The Sun.
London, England, 1866-01-16 00:00:00

very different interpretations. It was equally pos-
sible to support Lord Palmerston, because he differed
from the Conservative party, or because he flouted

Mr. Bright; because he called himself a Reformer,

or because he strangled a Reform Bill. All this is
changed now. Stat magni nominis umbra ; but the
shadow has no shelter in it. l'hat the position of
no inconsiderable number of members of Parliament

at this moment is singularly perplexing we are
aware. We cannot help it, and we do not regret
it. Running with the hare and, hunting with the
hounds ; gaining a seat or gaining power as a
Liberal, while the retention of it against the assaults
of Liberal friends depends upon the chivalry of
Conservative opponents, recommended as it is alike

by the example of the late Premier, is a game which
very few can play, and which, we are obliged to add,
ought not to be played even where it can. Lord
Russell, at all events, whether he admires the moral
aspect of the last six years or not, is too wrong-
headed to support the role himself. Sir Stratford
. .

Northcote anticipates the embroglio, seriously
enough, yet not without a sufficient feeling -of the
fun that there will be before the next session is over.

" We may have another attempt made to carry on
the system of the last Parliament ;" but then " I
believe Mr. Gladstone is a man of energy, of charac-
ter, and of that impatience—if I may use the ex-
pression—of anything like indifference or indolence,
that he will be a very bad leader of a party desirous
to keep things quiet and to be apathetic. Ile may
be a very able and excellent leader when great
measures are to be passed, and great debates to be
carried on, because his great abilities will always

overbear, and make men pass by any imperfections,
infirmities, and faults of temper, and other faults
which tell in quieter times ; but I am sure it would
have been quite impossible for Mr. Gadstone in
the last Parliament to have played the part
which Lord Palmerston played with one-hund-
redth part of Lord Palmerston's success." So
Sir Stafford t orthcote, in plain words, expects
that Lord Russell will run straight upon his
destiny like a man—or a bull. He has still two
courses open. The one is, to satisfy the desires of
the more moderate among his followers (or rather
the desires of the less moderate among their consti-
tuents), by just paring down the corners of the
original Reform Bill—turning £5O into £2O, and
£lO into £8 (or into £6 in the hope that " the
Lords" will stand his friend and compromise it into
£B, which is much the same thing) ; or else he may
satisfy Mr. Bright and place the majority of his
supporters in a singularly unpleasant dilemma—
while, if he meddles, in addition, with the distri-
bution of seats, the fate of Actaeon will be luxury
compared with his own. This, according to an
acute observer, is the pleasant prospect of a Minis-
ter with a majority of 60 or 70 at his back, but
hampered with a stupid and unreal cry which he
and his party raised for hollow and factious pur-
poses years ago, and which now returns—pede
Pcena claudo—to avenge itself after seven years of
quiet but rather guilty silence. The ConServative
course is very clear. That of straightforward
people always is. We have no space for further
quotations, and must give the spirit of what was
said. If we find a party satisfied on the whole with
England as it is, but yet thinking that the present
condition of the representation of the people may
be considerably amended ; that e. g., the working
classes, the educated (but non-householding) classes,
and a few others, should find their place in the sys-
tem, perhaps " we may doubt whether there is so
much weight in their representations as they sup-
pose, we may remind them of the old epitaph, " I
was well ; I would be better ; and here I am ; " but
we are quite ready to go with them, as soon as a
couple of points are settled. First, that anybody
can be found who feels the grievance; second, that

