The Sun.
London, England, 1866-04-23 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

THE " SATURDAY REVIEW" ON DOWNING-STREET
DICTATORSHIP.—It has been said that one of the
most remarkable social and political phenomena of
the day is the concurrence of a claim for personal
liberty with a superior claim for a strong govern-
ment. And this, it is added, is what has happened
once before in the world's history, in the rise of the
Imperial power in Rome. Historical events seldom,
perhaps never, exactly reproduce themselves ; but
there is sufficient analogy in the two cases to give
them something more than a superficial resem-
blance. In the two leading countries of the Old
Continent and the New World, in France and
the United States, much the same political ten-
dencies are observable. Universal suffrage, with
a strong despotism tempering it, the treading out
of a real personal liberty by a general system of
what amounts to Government proscription of all
intellect and discouragement of all thought in
politics, reigns in France. In the United States,
this fearful system and its consequences are repro-
duced by the party monopoly of State appoint.,
ments, and all revenues oft political distinction are
as completely closed to the higher American mind
as on the Seine. In its lowest form the same ten-
dency has taken root among ourselves, in our esti-
mate of our municipal government. We want to
be governed, and we want to retain the form of
self-government, but we decline to take the trouble
which self-government involves. So the timid and
idle whimper for a Haussmann, or scream for a •
dictator-dile. We are all ready, though we care
not to say so, or we are all thought to be ready, for
a Cmsar—a Caesar Augustus or a Caesar Napoleon
or a Caesar Lincoln. It is only in such a state of
things that a Bismark is possible, and can be, even for
a time, a success. It may be that Earl Russell and
Mr. Gladstone have appreciated this state of Eu-
ropean political morals; but whether they have not
over-estimated its force among ourselves is another
matter. For it may be quite possible that, though
we clamour for strong government in the face of
Pancras Vestries and Metropolitan Boards of Works,
we are not quite demoralised. It does not follow
that because we cannot, or will not, manage our
lighting and scavengering, we are yet disposed to
abolish the House of Commons. Earl Russell seems
to think that we are entirely ripe for a little high-
handed despotism of this sort. He and Mr. Glad-
stone are quite ready to do the gevernment of the
country in a free, noble, and high-spirited imperial
manner. We are not fit to be trusted, and the pre-
sent Ministers will relieve us from all anxiety. As
things are, Providence and all human things com-
bining to make the present Cabinet the only possi-
ble Cabinet, it follows that the present Cabinet must
have its own way. A pure Whig Ministry, or rather
a Russell Ministry,being of the nature of a political
Fate, why it is folly to kick against Fate. And this
because Fate has it all in its own hands ; if Fate
were to be cashiered, and the Titans were to de-
throne Zeus, then chaos would come. This is pre-
cisely the Premier's argument to his followers, who,
we are told, receive his oracles with tremendous
enthusiasm. He did not condescend to justify his
policy ; he simply announced it. The Franchise
Bill might be incomplete, unintelligible, illogical
without a measure of redistribution ; but it was the
Premier's intention to persevere with it in practical
independence of its necessary context, and this was
the oracle's voice. If the supporters of the Govern-
ment, if the House of Commons, if the country did
not accept this decision of the Destinies, let them
take the consequences. It was not a matter to be
argued ; it had been decided. There is something
in this noble insolence which is sure to tell. One
cannot help having a sort of sneaking admiration of
a Bismark, when he ruffles and hectors in a superb
way. And one admires him the more, in the clas-
sical sense of admiration, so long as he succeeds.
In Earl Russell's case it remains to be seen whether
success will justify his swelling pretensions. He
bids high for success ; but if he fails, he fails irre-
trievably. All that will be left for him and for Mr.
Gladstone will be to take to the demagogue line in
a more vulgar fashion. And we must do him the
justice to say that Earl Russell will make a very
poor Tribune of the people. Septuagenarian powers
are not the stuff out of which an O'Connell, or a
Feargus O'Connor, or even a Mirabeau are made.
The present Premier will not be in his place at the
head of a Birmingham Union to demand a £7
franchise from Lord Derby installed in Downing-
street. And yet this, or a little short of this, is
what must have been present to his mind when
he delivered his recent address to his followers.
