The Sun.
London, England, 1858-05-27 00:00:00

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THE SUN, LONDON,

terrified at my own shortcomings, and I
listened attentively to a nisi priers nar-
rative, ending with a resrlution, which I
think must have been drawn up by a conveyancer.
In the other House of Parliament a still greater
reputation condescended t 3 appear upon the
human stage, and like a Pharisee of old, with
broad phylacteries upon his forehead, he called
upon GOD to witness, in the voice and accents of
majestic adoration, that he was not as other men
were, for that he was never influenced by party
motives."

But " man proposes while GOD disposes." The
overthrow of the Cabal was the most signal ever
known. It WAS totally unparalleled. The inde-
pendent Members would not march through
Coventry with the detected schemers. Prejudices
were cast aside. Honour and justice resumed its
sway, and party feeling was for once disregarded
in the interests of the community. This
was a miraculous result, and clearly
and distinctly has Mr. DISRAELI explained its
causes. His speech, as a marvel of eloquence, is
well worthy of perusal, but it should be more
closely and attentively considered for the sound
and wholesome information which it conveys to
the great body of the people—information which
might otherwise have been beyond their reach.

The Barnacles are, at any rate, no longer stick-
ing to the old State Vessel. In time, perhaps,
the triple group of the British Laocoon—Eng-
land, Ireland, and Scotland—may be extricated
from the serpentine involutions of red-tape, in the
midst of which those three unfortunates have been
so long struggling helplessly. Ultimately, even
we may get rid, at last, of the old stubborn,
stifling, strangling system of Circumlocution.
The two latter anticipations are, of course, at
the present moment, simply hypothetical. But at
the very least—already—we have extricated our-
selves from the clutch of the Barnacles !

In order to realise this extremely gratifying
fact, at once and to the uttermost, it is only neces-
sary to contrast the actual Ministry of to-day
with its two immediate predecessors.

With the one solitary eliception presented by
the instance of the Noble Lord the Member for
King's Lynn —between no two members of Lord
DERBY'S Cabinet are there anywhere traceable
the ties of relationship. And let it be recollected,
particularly in the instance of Lord STANLEY, that
that young and promising Statesman was offered
by Lord PALMERSTON the very post he now occu-
pies, namely, that of the Colonial Secretaryship.
Whereas—don't we all of us remember only too
well how it was in the matter of relationship with
two preceding Governments, the RUSSELL Admi-
aistration and the PALMERSTON Administration ?
Each of those Cabinets consisted of fifteen mem-
bers—while the present Ministry numbers only
thirteen.

But out of the fifteen members of the Cabinet of
Lord JOHN RUSSELL H there was not a single
one of them who was not either himself a
specimen of the old Whig nobility, or,
what comes pretty much to the same thing, closely
allied to it by family connection or blood relation-
ship. E'even out of those fifteen were distinctly
linked together by recognisable ties—constituting
quite a domestic party: altogether giving the
Cabinet Council the appearance of a Christmas
Dinner-table when the ladies have gone upstairs to
the drawing-rooms. Among a single family alone
nine conspicuous offices were comfortably distributed
—three of these nine individuals were Cabinet
Ministers, the other six wereeleverly sprinkled about
in stray places at home and in the colonies. And
so, under Lard Joures delightful regime, the Bar-
nacles—meanuhg the GREYS, and ELLIOTTS, and
RUSSELLS, et hoc genus omne—were clustered toge-
ther in bunches all over the old hull of the good
ship Britannia.

As to the fifteen members of Lord PALMERSTON'S
Government—they were chosen, too, with an espe-
cial regard to the pur sang, to the blue blood, the
divine ichor of the old Whig aristocracy. As
many as four seats iu the Cabinet were secured to
one admirable Family—blood relationship securing
to another the Irish Lord-Lieutenancy, and marital
connections inducting at the eleventh hour into the
high post of Lord Privy Seal, ULICK JOHN, the
most noble the Marquis of CLANRIOARDE.

Both Ministries were in this respect, no doubt,
most admirably and ingeniously arranged. The
RUSSELL Cabinet lasted very nearly six years—the
PALMERSTON Cabinet more than three. But each
in turn went at last--smash. The family party
in each instance had to be scattered, to do
penance on the front benches, or the back
benches, or below the gangway, on the side of the
Opposition. The RUSSELL Ministry going down
under the influence of two crushing overthrows,
one in '5l, on the motion of the Member for Eist
Surrey in regard to the Franchise, the other in
'52, on the amendment to the Militia Bill, pro-
posed by the Noble Viscount the Member for
Tiverton. The PALMERSTON Ministry succumb-
ing only the other day under the weight of that
clear adverse majority of Nineteen. And thus,
and thus, history will say, was the vessel of the
State rid at last of its antique and almost imme-
morial incrustation of the Barnacles.

Now under the Earl of DERBY'S Premiership—
with the one exception already particularised, that
afforded by the circumstance of the Premier's son
being (what Lord PALMERSTON wanted him to be
in the late Cabinet) Secretary of State for the
Colonies—no two members of the existing
Ministry are in any way bound together
by the ties of reiatio...t.;r. Here, at Any
rate, if in nothing else, there is a positive
gain to the country in the change of Ad-
ministration. The peculiarity we are now no-
ticing in Lord DERBY'S Government of '5B was
observable also in Lord DERBY' s Government of '52.
So that it seems to be in truth really and actually
a distinguishing party characteristic. It is certainly
a characteristic that at once endears the party to
the general community, makes it welcome to the
country at large as a positive relief from the old
intolerable repressive system of exclusiveness.

lore, at any rate, we have men at last ins!alled
in office, because of their fitness for office, and not
simply because of their family relationship. Here
are Ministers selected by reason of their political
ant3cedents and their Parliamentary careers, and
not in any way by reason of their constituting a
branch, or a twig, or a leaf upon one particular
genealogical tree—a sort of political lipas. No
longer, thank Heaven, as under the Whig regime,
a certain descent absurdly and incongruously re-
aults in a certain elevation. Lord DERBY'S col-
leagues, at any rat; have not been chosen for
'.heir ancestry, but, on the contrary—as ministers
ought to be—for themselves. There is ob-
viously here—under this system of things—some
better chance, some really good chance at length

of getting the Right Min-in the Right Place.
possibility of wonderful
We clJn't believe in the
families—either upon the histrionic stage, or on
the arena of politics. Whenever the manager of a
Country Theatre fills up the list of the dramatis
pdistributing
own immediate
s all theprincipal parts
household
aetnrosze
thbeyme m b s of his

* " Phases in Polities." By William Bdmondstele
[not Aytoun, but] Lendrick. London :T. and W. Booze,
1858. Svo. pp. 76.