The Sun.
London, England, 1869-01-30 00:00:00

SPIRIT OP ,TOTJANALB,

The Saturday Review does not spare its criticising on
Earl Russell's last achievement with the pen. Ile has,
he says, his place in politics, but it is like that of a buoy
telling of the perilous rocks and currents. Where Earl
Russell is, there is danger. He is all for Mr. Gladstone,
and all for his own favourite scheme ; all for him-
self and all for everybody else ; he is for disesta-
blishment, and even for disendowment, but for a
disendowment which looks very like disendowment
first and re•endowment afterwards. There is to
be secularisation, because it is a constitutional principle
for the State to strip the old Church whenever the State
pleases ; and here the great principle by which Woburii
Abbey is a Bedford estate is maintained. But then the
State, like Dorcas, is to make up new coats and garments,
not so large and cumbrous as the old ones, but warranted
to fit well and suit the prevailing fashion ; and the Epis-
copalian Protestants, after all, are not to be turned out to
perish in the cold. Earl Russell may well say that he
cannot congratulate himself on being " precise as to dis-
endowment ;" and when he complains that " there seems
to have been some confusion in the Resolutions of the
House of Commons on this subject," we are tempted to
add that the fog and haze must have spread into the
Upper House, and the confusion must have confused Earl
Russell himelf. Qualis ab incepto. Earl Russell is Earl
Russell still. He thinks that he is the most practical
of statesmen, while he is what the French call a
mere ideologue. He affects to be original ; which he
may be, only that Earl Grey, Mr. Bence Jones, Mr.
Trench, and everybody else, has been before him. He reads
them all, admires them all, admits what everybody says,
and then considers himself to be very impartial because he
sees that everybody is right, and that the very opposite
arguments to theirs are all right too. But then it is a
question about Ireland ; and Earl Russell knows that to
solve an Irish difficulty the best way is to make con-
fusion worse confounded than ever. This Earl Russell
has clone, and not for the first time ; but his latest triumph
in this curious art of statesmanship is assuredly his
greatest,

The John Bull makes somo remarks upon the notable
letter of Lord Russell, and calls attention to the inconsist-
ency displayed by the noble earl in his recent suggestions.
"A great calm always precedes a storm. It is simply
because of the lull in the political world before a campaign
which bids fair to be one of no ordinary severity that Earl
Russell's third letter to Mr. Chichester Fortescue has at-
tracted so much attention. The veteran Whigleader cannot
keep his pen from paper. Three times already has he pro-
pounded different views on the Irish Church, and it really

seems a waste of time to discuss at length propositions
which before Easter will in all probability be withdrawn.

Many people trouble themselves most unnecessarily in
speculating on the reasons why the noble earl thus takes
the public into his confidence under the thin disguise of a
letter to the Irish Secretary. Probably these numerous and
very ephemeral manifestoes are simply caused by
an incurable cacoethes scribendi, and by a desire,
though not in the Cabinet, to seem to lead public
opinion. When, therefore, Earl Russell finds that
one of his pilot balloons is not wafted gaily along
by the breath of popular applause, he forthwith sends up
another. His latest bantling has received but rough usage
from the Liberal press, and its only real use, in our opinion,
is the further evidence it affords of the want of any prac-
tical scheme among Vie Liberals for disposing of the
money which they propose to filch from the Irish Church.
We hope that an early copy of the pamphlet was sent to
the Governor-General of India. The Earl of Mayo can
hardly fail to be gratified by its perusal. No words were
strong enough with which to point a sarcasm at his
levelling-up policy. But here we have the author of the
Durham Letter, a Protestant of Protestants, a warm sup-
porter of the British and Foreign Society, proposing that
£360,000 shall be divided equally between Protestant
Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, and Presbyterians, " for
purposes strictly defined by Parliament." What is this
but endowing two other Churches, not in the open manner
suggested by the Earl of Mayo, and retaining the princi-
ples of an establishment, but in a peddling and impracti-
cable manner ?

The Saturday Review finds it difficult to believe that Mr.
Edward Watkin Edwards, official assignee of the Bank-
ruptcy Court, can be a fact and not a myth, One would
have thought that to realise and receive and be account.
able for the assets and estates of the firms who find them-
selves compelled to breathe the air of Basinghall-street,
and to keep the accounts of one in every three of the
London bankrupts, would exhaust any one man's time
and talents. But to Mr. Edwards the trifling burden of
official duties was a mere perfunctory episode in his active
life. When Overend, Gurney, and Co. had secured Edwards,
they could defy fate and the Bank rate of interest ; they
had got confidence, stability, certainty, the Destinies
and Fates, all in one. Every man has his price in another
sense than Walpole thought, and the price of such an

interposition as Edwards was enormous. Indeed, being
something more than man, his salary was superhuman.
lle was rewarded much as Crctsus rewarded Delphian
Apollo for an opinion which turned out to be about as
valuable as that for which Edwards was himself subsi-
dised. Mr. Edwards received £5,000 a year for consenting

