The Sun.
London, England, 1868-12-07 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, MONDAY EVE MN(; DECEMBER 7, 1868.

SPIRIT OP THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

The Times says Mr. Gladstone has failed to secure any
new strength for his Administration in the House of Lords.
The late Lord Cranworth is succeeded as Lord Chancellor
by Sir William Page Wood ; and feeble as Lord Crary.
worth's debating power was, the new holder of the Great
Seal will be even less efficient in debate. The failure to
obtain further support is doubly unfortunate, because it
cannot be denied that the Opposition has gained inthe inter-
val. Lord Salisbury has taken his placein the House of Lords
since 1866 ; Lord Cairns, unfettered by the responsibilities
of office, will wage war on the Ministry with all the vigour
of Protestant Ulster. On the other hand, Lord Russell
has pleaded increasing age as a reason for declining office,
or even a seat in the Cabinet without office, and though
he will be a zealous friend of the Ministry, he will not be
able to speak with the authority of one who has a voice
in shaping its policy. The prominent members of the
Government in the Upper House will be Lord Granville,
who will be Secretary for the Colonies, and who will lead
the House ; the Duke of Argyll, who has accepted the
post of Secretary for India; and Lord Clarendon, whc
has returned, as we announced, to the Foreign Office.
It would be impossible to select three more efficient
debaters, though each has a different style ; but it cannot
be expected that, singly or collectively, they should
be masters of the legal technicalities which must
abound in the Disestablishment and Disendowment Bill.
In the Commons the Ministry will possess undoubted
strength. They have, in the first place, a majority of
115, or thereabouts, at their back, and with Mr. Glad-
stone, Mr. Bright, and Mr. Lowe on the Treasury Bench
they possess three debaters of unequalled power. The
appointment of Mr. Lowe as Chancellor of the Exchequer"
will doubtless provoke criticism, and although no one will
doubt his ability to adorn the post, there remains a sound
opinion that his energy of character might have been
more profitably employed elsewhere. Lord Derby
invited Mr. Cardwell to become Finance Minister
nearly seventeen years since ; Lord Palmerston
made him the same offer in 1855 ; and had he
been now placed at the Exchequer, and Mr. Lowe
at the War Department, Mr. Cardwell would have had
a more congenial office, and there would have been better
hopes of efficient army reform. The acceptance by Mr.
Bright of the office of President of the Board of Trade is
understood to be a reluctant sacrifice to patriotism. Mr.
Bright absolutely declined the laborious duties of Secre-
tary of State, but he could find no sufficient reason for
refusing altogether to serve his country in Council, and he
was thus prevailed upon to undertake the less exacting
labours of the Board of Trade. Another accomplished
speaker declined to take the office offered him, but, as we
must frankly acknowledge, we think the effect is likely to
be more injurious to his own reputation than to the
Government. Mr. Coleridge would not consent to
serve under Sir Robert Collier ; and when we
remember that Sir Roundell Palmer was for two
years Solicitor - General under Sir William Ather-
ton, we can only wonder and be silent. The
Times concludes that, with one signal exception, Mr.
Gladstone has brought into his Ministry all the ability and
power that lay at his command.
The appointment of Mr. Bright to the Board of Trade
gives the Herald something to be thankful for. He might
have displaced the Duke of Argyll, and governed India.
What is to become of those other hopes of the party, Mr.
Forster, Mr. Stansfeld, and Mr. Ayrton, we have yet to
learn. But we confess that we shall consider Mr.
Forster's services ill-requited, and his obvious quali-
fications neglected, if his claims to high office
in Mr. Gladstone's Ministry are postponed to those
of any member in the House of Commons whom
we have named. Sir W. Page Wood, it is said, is to be
Lord Chancellor--a learned judge and a good partisan,
but not likely to be of much use to his party as a debater ;
and Sir Robert Collier is to succeed to the office of
Attorney-General—an appointment which he is in every
way well qualified to fill. Of Sir Roundell Palmer, who,
we presume, is to take Sir W. Page Wood's place, we
need only say that the bench will gain as much as the
House of Commons will lose by the transfer, and that no
man's name will stand higher than that of the man who,
with the highest prize of his profession within his grasp,
sacrificed everything to earnest conviction and honourable
scruple.

