The Sun.
London, England, 1868-12-17 00:00:00

SPIRIT OP TEE PUBLIC JOUBITALS.

The Times again attacks the constitutional formula
which requires that members of the Government should
seek re-election after accepting office. It doubts whether
the system of re-electing members of Parliament who
have taken Ministerial office was aver put to an ordeal, on
the whole, so trying as this ; and the result is awkward,
since the system is one of those time-honoured national
institutions which it is almost impossible to defend, at
least on its own merits. How on its own practical merits
any sort of decent defence can be made out for it, we fail
to see. Even its most ardent admirers appear to admit that
in the present position of English politics it is little more
than ornamental, or, if in any way useful, only so as a con-
spicuous monument of a constitutional principle so
important that it should be allowed to run no risk of being
overlooked. But they add that under certain conceivable
circumstances—such, for instance, as the accession to the
British Throne of an able but wrong-headed king—it
might still, with a host of similar contrivances, subserve
the purpose for which it was originally devised, to protect
the people from the too powerful prerogative of the Crown.
Thus—to put a case which, however extreme, does well
cnotigh for illustration—if Mr. Gladstone were a dangerous
Minister whom the Queen ought not to have appointed,
Greenwich might now stand between the people and the
Throne, and reject him. But surely Parliament would be
quite capable of keeping the Premier's despotic tendencies
in order without the assistance of Greenwich, and ought
to reflect the general feeling of the country decidely better
than any single constituency? Besides, although it is con-
venient for the argument, it is scarcely fair to assume
that, in any difference of opinion between them,
Greenwich must necessarily be sight and the
Crown wrong. The reverse might happen, and
a Premier approved by the great majority .of the
people, as well as by the Crown, might be unseated, and
for a time kept out of his own proper place in the House
of Commons by one small constituency. It is absurd to
suppose that, with the close intercourse now kept up
between members and their constituencies, Parliament
would not reflect the popular feeling better than any one
constituency. Subservience, not absolutism, is in these

days the besetting danger of Parliaments.
The accident to a goods train on the Brighton Railway
suggests to the Daily News some remarks on the carriage
of oils. A North-Western truck, laden with petroleum or

some inflammable oil, had been passed on to the Brighton
line to be sent to France. The precaution had been taken

to put the barrels in a covered van, or box truck, but as
the train stood at a siding in the darkness. a watchful

guard detected a leakage from the truck, and went lamp
in hand to ascertain its cause. As he stepped into the
vehicle the vapour caught fire, and in an instant he
was enveloped in a sheet of flame which filled the
interior. A fellow-guard helped him out, but he
has since died of his burns, and it is only too probable
that his gallant rescuer may not recover from the injuries
he received. It is impossible to say that anybody was to

blame for this calamity ; but its accidental nature suggests
whether explosive and combustible oils ought to be carried
by railway at all. They can hardly have special trains to
themselves, and they will always be sources of danger to
any trains by which they are sent, and to the whole traffic
of the line. But why need they go by rail at all? The
country is covered with a network of canals which still
carry some of the heavy traffic. Would it he a severe
hardship if the carriage of explosive oils were limited to
them? It makes all the difference in the danger that the
one class of traffic is by fire and the other by water ; and
the slower movement of water carriage would only
render it needful that orders should be given a day cr two
earlier.

The Times considers Mr. Reverdy Johnson's speech at
the Fishmonger's banquet as decisive in the math r of the
Alabama difficulty. The telegraphic abstract of the
President's Message informed us that there were some
points in the proposed arrangement from which the United
States Government withheld their assent, and we desired
to be further informed whether these points were of
primary or of subordinate importance. If the main
principles of a treaty are agreed upon, there can be no doubt
the two Governments will be able to adjust matters of detail.
We are glad, therefore, to find that Mr. Johnson renews,
in the most unqualified teems, the encouraging assurances
he had previously expressed. The fear that there exists
any insuperable impediment to a settlement is, he declares,
" all a delusion." " There is not," he says," the most remote
possibility that the friendship between the two countries
will not be fixed upon a firm and endurable basis." He
repeats that "there is not the most distant expectation"
of a failure ; and he hopes no one will endeavour by
a report to the contrary to depress the English or American
funds. In the face of these statements there ought no
longer to bo any doubt of the successful result of the
negotiations. Mr. Johnson has, of course, been in
communication with his Government, and is fully acquainted
with their views. He knows also the point beyond which
we are not prepared to go ; and when he asserts so
Positively that there is not the em st remote possibility
of disagreement, we are bound to regard the question as
virtually settled.