to act for Overend and Gurney in all matters in which
those simple and guileless folk, unskilled in the naughty
world of discount and finance, might ask for his advice
and assistance. The value of these unknown and hypo-
thetical and only probable services can be reckoned
by the known purchasing powers of £5,000 a year in the
ordinary concerns of life. £5,000 a year purchases in the
open English market a Bishop, a Judge, a Prime
Minister, a Speaker of the House of Commons, a Secre-
tary of State. £5,000 a year hires these small
functionaries, body and soul, mind and tongue, and pen
for every clay, and all day long. But £5,000 a year
could only buy a fraction of Edwards, the mere hours of
idleness of his mighty mind; what was left of Edwards
after he had spent his day from ten to four in the Bank-
ruptcy Court was gladly snatched at and bought up at
£5,000 a year. After six hours of official business came
the cannie hour at e'en of Edwards, equal in value to a
whole day's work of such poor creatures as Mr. Gladstone
and Mr, Disraeli. But there was something left of
Edwards marketable even after Basinghall-street and
Lombard-street had taken their fill and fling out of him,
Mr. Stefanos Xenos thought the very snips and parings
of Edwards, after serving her Majesty and the great dis-
count house, worth £5OO a year and a present of a steam
yacht. Mr. Edwards also believes that, in addition to all
these pickings, he was auditor to the Galway Steam
Packet Company ; he owns that, while hired to drive close
bargains with the customers of Gurney, he not only
received an annual £5OO from Stefanos Xenos, one of their
customers, but £2,000 from another, a Mr. Pearson ; also
£3OO for acting as umpire between Lascaridi and Lever on
the one part, and Gurneys on the other, from whom he
was at the same moment taking the aforesaid £5,000 a
year ; and he will not swear that he did not get something
—it might be odd hundreds or thousands—from the Mill-
wall Iron Company under precisely similar circumstances.
To finish up this portrait, it remains to remark that the
gentleman in whom Overend and Gurney invested at such
a frightful premium does not look like so very valuable a
commodity. Since the evidence given by Majocchi, never
was human memory so uncertain, treacherous, and leaky
as Mr. Edwards's. Dates, facts, particulars, details, all
slide and glide away from Mr. Edwards in the witness-
box. He has a very bad memory as to dates ;it entirely
fails him on every point of business worth remember.
ing ; he really would be candid were it not for this
sad infirmity of faculty. Whether he was debtor or
creditor, whether he paid or received, what he disbursed,
or the reverse ; whether it was a hundred thousand or so
on this side or on the other ; whether he was acting for
somebody or somebody else : when, if ever, he was him-
self, or whether he was always an alter ego, and, if so, an
alter ego of whom ; whether he was Gurney against Xenos,
or Xenos against Gurney ; whether he was an official
assignee, or an Atlantic Steam Packet Company, or an
Anglo-Luso, or a Millwall ironsmith, accountant, bill-
broker, money-lender, or yachtsman, whether he was
acting for any body, or for two bodies, or only for himself
—he really does not know. Nor do we.

The Spectator comments upon the City trial, and is not
surprised at the various manifestations of feeling that have
taken place. We do not wonder, either at the deep pity
felt by some men for the defendants in this trial, or at the
roar of applause with which the news of their committal
was received. It is hard, while human nature remains as
it is, not to feel for men who, having risen so high, have
fallen so low ; and as hard not to enter into the satisfaction
of the crowd on hearing that the law was strong enough
to compel inquiry into the causes of the greatest commercial
ruin wrought in our days, to demand proof that this ruin
was not due to fraudulent design. That is the effect of the
committal, and we cannot, we confess, see how just and
shrewd magistrates could come, on the evidence before
them, to any other decision. Of course, any definite opinion
as to the guilt or innocence of any of the accused would still
be grossly premature. Further on, in alluding to the critical
period of the transfer of the company, it declares that
the clear duty of the partners in the firm at this moment
was to have met that crash, surrendered their great pro-
perties, and arranged matters with their creditors. Had
they done this, men would indeed have wondered at the
astounding folly of men so experienced in business throw-
ing away their money in such speculations ; but their
names would have been unstained, and capital would have
been forthcoming to enable them to regain a position.
Instead of this, they—moved, perhaps, in some degree by
genuine consideration for their own depositors, whom, be
it remembered, they saved from loss—resolved to sell their
business to a company, which should bring in a new capital
of £5,000,000. They did so sell it, and it is here that the
question of their intent begins. It is certain that if they
had published to the world the precise facts of their posi-
tion they would never have got a penny. This they them-
selves probably do not question—certainly their counsel did
not ; but they contend that their estates were so large,
their credit or goodwill so valuable, and their legitimate
business so immensely profitable, that it was still reason-
able to think that all losses might be met and the new
company still flourish.