He must either have meant this by his domineering
language, or he must have talked big from very
emptiness of counsel. As a matter of fact, we are
convinced that the Government arO only blitstering
because there is nothing left but to bluster. They
are committed to a certain line, and they think that
their only safety lies in adopting the most haughty.
deportment. Being a necessity to the country, it
is superfluous to consult anybody but themselves.
A Cabinet, especially a Whig Cabinet, is empowered
by Providence to rule, and the act of ruling must
be now and then imperious. They are forced by
political exigencies to dictate, and they accept the
burden of dictating. It is sometimes necessary,
under the stern obligation of puttingdown an enemy,
to snub a friend. And if your friend and constant
supporter, your natural ally and client, your
trusted and valued dependant, your consistent con-
fidant, has the temerity to doubt your prudence,
or to question the propriety of your policy, why
then, painful as it is, he must be denounced as an
accomplice in a dirty conspiracy, and set down as a
traitor, a renegade, and apostate. Thisis Earl
Russell's attitude to Lord Grozxcuor. Although
this is the treatment wliich Earl Russell thinks, as
a matter of domestic discipline, necessary for his
family of Whigs, we might perhaps have reckoned
upon a different and more courteous bearing to the

House of Commons. It is one thing to whip all the
children and send them to bed by a bold indiscri-
minate act of terror another to defy the whole
parish. But the Cabinet is equal now to this
emergency. To be sure, they have managed to
combine irresolution with insolence; they have
yielded over and over again to pressure and re-
monstrances ; but in the act of yielding they have
contrived to be even more offensive than before.
A resolution on the part of at least some influen-
tial Whigs was announced, to the effect that the
Franchise Bill ought not to be proceeded with till
the House of Commons was in possession of the
Government Bill for redistribution of seats. Yes ;
by all means, if you wish it you shall have this
Bill. You shall be in possession of it. It shall be
before you ; it shall be laid upon the table ; you
may read it, and learn it, and inwardly digest it.
But you shall not
,have this Redistribution Bill till
you have swallowed the Franchise Bill ; and as to
the second bill, we cannot pledge ourselves as to the
when and how of proceeding with it. This must
depend upon circumstances ; upon the period of the
session, and the condition of public business, or on
the Premier's digestion, or on Mr. Gladstone's tem-
per, or on Mr. Bright's advice. " If am asked
whether the Government pledges itself, immediately
it has passed the Franchise Bill, to go on directly
with the other bill, without considering the times and
opportunities, I must answer that I certainly cannot
pledge the Government to do so." Which answer
on Earl Russell's part amounts to this :—The
House of Commons has extorted from us a
pledge to produce a Disfranchisement or Redisz
tribution Bill. This promise I will keep, as far
as the letter goes ; but, as far as its spirit goes, I
reserve to myself free liberty to break. Next week,
or next month, or next Session, or next Parliament
perhaps, if all things go well, and if " other mea-
sures of great importance do "not stop the way," I
will go on with this second bill. Of course I shall
be alive to pass it. Of course there will be no
European war ; of course there will be none of the
thousand and one possible contingencies, foreign or
domestic, which may interfere with my leisure, or
which may put an end to me or to the present
Parliament, and then I pledge myself to take it up
and go through with it. This is Earl Russell's
private language to his friends, as represented by
Mr. Ayrton ; Mr. Gladstone repeats it, with even
more superciliousness of manner and a more ela-
borate and studied discourtesy, in his public re-
ply to Mr. Marsh, who inquires, meekly enough,
whether Government had made up its mind on the
redistribution of seats, and when it would please the
Government to announce its decision. It was not so
very unreasonable a thing to ask the Government
what it meant to do under certain circumstances; but
knowing what Mr. Gladstone has of late become, few
will be surprised to hear that Mr. Marsh's ongstion
was met by the civil and polite answer— Wait till
you hear • first take a plunge into the great un-
known, and then, but not till then, we will give you a
solid ground for the leap you have taken upon com-
pulsion. We say that Mr. Marsh's question was
not an unreasonable one. For it seemed to come
to this. Supposing that the Government Franchise
Bill is carried, and that we have to wait till another
Session, not for the mere production of the second
bill, but for serious and practical legislation upon
it, the country will be actually without a Constitu-
tion for a twelvemonth. A vast horde of new con-
stituents will have the franchise, but no representa-
tive.; and an appreciable number of representatives
will sit representing constituencies which will have
ceased to exist. With all respect to the students
and eulogists of Lord Somers, we must pronounce
this to be a political interregnum unknown to the
genius of the English Constitution, because revolt-
ing to common sense. Yet, just because it is im-
perious and tyrannical and insolent, because it-
treats the House of Commons as children are treated
by an ignorant nursery governess, it is the policy
which seems to suit the present Government. Pos-
sibly it may answer—that is to say, possibly the
House of Commons may submit to be terrorised by
a strong Government; but, if it does, the indepen-
dence of Parliament is a phrase in history. If,
however, it does not answer, and if the Parliamen-
tary worm turns, we have seen the last of Earl
Russell.