The Daily New 3 considers Sir W. Page Wood a more.
gain to the Cabinet. Many years ago, while he was a
member of the House of Commons, he urged the disesta-
blishment of the Irish Church, to which he will now be
instrumental in giving effect. The moral value of his
adhesion to the Government is great, and more than com-
pensates any deficiency in those arts of debate in which
bis immediate predecessor shines' brilliantly. In Lord
Clareetdon's return to the Foreign Office the services are
secured of a statesman who has the confidence of both
parties, whom Air. Disraeli brackets equal with Lord
Stanley, even in the hottest fervour of his eulogies
upon the younger statesman ; one to whom all the ways
of diplomacy and courts of Europe are known, and who

possesses an authority abroad superior to that of any
English politician since the death of Lord Palmerston.
Lord Granville has not unnaturally prefeired the
labours of the Colonial Office to the dignified ease of the
Presidency of the Council. The qualities of judgment,
tact, and moderation which he has shewn in the
leadership of the House of Lords admirably fit
him for dealing with communities sensitive alike
in their attachment to England and in their
jealous self-reliance. The Duke of Argyll finds at length
an office worthy of his great abilities, industry, and con-
scientiousness in the India Office. The administration of
India is a question which he has especially studied ; and
deeper investigations have led him to renounce the policy
of annexation by which his imagination and judgment
seemed at one time to be taken captive. Mr. Cardwell's
administrative ability and economic training will have
abundant scope in the War Office. The list of Ministers
does not contain a better appointment than that which
places Mr. Childers at the Admiralty. Mr. Lowe's repu-

tation as a financier has still to be made. • His ambition
cannot but be satisfied, and his brilliant'abilities will be
tried to the utmost in the office of Chancellor of the
Exchequer.
The Standard says Mr. Gladstone has formed an
Administration in a remarkably, we might, perhaps, say
unprecedeutedly, short time. Forty-eight hours sufficed
him for the accomplishment of a task which has occupied
Premiers supposed to have been far more favourably cir-
cumstanced ten days or a fortnight. He received her
Majesty's commands on Thursday, and went down to
Windsor, where—touching attention !—the band of the
Slough Rifles was waiting to welcome him, on Saturday
with the list of the Cabinet in his pocket. Never
was a Cabinet run together in such a hurry, and never
was so odd a production exhibited to the British public.
That it includes some able men, that it represents nearly
every section of the Liberal party, we allow ; but its
elements are singularly incongruous, and the different
offices, with two or three exceptions, seem to have been
distributed, not from any consideration of the fitness of
the man for the Ministry, but by a lottery. A better
illustration of the time-honoured British custom of putting
the round men in the square holes and the square men in
the round holes has never been furnished. The omissions
in this list of the new Cabinet will strike everybody. Neither
Mr. Forster, Mr. Stansfeld, nor Mr. Brand, whose presence
the Liberal organs declared was indispensable, have a
place in it. Mr. Milner Gibson, the Marquis of Harting
ton, the Duke of Somerset, Lords Halifax and Stanley of
Alderley, are also unprovided for. Mr. Ayrton, Mr.
Cowper, and Mr. Hugessen and Lord Dufferin will
will probably be content with subordinate places ; but the
gentlemen we named before can hardly accept any office
which does not give a seat in the Cabinet, and not even
the acceptance of office by Mr. Bright will satisfy the
Radicals for the exclusion, however necessary, of their
representative " young men," Messrs. Forster and
Stansfeld.
The Telegraph, observing that Mr. Bright's post is his
own choice, says that not for the first time has he shewn an
utterly unselfish desire to postpone all personal considera-
tions, and to help his leader in any fashion or in any way—
either by standing out, a friendly looker-on, or by taking
a post which, while comparatively humble, will give him
his full share of Cabinet responsibility. All things con-
sidered, the Chancellorship of the Exchequer is, perhaps,
the best position into which Mr. Lowe could have been put.
Not to out it too finely, he has " a temper of his
own." In a department where he would have exercised
direct rule over permanent officials, and been able practi-
cally to carry out his own extremely concrete ideas on
some questions, his special qualities—those faults of his
that " lean to virtue's side," and those faults of his that
don't--would have brought him into constant collision
with less acute intellects, and with men not always
accustomed to obey. But the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, wielding an immediate power in a
small office, has a wide criticising control over all
the departments of the State ; and we are quite sure that
Mr. Lowe will be a fearless financial critic. All the other
appointments have some indisputable and cogent recom-
mendation. At the same time, Mr. Gladstone cannot
fail to observe that the Cabinet already contains an ample
measure of the "aristocratic" element; and the country
will not be satisfied unless the Ministry be further rein-
forced by the addition of more than one distinguished
commoner. If that be done, we shall have, iu the best
sense of the word, a strong Cabinet.
The Post, admitting that the Cabinet is an amalgania•
cion of all the Liberal elements, inquires whether, sup-
cpaonsindgri i‘A,
el r.itC.xllvlsitlimiNeirg. eit3sr
iag wholehtail d ti\efarm i.
L two
ehia)runnessto,
ghee.
ther? It may be replied that on the question of the Irish
tCrlyi Church
ruptliyi e yt
oNNl•jirl ln; bk
gtuhta
questionA r. Gladstone
tnth einevitable k iii a lkil ig
conclu-
sion?•
Mr. Lowe and Mr. Bright will hardly agree

