The Sun.
London, England, 1858-10-28 00:00:00

the temptation of citing as an illustration Of what
"mean: During the Russian war there were two
points in which the interest of Europe was cen-
tered=-one' was Sebastopol, the other the city of
Kars. I hope we have not forgotten all the geo-
graphy we learnt during those calamitous times,
for I believe it is the only really valuable thing we
got by the war. (A laugh.) You recollect that
the city 9f Kars was besieged by the Russians,
and that it was defended by Turkish troops, as-
sisted and commanded, I think, by an Englishman
—Col. Williams. (Cheers.) You have heard, and
I am not at all prepared to dispute it—that Col. Wil-
liams behaved, I do not say with great bravery, for
that is common to almost all Englishmen and indeed,
to the majority of men everywhere,—but with great
sagacity and prudence, and showed the qualities
of ao, commander. Eventually he was obliged
to capitulate, and those who capitulated
were treated in the most honourable manner
by the Russians who obtained possession of the
town. At that time a nobleman of very high rank
—no less a personage than Lord Stratford de Red-
cliffe—was ambassador from the Queen of England
at the city of the Sultan. He had been there for
nearly 20 years. During the siege of Kars Colonel
Williams wrote and forwarded to Lord Stratford at
Constantinople more than 60 letters and despatches
with reference to his position, stating how they
were worn out with sorties and the attacks of the
enemy, how long their provisions and ammunition
might last, and urging him to take any steps which
might be possible for the purpose of making a
diversion in his favour or of sending relief. All
this was most proper for Colonel Williams to write
and communicate to the ambassador of the Queen
at Constantinople; but do yourecollect the striking
fact that Lord Redcliffe did not reply to—did not
acknowledge or take the smallest notice of :any
oneof those 60 or 70 despatches. (Cries of "Shame'
and hisses.) He treated them as waste paper. He
had been years at Constantinople, quarrelling with
every European Minister there, and bullying the
Ministers of the Sultan ; but when his own coun-
trymen and their allies were shut up in the fortified
town of Kars, besieged by a powerful and over-
whelming force, driven at length to starvation, and
finally to capitulation, this great official treated the
whole thing as utterly beneath his notice. Subse-
quently, Colonel Williams came to England and
was made a baronet; Parliament passed an act
granting him a pension of £l,OOO a-year, and the
Marquis of Lansdowne, one of the Cabinet Minis-
ters of the day, brought him into the House of
Commons for 'his pocket borough of Calne, in Wilt-
shire. Colonel Williams has never opened his mouth
in public in England on the subject of his treat-
ment by Lord Stratford de Redcliffe—(a laugh)—
while that nobleman, who had been guilty of this
great neglect, I say this enormous crime—(cheers)
—has since taken his seat in the House of Lords,
has become a great authority, and has now been
sent by the Government on a special mission to Con-
stantinople. I need not tell you that I was not m
favour of any of that Eastern policy, but I presume
Lord Stratford was ; he was one of the great au-
thors of it, and I say that any man who takes office
from his Sovereign and his country as he took it,
with a salary of £lO,OOO a-year, and expenses
of almost like amount,- for the Embassy at Constan-
tinople, is guilty of a scandalous abandonment of
the duty he owes to the Queen and to the country
if he pays no attention to such letters as those that
Lord Stratford received from an officer of her Ma-
jesty shut up with our allies at Kars. (Cheers.) If
Lord Stratford had been a Russian nobleman and
had so behaved, before taking his seat in the House
of Peers and going on a special mission to Constan-
tinople he would have had the advantage of going
on a special mission to Siberia—(cheers and laugh-
ter)—while if he had been an ambassador of the
United States of America—but I cannot follow out
the illustration, because in,the United States there
is no family influence, there is no power such as
that wielded by our great provincial potentates—
there is nothing in that country to shield an officer
of the State from public reprobation, and therefore
I am quite certain that no person deputed. from the
United States could by any possibility be giiilty of
the abandonment of duty which was manifested. by
Lord Stratford de Redcliffe. (Cheers.) Whenever
you get a House of Commons that fairly represents
the nation; with a Cabinet that fairly represents the
House of Commons—(hear)—if there be any other
Lord Stratford I would not like to predict precisely
what would befall him ; but I believe thqt such a
man, with such a temper—for it was a question of
temper—will, not receive under such circumstances
high and continuous employment from the. Gover-
nment of this country. (Cheers.) I say we have
a right, be it in peace, be it in war, when we
employ men in the service of the Crown and of the
State, and pay them for their labour, to all their
energies and to all their devotion. (Cheers.) This
question of Parliamentary reform, then, is a great
and serious- question. I want to give a word of
warning to those persons who are now engaged, if
there be any engaged, in constructing a Reform Bill
for the next session. Let them not bring in a delu-
sive and sham measure. (Cheers.) Universal suf-
frage, equal distribution, vote by ballot—any of
these points may or may not be perilous; but if
there be one thing more distinctly perilous than
another to the ruling classes in this country it is
that now, when they are committed to at least a
temporary—l wish it were a permanent—settle-
ment of this great question, they should bring for-
ward and pass a bill which, while it offers you
something great in the way of constitutional free-
dom, is found immediately after it has passed to be
nothing but a delusion and a sham. (Cheers.) It
will disappoint everybody ; it will exasperate all
the reformers ; it will render a feeling which is now
not bitter both bitter and malignant, and within 12
months after the bill has passed and the cheat is
discovered we shall be entered in all probability
upon another agitation, but an agitation of a very
different character from any we have yet seen.