THE " LONDON REVIEW" ON MR. WHITESIDE'S
ELOQUENCE.—There is always a certain respect
attached to consistency, and even an obstinate man
is often credited with force of character, when he
displays a sullen immobility which nothing can
shake. Mr. Whiteside is not obstinate, he can
always give a sort of reason for his opinions; but
he isimmobile. He has nailed his eolours long since
to the mast of Conservatism, and will go down with
the ship rather than surrender. His essentially
oratorical temperament imparts a certain grace to
his obsolete notions. To him they are all the better
for being despised. Finding himself in a minority
where there is a vast occasion for speeches, he has
discovered it to be impossible to desert his friends.
In Ireland he is a pillar, a monument, and one
might say an organist, of the Establishment.
The erudite institutes of young men who have
periodical teas and improvement, those amiable
guilds who submit to be practised on by lecturers,
know him well in Dublin. There it was he first
introduced St. Patrick to them in the character of
a Protestant missioner. In the house he is taken
as the trump card of the Opposition on Irish ques-
tions. His part is to vex the Government by cross-
questions, and by humorous eloquence. The
Government can do no right— that is his text. His
manner is national, almost to the stage degree.
Gesture is his forte, and adjectives are his delight.
He hammers a subject rhetorically, beating it out of
shape and recognition, and suiting each word with
the action of a Demosthenic, if not a harmonious,
blacksmith. But his sense of fun injures the effect.
The same fault is perceptible in his bar speeches.
Juries are seldom off a broad grin while Mr. White-
side is addressing them ; junior counsel, with whom
a little joke goes so far, twitter at the conclusion of
every period; the judge is visibly expectant of good
ones, but the attorney who engages the emi-
nent advocate not unfrequently looks more
anxious than appreciative. Does Mr. Disraeli
ever experience a sensation of this attorney kind ?
Mr. Whiteside is a genuine professor of clever talk
and sustained jocosity. Facts with him are to make
either puns or antitheses from. He throws them up,
and catches or drops them with the airy dexterity of
a juggler. History serves him for points. He uses
it seldom, but judiciously. The period of " No
Popery, brass money, or wooden shoes " is that
which he recurs to most frequently, and with most
pleasure. Somewhat over clever for his latter-day
admirers, with whom the Pope is Antichrist, too
much of a gentleman to associate with the bigoted
rowdies who call themselves Orangemen, Mr.
Whiteside goes back to a time when things were as
Protestant as now and far more pronounced. It
never occurs to him to regard Protestantism in any
other light than as an inexorable obstruction to the
religious belief of his fellow-Christians. It loses
vfeight, form, and colour in his eyes, when not
aggravatingly dominant and irrationally grasping.
