The Sun.
London, England, 1869-04-03 00:00:00

SPIRIT OP THE PUBLIC JOITRNALS.

The Saturday Review thinks that the Conservatives are
taking a well-deserved holiday, and that, in spite of the
pleasures and honours of office, they are really better off
in Opposition. They have no difficult task to perform ;
they need not force their intellects to try to guess what on
earth their leaders and they are after. But although the
situation is very easy and pleasant for the bulk of the Con-
servative party, and for those of their leaders who take
advantage of the absence of restraint to talk unalloyed
Conservatism, it is by no means easy or pleasant for one
or two of the most eminent among them. Mr. Disraeli
and Lord Stanley, more especially, are passing through a
season of considerable trial and difficulty. They cannot
take their holiday, and rollick in the untutored liberty of
unofficial Toryism. Mr. Disraeli is out of office, but it is
his business to make office some day possible again for
himself and his party. He has to think how he may con-
trive to stand well with his followers, and not run athwart
them in their present humour, and yet to pave the way for
leading Cies into courses of which as yet the:- have no
notion. If there is anything certain about Mr. Disraeli,
it is that he holds a Conservative Ministry, standing on
the pure principles of Conservatism, to be an impossibility.
He is obliged to look forward and to picture himself
responsible for the government of Ireland, and when he
does thi 3 he cannot for a moment suppose it possible that
he should really govern Ireland as Mr. Hardy would have
it governed. Lord Stanley is in a still more embarrassing
position. He may be taken to hold the ordinary Liberal
opinions on the matter ; and if the comparison could be
pursued thoroughly, there are, we imagine, very few points
on which the opinions of Lord Stanley and of Mr. Lowe
are not substantially the same. Both objected to Reform
on the ground that measures equally liberal, and perhaps
more liberal, might be carried without it than with it.
Both discuss public affairs with a sort of cynical candour,
and both take the view of what may be regarded as
extreme common sense on all questions such as education,
colonies, endowments, and State interference. But then
Lord Stanley is not free as Mr. Lowe is. Lord Stanley is
attached to the Conservative party, and must take the
consequences. He cannot think, act, or say anything.
He must hold his tongue, and try to administer as well as
possible whenever he gets a chance. He might, of course,
leave his party ; but he is bound to it by much more than
ordinary ties, and there are innumerable doubts and
scruples which rise up in the way of taking so decisive a
step when a man begins to calculate all the consequences,
and to ask whether he is bound, or would be wise, to sacri-
fice a position generally satisfactory in order to declare his
views on a particular question. Men of the mould and
cast of Lord Stanley are not to be blamed because they do
not take so great and heroic a line. If Lord Stanley was
a great man, or had a sympathy with the higher thoughts
and interests of the nation, or wished to mould the condi-
tion and determine the prospects of the generation in which
he lives, he would not be content to stand wholly aloof
while such subjects as the Reform Bill and the Irish
Church Bill are discussed. But Lord Stanley is a man
of a different stamp; and a cold, judicious, unimagina-
tive Liberal, who was bred and lives among Conserva-
tives, may perhaps be right in thinking that he is not
sacrificing too much for his party when he gives a silent
vote in its favour on such a question as that of the Irish
Church.