about education ; and as to V foreign affairs, Lord
Clarendon, trained in the school of Palmerston,
will certainly not entertain the notions which
Mr. BEglit has eloquently expounded on a hun-
dred platforms. Mr. Gladstone's arrangements may
be susceptible of another interpretation ; but political
influence depends on political integrity, and if Mr. Bright
or Mr. Lowe were capable of suppressing their convic-
tions, or compromising their opinions, they could bring to
his Ministry no support worth having.
In the opinion of, the Star, it is upon the preparation
which Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet evinces for the work of
retrenchment • that he is most heartily to be con-
gratulated. Mr. Gladstone himself, as First Lord ;
Mr. Lowe—an absolutely implacable economist—as
Chancellor of the Exchequer; Mr. Childers—who has
vowed himself to naval economy—as First Lord of the
Admiralty ; and Mr. Cardwell—a thoroughly Peelite
administrator—at the War Office, will form a quadrilateral
which the spending classes will assail in vain.

MB. PEABODY.

AI-

The foriowitig letter has been addressed to the Right
!lon. Lord Stanley, M.P. (chairman) ; his Excellency
Reverdy Johnson, United States Minister ; Sir Curtis M.
Lampson, Bart., Sir James Emerson Tennent, Bart., and
J. S. Morgan, Esq.:—
" London, sth December, 1868.

"My Lord and Gentlemen,—l beg to acquaint you,
who have so kindly undertaken the management of the
fund set apart under my second deed of gift of the 19th
April, 1866, for the benefit of the poor of London and its
vicinity, that in pursuance of an intention which I hare
entertained since the creation of that fund, I am desirous
now of adding to it a further sum of £lOO,OOO. In con-
templation of this I purchased, about three years ago, a
tract of freehold building land of about fifteen acres in
extent, at Brixton, near the City of London School,
easily accessible, and within a few minutes' walk of fre-
quent trains to and from London. This land has increased
in value, and can now be let on building leases of eighty
;fears at rents producing about 8 per cent. per annum on
the cost, which is £16,285 17s. 3d. This land I propose
to convey to you with the same powers as are
conferred by the deed over the other property
of this trust, and with discretion to you either to deal
with it as a source of income by letting it, or any portion
of it, on lease ; or, should you deem it expedient, to retain
it in your own hands, as sites for dwellings to be erected
by the trust. Pursuant to my letter of the 29th
January, 1866, I transferred to you, subject to a con-
tingency therein explained, 5,000 shares in the Hudson's
Bay Company, which accordingly stand in your names,
together with 642 additional shares purchased by the
re-investment of the accruing income of the previous
5,000. These 5,642 shares I have since redeemed con-
formably to the deed of the 19th of April, 1866, by the
payment of £lOO,OOO on the Ist of February last. I
have now to acquaint you that it is my intention,
so soon as the necessary deeds can be prepared,
to hand the shares over to you, to be retained or dealt
with according to your best judgment and discretion. The
price of these shares shall be fixed on the 17th instant by
the Stock Exchange sales on that day, when I will hand
to you a cheque for the balance to make the gift a cash
value of £lOO,OOO. This amount will increase my former
donation of the second trust to £200,000, and, including
my gift under the trust fund of March 1862, of £150,000,
a total of £350,000. I trust you will see manifested in
this further donation an expression of my entire satisfaction
with the manner in which you have conducted the affairs
of the trusts.—l am, with ,reat respect, your humble
servant, GEORGE PEABODY."