He would sacrifice Luther to-morrow to save the
Irish establishment. In that, he beholds the faith
of the Reformation reduced to the perfection of
practice. Numbers do not compose a Church, and
if there are but few Protestants in Ireland compared
to the Roman Catholics, remember what excellent
Protestants they are, and worth any amount of the
Papistical rubbish, who can only urge the accident
of a majority in their favour. Wealth is the stan-
dard of ecclesiastical merit ; will you deprive the
Irish Church of its endowments and its virtues at
one stroke ? Again, bear in mind the Establishment
is a garrison of the Government ; withdraw it,
and Mr. Whiteside will not be answerable for the
consequences ; that is, the Government can have
loyalty as long as they pay for it, but some-
thing else when the supplies are stopped, per-
haps Fenianism, perhaps Ninety-eightism. We
feel assured the co-religionists of Mr. Whiteside in
Ireland must entertain sentiments of profound gra-
titude to the honourable gentleman for this exposi-
tion of their ideas. We used to think that our faith
and love for the throne were not subsisting upon
either grants cr taxes, and we were under the im-
pression that similar views were entertained at the
other side of the water. Mr. Whiteside holds other-
wise, and he speaks with authority. He was more
archaeological than logical the other night. It is a
bad sign of a case to see a lawyer hunting for
mummy precedents. As an antiquarian recreation,
an essay upon the connection of the Round Towers
with the institution say of grand lodges, would be
more or less interesting for a gospel tea-party, but
lucubrations of a similar kind are not popular at
Westminster. Indeed, it is rather painful than
otherwise to hear a gentleman compromising his
faith by ascribing its origin to a speculative, and, to
speak plainly, an absurd source. We do not re-
quire a Chinese length of prescription for our belief
because it suits a special pleading of Mr. White-
side's, nor does our Church abide by his fallacy ; if
his argument falls, it falls alone. We strongly sus-
pect his position in this respect is quite untenable,
and can be refuted by direct evidence. But Mr.
Whiteside is essentially a barrister; he holds a brief
and will state from it, leaving the other side to make
their own case. This tells btter at Nisi Prius than
in Parliament. Mr. Whiteside is splendid at Nisi
Prim. He is never absent from a heavy " breach
of promise." His cajolery, shrewdness, and pathos,
enlisted either for injured plaintiffs or decoyed de-
fendants, charm every one who listens to him, occa-
sionally with the exception, however, of the per-
sona,ge to whom we before alluded. Against rail-
way companies, going for damages, he is irresistible.
We remember his brilliant exertions for Mrs. Yel-
verton. How the Irish papers described the tear-
compelling passages, the gusts, the breaks, the
throes, and the flashes, and all the rest of it,

which excited the Dublin populace to make
horses of themselves and prance through the
streets with the carriage of the much-injured lady
who is now rendering " Excelsior" to admiring
audiences. We can more easily recollect the ora-
tion upon Stephens. The humour of that was ex-
tremely titillating. Everybody enjoyed it; and
there was just Mr. Whiteside's mistake. A debater
should avoid making an opponent enjoy him : one
never fears a man one laughs at. Mr. Whiteside is
to no small extent the victim of his own wit. He
is possessed by it, quite as he possesses it. In
every epithet there lurks a smile ; when you read a
line you notice the gap in the meaning left to be
filled up by a shrug, a grimace, a frown, lightly
severe of engagingly satiric ; here the hand was
clenched, there the action required a stoop forward,
at the end of a sentence you miss the real bang
which fittingly closed the paragraph. We should
not be understood as deprecating all this ; it is very
good in its way. Mr. Carlyle is far too severe about
wind and tongue ; a little wind and tongue is an
agreeable change. Orators are few, and Mr. White-
side is an orator if there is truth in elocution books.
He never wants a word or gesture to suit it. He
has a fine voice, an impassioned delivery, an at-
tractive presence, and a certain honest assurance
which is not to be confounded with impudence. He
never forgets he is a gentleman, and there is an air
of the old school which he bears gallantly and natu-
rally about all his performances. You perceive at
once that you are listening to an accomplished
speaker, who revels in his art, and sacrifices to it
everything but a consciousness of that thorough re-
spectability which he has always maintained. Per-
haps there never was a man of such extreme views
less unpopular, even with those who are diametri-
cally opposed to him, than Mr. Whiteside. From
the outset of his career he took a marked course,
but he never was an unfair enemy. He manipu-
lates facts, he disinters cock-and-bull stories, he
jumps to convenient conclusions, he astonisheA sen-
sible people by maintaining dead notions, which he
galvanises for a moment into the semblance of life ;
he hits right hard, but never a foul blow. When-
ever he is personal he is not malicious. He in-
dulges in a round of abuse to show his skill, but
never to hurt seriously. Though his party has been
so long out of office, he has kept his temper. Hence
the lenient style in which the Irish papers reviewed
his late speech. There is an amount of genuine worth
in Mr. Whiteside which counterbalances the vagaries
of his rhetoric, and the absurdity of his politics. He
is the doughtiest champion that the Establishment
can produce, and it is more fortunate in him than
it probably would be in another. He at least will
believe what he was always taught to believe,
and what he will believe to the end with
a chivalrous and a picturesque determination.