a remedy be discovered which is not worse than the
disease. If, on the other hand, we find dangerous
measures launched, either in stupid obedience to
Mr. Bright and his ruler—whether the line be drawn
at six pounds, five pounds, or no pounds at all—or
in dull fetish-worship of Lord Russell's consistency
—we shall oppose the nonsense to the uttermost.
" THE SPECTATOR" ON THE LUXURY OF WINTER.
—To a Londoner a sharp winter is a season of
torment, a frost as bad as a second income-tax, a
fall of snow worse than fifty concentrated fogs. He
is the creature of civilisation, and snow hates civili-
sation, and the Londoner therefore hates snow.
Talk of a cheery frost ; the first thing a frost does
for a Londoner is to hand him over in humiliating
bondage to the only hateful class of English trades-
men, the people who call themselves plumbers, and
are everything by which they can hope to extort a
few more unnecessary pounds. ,The " frost has
burst the pipes, sir," remarks his servant confiden-
tially, and the Londoner knows that 6d. more has
been piled upon his income-tax. The water is pouring
through his pet ceiling, the skylight is breaking with
the weight of snow, the roof is letting in drops
which fall in heavy splashes with an infernal pur-
pose in their noise, and there is nothing to do but
send for the man who can mend the pipes, and repair
the skylight, and adjust the tiles, and who will pre-
tend to do all those things, who makes you some un-
intelligible statement about some pipe you never
saw, and at last sends in a bill which amounts to
about £7 10s. for each man's day's work, but which
you are entirely powerless to dispute. Fretted with
unexpected, and, as he knows, utterly useless expense
—for no plumber ever seems to repair anything—
the Londoner tries to reach his office, or counting-
house, or club, and is assailed at his doorstep by a
couple of ruffians, who assert clamorously their right
to clean " his" bit of pavement, and to be paid there-
for. If he is unwise to resist, thinking that in a civi-
lised community the authorities who tax him will
see the street cleaned, but if he has any experience
of vestries, or any knowledge of their genius for
neglecting duty, he authorises the work, and pays a
shilling to have his steps -made as slippery as glass,
under pretence of clearing them. At last he is inthe
streets, and finds them laden a foot deep with a mass
precisely like the pulp of brown paper, a sticky con-
glomerate of mud, snow, sand, and deadly cold water,
which penetrates in a second through the strongest
boots. He can scarcely see for the smut-loaded snow
drifting in his eyes, scarcely walk for the clammy slush
settled on the ice-bound pavement, scarcely hear for
the wind. Every three yards one foot slips on the most
treacherous footing in the world—a stone pavement
covered first with a thin coat of ice, then with a coat of
slush, and finally with a crisp white powder which
wets his ankles through and through. Every 30
yards he becomes an involuntary partaker in the
" exhilarating enjoyment" of snowballing, his share
in which consists in receiving either a cricket ball in
the back—your London Arab always loads his
snowball, an outrage on boy morality which ought
to be made capital—or a handful of loose snow deftly
lodged between his coat collar and his neck. He looks
round for an omnibus, but the only one in sight is
full and steaming, or a cab, and is told bythe driver,
who really is " cheery," partly from the prospect of
plunder, partly because he has discounted that
plunder in gin, that he is going home, but will carry
him nevertheless for five times his fare. Ten times
was asked, and given repeatedly to our personal
knowledge, on Thursday with perfecfimpunity. Of
course the Londoner—provided he does not wear
spectacles, in which case he gives in at once, glad to
escape lunacy—resists for five minutes, but all cabs
are alike, and•he yields at last, and seats himself in
his hansom to find the glass let down on his nose, and
the three separate chinks in that vehicle raining iced
water on his waistcoat and each knee. Chilled to
the bone, his feet wet, his knees wet, his hair drip-
ping, not with water, but a liquid compound of ice
and soot, he is carried at three miles an hour to
his destination. There he finds everything going
wrong, the telegraph wires hanging across the
street, the gutter artistically choked up so as to flood
the office, the boys up to their eyes in the luxury of
making mud pies with the substance they call snow,
and his partner, who lives in the country, eloquent
on the loveliness of the landscape he had driven
through. "Every branch, sir," says that Goth, "looked
like a stalactite," till his auditor wishes, as he tries
to get warm, that they had been stalactites, and had
tumbled on their r dmirer. All day long, if it is a
day like Thursday, it is the same—brown mud and
yellow flake outside, an incipient cold within, a total
impdssibillty of going anywhere or seeing anybody,
an absolute determination that the fire shall burn, a
secret acknowledgment that till wet soot ceases to
fall down the chimney the fire will continue to dis-
obey. The dreariness of a London office in a snow-
storm is a thing absolutely unique, or if paralleled,
paralleled only by that of a private parlour in a
country inn when the rain is coming down with a
manifest sense of duty to perform. " Cheery snow,"
indeed ! We wish Charles Dickens, and Mr. Kings-
ley, and all other masculine Obristians, had been
made to stand in it in the. Strand all Thursday
afternoon, sharing in the " exhilarating game," as
played from under the Adelphi Arches. We also
wish the storm had occurred a month later, when
the borough members will be all in town. The Lon-
don Vestries'would get small mercy then, and Sir
G. Grey's bill for handing the streets over to Sir J.
Thwaites would have been rushed through with the
energy peculiar to men with the chilblains. Five
minutes' enjoyment of the " cheery" slush would
have rid us of Bumbledom for ever. Winter in
London is bad enough even for the well-to-do, but
it must be a heartrending season for the poor. There
were scores of working women out in that snow-
storm, with no additional protection, except thin
shawls, which held the snow nicely in their creases,
and the whalebone imbecility called an umbrella,
which affords about as much protection against driving
snow as an artistically arranged cobweb, but which
held forward as it is, is an irresistible target for the
boys. Even the men, cabmen excepted, are badly
clothed, the working dais in London wearing no-
thing half as efficient against the snow as a Scotch
shepherd's plaid, and leaning to an overcoat which,