The Spectator says that Mr. Gathorne Hardy is con-
sidered by many of the Conservatives to be the true pillar
and cornerstone of their party. His Conservatism is not
moth-eaten by speculative doubts like Mr. Disraeli's, nor
dangerously undermined at the most important points by
frigid, clear business sense like Lord Stanley's. He is full
of an obtuse enthusiasm which renders him deaf to the
tendencies and ideas of the world external to his own
habits of mind. He is one of the most fluent speakers in
the House of Commons, and, in a literary sense, of all
fluent speakers he is the least interesting. There is no
depth and play in his voice, no flexibility in his thought,
no scale in his emphasis, no variety in his manner. He
once assailed his favourite enemies, if we may be allowed
the expression, the latitudinarians of the Church, amidst
the uproarious cheers of the rank and file on his own side,
as the advocates of a "misty and muddy" religious sys-
tem. The words, like most of Mr. Hardy's oratorical
adjectives, were singularly ill-adapted to the Church
Liberals in general, amongst whom are to be found the
men of sharpest and most lucid, even where they not of
the deepest and most powerful, thought whom the Church
contains. But if these epithets were not descriptive of the
men at whom they were cast, they were in a certain sense
very expressive of the mind of the speaker who cast them.
There is nothing like keenness of discrimination about Mr.
Hardy's eloquence. As he warms up into ardour, a
thicker film than usual falls upon his intellectual eye.
Mr. Gathorne Hardy is the Mr. Perceval of our own time
—no doubt a shade or two more liberal, as the whole
atmosphere of political thought is more liberal than it was
sixty years since. Like Mr. Perceval, Mr. Gathorne
Hardy has " poor powers of reasoning and none of imagi-
nation." Like him, he has strong religious convictions,
and in " regard to purpose and persistency," is, as Miss
Martineau describes Mr. Perceval, " among the few
strong members of the Conservative Cabinet." Like him,
his political faults arise " from the narrowness of his
intellectual range, and by no means from any harshness,
hypocrisy, or pride in the temper of the man." Like him,
he is upright, honourable, amiable, everything that is
worthy outside the intellectual conditions of statesman-
ship—look, forinstance, at his steadiness in supporting the
report of Mr. Justice Martin on the electoral corruption
of Norwich last Thursday, against the special pleas of his
own party. But like him, too, it seems to us quite possible
that if Mr. Gathorne Hardy ever came to rule the country
as the head of a powerful Conservative party, he would
be quite capable of ruling in so narrow a spirit as to
render himself far better hated by the people than the
most unprincipled of all the statesmen of our century.
The Examiner and London Review remarks upon the
increased cost of living, which has become the most pres-
sing problem of the present time, both in this country and
in the United States. If we look at home, we find great
depression of trade and increase of pauperism, accompa-
nied by a very high rate of expenditure, which, although
it may not have caused the existing distress, certainly
• aggravates its pressure. There are no complete returns of
local taxation, so that the full amount of the public bur-
dens can only be imperfectly estimated. The last number
of the Statistical Abstract shews that the amount expended
out of the imperial revenue and the poor rate, including
payments for county police rate, &c., for the year 1867-8
was above .£84,276,000 ; in 1852-3 it was £63,587,000,
shewing an increase in these items alone of above twenty
millions and a half sterling in fourteen years. It cannot
be doubted for one moment that such an addition to the
public burdens presses very heavily upon the people, and
has tended to produce that depression of trade which
invariably follows a diminution of their available resources.
We mut confess that we are utterly unable to compre-
hend the necessity for this extraordinary increase. It
would seem, not only that no effort has been made since
the Crimean War to reduce the expenditure of the Impe-
rial Government, but that the spirit of extravagance,
which, according to Sir Stafford Northcote, was then
created, has spread to our local authorities. The great
increase in the poor rates is not due to the increase of
pauperism, as we find from Government returns that
934,419 paupers cost '25,395,022 in 1849, while 958,824 cost
£6,959,840 in 1867. The records of crime do not spew any
increase in the number of commitments and convictions
to account for the increased cost of our county and police
rates. Nor, we believe, do the increased efficiency of our
army and navy, nor the necessities of the civil service,
account for the extraordinary increase of the imperial
expenditure. The real fact, we take it, is that this vast
addition has grown up almost silently and imperceptibly.
Unwatched by the public, officials have launched out into
this and that extravagance, until at length, in the pressure
of a financial crisis almost unexampled, those who bear
the burden have been aroused to a consciousness of its
weight.

The John Bull takes " No Surrender " to be the inscrip-
tion on Mr. Hardy's flag, which it last week recommended
Mr. Disraeli to unfurl. The late Premier's Church
appointments are severely censured, and the John Bull
declares that experience has shewn bow shortsighted was
a policy which alienated friends and secured no new allies.
The question now is, shall the Conservatives have no
policy on the great questions which are cropping up, or
shall they boldly, at some temporary loss of numbers and
popularity, resolve to be true to their principles? The
more the country realises the real meaning and effect of
the Government Bill, the more will people regret that
once again they have been deluded by Liberal profes-
sions of justice ; and hence it is, in our opinion, the
bounden duty of the House of Peers to remit the question
to the people ; and those of their lordships who were
anxious to read the bill a second time and attempt to
amend it in committee may see how futile such a course
is, from the anticipatory denunciations of such a course
by those very Liberal organs which arc revelling in the
ides that their lordships arc about to give in. A few
more such meetings as those in Leicestershire and even
the weale brethren among the peers will summon up
courage to do their duty to God, the Sovereign, and thf

People.

THE ROYAL HUMANE SOCIETY'S MEDAL.—A
general order, just issued, authorises officers, non-commis-
sioned officers, and soldiers who have received medals
from the Royal Humane Society for acts of bravery in
saving life to wear them on all occasions when in uniform.
In all cases when an officer, non-commissioned officer, or
soldier may be deemed worthy of receiving a second mark
of distinction for saving life the Royal Humane Society
have, with the concurrence of the Field-Marshal Com-
manding-in-Chief, agreed to add a clasp or J ti? the
medal already granted.