He will be found at his post as faithful
as the Pompeiian sentinel. As long as he can hold
his ground he will never surrender. He is not
haunted with a fear of Jesuits like Mr. Whalley,
nor with any other fear but that of disendowment.
His brisk and amusing opposition may be as mis-
chievous in a combat on this point as the sudden
flight of a champagne cork ; but the weapons with
which the battle -must be fought will assuredly be
of another and a heavier kind.

THE " SPECTATOR" ON THE LARGER ASPECTS OF THE
REFORM DEBATE.—The speeches which seem to us to
have gone deepest, we will not say into the minor ques-
tion of Earl Grosvenor's amendment, but into the ultimate
objects and grander aims of the Reform movement, are, we
do not hesitate to say, Sir BulwerLytton's, Mr. J. S. Mill's,
and Mr. Hughes's—the last of which did not receive in the
House all the attention which it will unquestionably receive
in the country, but all of which seem to us to converge in-
tellectually on the same point, to prove the defectiveness
of the Ministerial Bill in sound principle, though not all
coming from the same side of the House, and two of them
taking the view opposed to our own of the practical ques-
tion at issue. In principle it seems to us that these three
speeches are absolutely unanimous, though party exigen-
cies have perverted two of the votes which will follow the
speeches. When Mr. Hughes, on Thursday night, in-
sisted so forcibly on the "totally different world" which
we have been allowing to grow up beside that middle-class
society whose ideas we know—a world whose ideas, and,
if we may so speak, laws, are so different from our own
that Mr. Hughes could only echo Mr. Layard's confession
of complete incapacity to represent it adequately in that
House—he made out, as we think, a most forcible, a most
unanswerable case, for a real and substantial representa-
tion of that class in the House of Commons. Nothing can
be more dangerous, nothing more suicidal, than to recog-
nise the existence of such an unknown population, and yet
to try to keep it, as some of our petty Conservatives and
Conservative-Liberals wish, silent and dumb at our feet.
Those who have retorted upon Mr. Hughes that he
had made the most damaging of all admissions for
the cause of which he was speaking, seem to us
purblind and incapable of understanding history, if
they mean, as some of them do mean, that he made
out a case against a generous political measure of
representation for that class in the House of Commons.
But we quite agree that Mr. Hughes did make out a case—
a case so strong that we claim him as the most powerful
of all our witnesses against the theory of unlimited down-
ward extension of the franchise—adverse to the theory of
the present bill Why, all his argument rested on the im-
portance, the overwhelming importance, of bringing these
different worlds of thought into mutual communication
and habitual reference to each other's ideas. But there are,
as everybody who thinks for a moment must see, two
equally adequate modes of absolutely preventing that re-
ciprocal influence—the one which we now adopt, and the
one to which the Government Bill tends at no very remote
period; the one of keeping the working classes out en masse
and the one of letting them in en masse. Mr. Hughes is,
of course, quite right in saying that this "cataract" of
labour does not threaten the constituencies now. But it
does threaten the constituencias at the next era of reform,
if the principles of 1832 are to be sanctioned by the prin-
ciples of 1866. We are the blindest of all reformers if
we legislate only for a generation, seeing as wo do how
powerful, how omnipotent, we may say, is the prece-
dent adopted in the last generation on this subject, to
dominate the actions of this. And therefore when Mr.
Hughes tries to nullify the effect of his most able and tell-
ing speech, by confirming the irrelevant assertion of Mr.
