is being enjoyed in various degrees according
to the capacity of the purse of the enjoyer. Already
"My Lords and gentlemen" have quitted the dingy
atmosphere of St. Stephen's, and having donned their
tweed suits and ponderous Balmorals, are preparing to
"disestablish" the grouse on the Northern moors. "The
girl of the period " is in full force at various watering-
places, and even out-does herself in the georgeousness of
her attire, and the sparkling amiability of her well-known
manner. The City clerk manages to run down to Mar-
gate for a week or so, and enjoys a metaphorical "half-
pennyworth" of that cream in which his wealthier neigh-
bour can indulge ad libitum. In other words, all the
world is holiday-making, and a fashionable marriage at
St. George's, Hanover•square, at this period of the year,
would create quite as great a sensation as a wholesale
murder. London, which a few weeks ago gathered into
itself all the brilliance and fashion of the empire, will
in a few days more be a complete waste, and the
West-end will vie in dulness with an average
country town, when it is not market-day. We
wish the holidays to be enjoyed, and we trust that Minis-
ters and others will eschew that very objectionable way
of working known by little boys as " holiday tasks." Yet
if report says true, Mr. Gladstone contemplates a trip to
Ireland with Mr. Bright. To our idea, a tour anywhere,
and under any conceivable conditions, with Mr. Bright as
a companion, would be something too fearful for serious
contemplation. At the best Mr. Gladstone's visit to
Ireland will have some painful resemblance to the visit of
a certain Israelitish King to a little vineyard, of which he
had taken possession. We therefore venture to suggest
that it would be better for the Premier to "look up" his
old friends in Lancashire, if, indeed, he cannot consent to
give himself an entire rest. It is to be hoped that Mr.
Lowe will not develope any further plans for the deteriora-
tion of British coinage during his time of rest ; and if Mr.
Bruce's official zeal must find a vent, we should propose for
him the congenial work of a tour round the prisons of
England in search of experienced convicts, who have not
been as yet set at liberty.
The Economist thinks the present system of coinage is
clearly bad ; but we must be careful about the remedy.
The subject is a most delicate one to handle. England is
a great exchange place, a great settling house of inter-
national dealings, and all such business is based on and is
calculated by the " sovereign." If, therefore, we in a
hurry make a wrong change, we may throw this exchange
business, which is both important and lucrative, into con-
fusion. We shall probably not hurt the great exchange
dealers ' • rather very likely they will first see their way
through the confusion, and so profit by it. But we shall
hurt the common dealer and merchant, for he will have to
pay not only the ordinary rate of exchange, but an in-
creased rate—the cost of the confusion—in addition. Mr.
Lowe does not enough remember that changes of this
sort are addressed, not to a special, but to a common, a
eery common, jury. A person able to read Adam Smith,
a person fit to weigh nice arguments, will see that mostly
on an average it will go Ai Mr. Lowe says ; 1 r
we have
here to deal with people who do not know what an
"average" means. What such people believe is that they
are always likely to be cheated, and always are being
cite- ted, unless they take the greatest possible pains in every
traosaction. Vnless these sort of people get back the
identical sort of sovereign from their banker which they
paid in to him, they will believe that the banker is " doing "
them, the Government is " doing " them, or somebody
is cheating them. And we are not sire that. of course
not at banks, but at inferior retail shops, this species
of imposition might not be attempted on cii,.toniers
apparently weak-minded. We can iioa inc a lady saying
to a shopman -" Ah, but that's not the price ticketted in
the window;" and the shopman answering —" Ali, ma'am,
that price is in the old money. Since that they've
shortened the sovereign, and we mu4t Lingthen our
prices." If the present most expensive of coinage is
to be reformed, ice think that the plan of charging a
seignorage at the Mint, beginning with a small one and
gradually increasing, is subject to by far the least ohjec-
Cons and offers the greatest advantages. Foreigns nations
would not be affected by it becawse the sovereign would
contain the same quantity of bullion as now, and, within
the country, the physical sovereign being the same, it
would be most hard to convince the rough mass of man-
kind that all was not the same. Indeed, if, as we have
suggested, the imposition of the law were protracted over
a series of years, the process would be gradual and imper-
ceptible, and for practical purposes the effect would be too
email to be worth considering.