The Standard thinks the correspondence between Mr.
Coningsby, on behalf of the working men of London, and
Mr. Reverdy Johnson is an episode at once painful and
ludicrous in the contemporary history of our relations with
America. Among the various insults to which the
American ambassador has been subjected, while in this
country upon a mission of peace, from the Radical party
and their organs, perhaps the most flagrant as well as
ingenious one is this last—to ask Mr. Reverdy Johnson
to dinner, and then to put him off upon the ground
that he is not popular among his own countrymen. The
exquisite bad taste, paltriness of spirit, and effrontery of
this proceeding are quite in keeping with the snore
deliberate attempts which have been made by the Radical
press in England to discredit Mr. Reverdy Johnson, and
to bring his mission into contempt. First to ask a man
to dinner, and then to tell him he is not good enough
company, is as bad a compliment in the abstract as any-
one can pay his neighbour. To treat a stranger so
in a foreign country is a refinement of snobbishness.
But the so-called working men of London have managed
to surpass even this almost impossible feat of shabbiness.
They asked Mr. Reverdy Johnson to dinner, being a
visitor charged with the representation of the -United
States in England, and after deliberate consideration of
all the circumstances, including a careful scrutiny of Mr.
Reverdy Johnson's personal character, they tell him, in
almost as many words, that he must not come to their
dinner because certain of his acts are not agreeable to the
majority of his countrymen at home.
The Herald says that Mr. Johnson and the working
classes of England are not alienated one from another. It
was a clique which invited him; it was a coterie which
rescinded the invitation. We beg the American Minister
not to misjudge this incident. It denotes nothing, except
that the peculiar conceits of certain insignificant cabals
generally result in confusion. We wonder where the
balance of loss lies—with the diplomatist who has lost his
dinner, or with the gentlemen who have thus bonnetted
their opportunity of self-display?
The Telegraph rather roughly disposes of the pretensions
of Greece. The plain truth is, that the Hellenic Kingdom
has not been such an acquisition to the modern comity of
nations as to induce other Powers, for its sake, to acquiesce
in a glaring outrage on international usages. A nation
may be judged, not by what it has done, but by what it
is expected to do ; such has been the standard applied to
modern Greece, and she has fallen far below the ideal.
Looking back to the high hopes that were formed on the
morrow of Navarino, and comparing the Greeks
of 1529 with those of to-day, it is impossible to
disguise the fact that if independent Greece is not an
actual failure, she has at least grievously disappointed
expectation. The last forty years have done much in the
lives of nations. Within that period more than one
continental kingdom has sprung into buoyant life ;
Italy has revived from the sleep of centuries ; and the
scattered members of the Teutonic family are uniting
into one. But for Greece there has been no resurrec-
tion. Greece was " living Greece no more" in the days
of Byron, and she is dead still—dead to the tradi-
tions of an imperishable past, to the glorious
incentives supplied by a living and advancing
present, to the sense of national honour, to the promptings
of a noble ambition. She contributes nothing to the
artistic or industrial resources of modern civilisation ; she
appears as utterly lost to all sense of the beautiful, the
true, and the elevating, as she was when the heavy flail of
Ottoman tyranny beat crouching peasants to the dust, and
the fishermen of Hydra were driven to man the Turkish
galleys in more than one deadly struggle against the flags
of Christendom.

Reform questions are the subject of many notices of
motion that have already been made in Parliament. It is
now indisputable, says the Post, that the abolition of
composition has been attended, as it was always' said
it would be, by great inconvenience both to rate-
collectord and ratepayers, and by enormous hardship
to the latter. The fine, however, which has been paid
fur the vote by the poorer tenants this general election
will hardly be endured till the next, and Mr. H. B.
t:;heridan's proposed Lill to repeal the obnoxious clause
of the Reform Act, although it will no doubt be met
with considerable oppositi,n, will in all probability be
passed at an early Feriod i f the session. At any rate,
of the advisability of ruz torh,g the power of making
contvositions there can 1,,! ch,uht, whatever ra,ty
b, tiro opimon as to the policy of carrying with it the prac-
tical further extension of the franchise which Mr. Sheridan
claims. Mr. Vernon Harcourt's motion for a committee
to inquire into the Registration Act probably points to the
saute subject, and that, too, will certainly produce some
animated debate, which will, however, require all Mr.
Harcourt's OWli clearness of statement to make the subject
intelligible_ or palateable to the uninitiated. All these
motions indicate a set determination to bring the Reform
Act once more into-question ; and when the inevitable pro-
proeals for the Ballot and the remodelling of the distribu-
tion of members arc supplied the whole case against it will
In completed.