Forster, that the working classes also are divided amongst
themselves into Conservative and Radical, we simply reply
that that is nothing to the purpose. If the root-ideas which
pervade the artisan world, the root-ideas of all politics,
those affecting all the social and political philosophy of the
day, are different from ours, then how all-important is it
that we should provide, not only for the present but for the
future, not only for the next 10 years but for the next 100
years—that Parliament should be a real meeting ground,
field for genuine and earnest discussion, between the ideas
generated in the atmosphere of labour, and the ideas gene-
rated amonst the far less united, the far less coherent middle
class, by the influences of our perhaps somewhat too lei-
surely study and too "excessive solvency." And to do this
it is clear that we must not only provide for admitting the
excluded to the field of discussion, but for keeping the
included classes, permanently in that field— a notion alto-
gether lost sight of by the member for Lambeth, and
of late months, though only of late months, also by
the member for Westminster. The line taken by Sir B.
Lytton in his very remarkable essay of yesterday week has
the most important bearing on that of Mr. Hughes and Mr.
John Stuart Mill. The most important idea by far of Sir
Bulwer Lytton's speech was, that if we neglect the precau-
tions we have pointed out, and allow the House of Com-
mons to become sooner or later not a meeting ground of all
the ideas fermenting in different portions of English so-
ciety, but the absolute estate of some one of them, then
we shall have to provide other checks by which the exe-
cutive may be able, as in both France and America, to hold
its own ground for a considerable time against the hasty
and half-considered legislation which always emanates
from the nominees of a single class. This is a very impor-
tant point ; and what is curious enough, it is fairly con-
ceded by some of the friends both of the French and the
American form of democrocy that such supplementary
guarantees are required by the theory which they advo-
cate. In a curiously dogmatic and supercilious leiter which
we publish elsewhere from Professor Beesly, that gentle-
man explicitly advocates the French form of republicanism
—the form of proletariat government, whose executive
organ is a representative emperor—and recommends that
for English imitation. lie says that the working men of
London,with numbers of whom he is personally acquainted,
are in theory republicans of the American democratic
rather than of the French imperial type which he prefers,
but in no degree whatever attached to our present consti-
tution. If so, we can only say that the sooner they
are attached ,tie it by learning to wield a large
part of its political power, the better. It is
well, however, that they still prefer the American
democracy to Imperial French republicanism, which is in
no sense whatever a free government. Of all forms of poli-
tical aspiration, Professor Beesley's seems to us the most
unmanly and the least possible for Englishmen. His
polemic against us rests upon the transparent fallacy that
the representation of classes Means balancing of hostile
interests. On the contrary, we hold it to mean the only
possible mode of convincing all classes of society that their
interests are not hostile, but absolutely the same. It is by
mutual exchange of thoughts that the commercial classes
and the landed classes of this country have at length arrived
at a tolerably cordial and complete mutual understanding,
is place of the jealous mistrust and hatred which they felt
for each other before the old Reform Bill. It is by a pre-
cisely similar process that wo look for the rise of a feeling
of reciprocal respect and regard between the working class
and the middle class. Therefore nothing can be more
absurd than to speak of the principle of class representation
as one which proposes to balance the interests of class
against class. It is, on the other hand, one which proposes
to combine the special powers, experience, and insights of
each class with those of all others, and Mr. Beesly, in his
affected denuciation of the theorists to whom he refers,
only shows that he has either not read or not understood
them. But he shows us also, what is more important,
that those who reject the class theory do not shrink
from the consequences of that rejection in the necessary

.M 1••
degradation of Parliament into a body quite subservient
to the Executive, instead of, as now, its virtui'
ruler. Either on the American or on the French thee'"?
of republicanism this consequence, u Sir Bulwer Lytton
well said, is nearly certain to follow democratic reform ;
and it is already perceived and accepted by many of its ad-
vocates. For ourselves, we believe that the ideal of true
popular self-government is so much higher than that of
government by a partially irresponsible executive, that W°
would fight to the very last against any change which
volves the deterioration of Parliament. And that deterio:
ration must take place if you either refuse on the one band
to admit a large and generous share in the deliberations
of the country the greatest of all sections of the nation,
provide on the other for the gradual exclusion from a 5"
stantial share in the national deliberations of all those,
through contact, discussion, and it may be sometimes tem;
porary collision with whom, we expect the working We
to learn to adjust more accurately their social and politica
theories, and to find their true function in the English Con-
stitution.