(Cheers.) Let us have a real bill, a good bill, or no
bill at all. The question at this moment is in the
hands of the enemy. We stand the risk of having
brought before us what I will describe as " a coun-
try gentleman's reform bill." The country gentle-
men have not been notoriqns for their sympathies
in favour of reform. We have always been carrying
on for the last 30 3ears and more a steady and per-
petual war against the predominance and the power
of the country gentlemen in Parliament. If we
loOk at their past policy we shall not have much
confidence in their proposed measure. Their
wars, their debts, their taxes, placed upon the bulk
of the people, their stout opposition to the Re-
form Bill of 1832—a1l this leads us greatly to
suspect them ; and I confess for my own part
I wish the question of reform were in the hands of
Reformers—in the hands of men of whose sympa-
thies with respect to it we could nothave,from their
past lives, the shadow of a doubt. (_C_h.ee.rs.) I
have great fears that until you have a Munstry in
which there are men: who are really in favour of
reform, and of an honest reform, you are likely to
get any such measure as the most moderate among
us ought to be in the least satisfied with. (Hear,
hear.) I must warn you against one phrase which
I find our friends—we cannot now call any of them
our opponents—the bewildered Reformers are be-
ginning to use. They say we must not on any ac-
count " Americanize" our institutions. Now, I
know only one institution in America of which the
Americans need to be very greatly ashamed—and
that institution was established under the Mon-
archy, although, unfortunately, it has lived and
flourished under the Republic. They tell us that
in America numbers overwhelm property and edu-
cation. Well, but numbers have not overwhelmed
property and education in England ; and yet look
at legislation in England. Look at our wars, look
at our debt, look at our taxes, look .at this great
fact,—that every improvement of the last 40 years
has been an improvement which numbers, and num-
bers only, have wrested from the property, and
what they call the education of the country
(Cheers.) Our education is fairly represented by
our Universities, but I say now, as I have said be-
fore, that if the Legislature of England, if the Par-
liament of England, had been guided for 30 years
past according to the counsels of the representatives
of the Universities, England, instead of being a
country of law and order, would have been long
before this a country of anarchy and of revolution.
(Cheers.) America is a strange bugbear. There
are 32 at least, if not 33, independent and sovereign
States in the United States of America. Now,
I am not one of those who believe that
you cannot be free and happy under a monarchy
such as ours. lam not proposing—l am the last
person to propose—that the institutions of this
country should be modelled upon the plan of
some other country, because it is the plan
of some other country ; but I say that if we are at
liberty to draw science, products for our manufac-
tures, and literature from every country in the
world, why should we not, if we see anything good
in the politics of another country, be equally at
libertyto take a lesson in that respect also ? (Hear.)
Speaking generally, in all the sovereign and. inde-
pendent States of America there is a franchise as
wide as that which I have proposed to-night—there_
is an exact equal allotment of members to the elec-
tors, and there is throughout most of the States
the
protection of the ballot. Yet, in America, Nye
_fii!d
law, order, property secure, and a population in
the enjoyment of physical comforts and abundance,
such as are not known to the great body of the
people in this country, and which never have been
known in any country in any age of the'world be-
fore. (Hear:) Now, will any man dare to tell me
in the presence of this audience that the English
nation in England is a worse nation than the Eng
lish nation in America ? Are we less educated, ar
we less industrious, are we less, moral, are we les
subject to the law, are we less disposed to submit t