TIIE ALABAMA CLAIMS.

(Prom the Anglo -American Times.)

The settlement of the Claims for the damage
done to American commerce by rebel cruisers
brings up the discussion what those losses really
were. We have already given a list of every ship
captured, but the number, although numerous,
and the losses, although heavy, could not have
driven the greatest of all mercantile marines from
the ocean. The opinion is general throughout
America that the real injury can never be reim-
bursed,tbeing the decay, indeed the destruction, of
the ocean-carrying trade, which, at the time of the
war, was mainly in American bands. All allow
that the merchant ships flying the American flag
had increased to a larger tonnage than that even of
Great Britain. All allow that while the ships that
flew the American flag were native built, a con-
siderable portion of those sailing under the Union
Jack were American-built ; and the deduction is
clear that the ship-building trade of America must
at that time have been the greatest possessed by
any country. No one now disputes that American
yards are silent, that the American Flag is compara
tively seldom met with on the ocean, that the foreign
carrying trade to and from even American ports is
now mainly in the hands of foreigners, against whom
American shipowners complain they cannot com-
pete. It neverseemsto cross the mind of an American
that this can be accounted for by other causes than
the havoc wrought by the rebel cruisers. Hence two
errors—the one that a few contemptible privateers
could almost irrevocably destroy the trade of such
a nation, and the other that it would be for the in-
terest of Americans to leave the question open till
they could cut England's commerce to pieces and
transfer her trade to themselves when she became
engaged in war. If it be not to the civil strife
and mainly to these cruisers that the decay of
American commerce is due, to what other cause
can it be ascribed ? Now to this question we give
the following answer with much diffidence and he-
sitation, as it appears to have escaped attention.
At the outbreak of the Civil War a great change
was taking place in the material for building ships.
That change was simply from wood to iron, which
latter was found cheaper, more easy of construction,
requiring less repair and more lasting. With a few
grave drawbacks iron established its superiority. One
drawback was the difficulty of keeping the bottom of
the vessel clean, but this has been remedied, as had
always been expected. Another was the difficulty of
adjusting the compass, influenced as it was by the
mass of iron around, but this alio was rectified ;
the third was the inevitable loss of the ship
if she struck, holes being torn out where wood
resisted. Water-tight compartments were in-
vented, generally a poor defence, by far the best
being the clear knowledge in the mind of the navi-
gator that if he did not steer clear of rocks he
would soon be at the bottom. For some time pre-
vious to the war and during the contest this change
was making way; but another was simultaneously oc-
curring, scarcely less important as against the Ameri-
can shipbuilding interest. The successive improve-
ments and simplification of machinery were substi-
tuting steam for sails. Had it not been for MAURY'S
discoveries, and his wind charts, which made a
voyage to the antipodes, or around the Horn, little
less certain under sail than with steam, the change
would have been still more rapid. But its effect is
very plainly discernible in the multiplication of the
fleets plying between Europe and America, iu the
almost total transfer of emigrants from sailing
ships to steam vessels, and the preference given
to the latter, even for the carriage of goods, not-
withstanding the higher rates. Thus then there
was a double change at work, the one in .the ma-
terial, and the other in the propelling power —from
wood to iron, and from sails to steam. Now how
would these changes have affected the American
builders bad there been no war ? Although Maine
could contend, not only successfully, but under-sell
English wooden-built ships, what chance had Maine
in building an iron steamer against the Clyde?
Supposing that we are correct in our assertion that
the change was inevitable under any circumstances,
and that it must eventually have silenced the ship-
yards of Maine, the war, and the rebel cruisers, only
hastened the natural destruction in progress, of the
American ship-building trade, and we now main-
tain that the destruction neither was, nor could have
been accomplished, by such agency as the privateers.
There are points bearing on this subject which
ought not to be overlooked. America settling
backwards from the sea, the first colonies were
along the coast, where the inhabitants naturally
assumed the habits nature enforced. They became
sailors in proportion to their proximity to ocean, and
as fishermen made the sea yield no small portion
of their food. But as civilization advanced in the
sun's course west, for ever west, the Atlantic was left
behind, and millions poured over the broad face of
the prairies, and myriads were born and grew into
men who had never looked upon the ocean. They still
keeping in Nature's course contracted rather an aver-
sion to than a pleasure in the sea, therefore while the
nation grew in magnitude its proportion of sailors
did not correspondingly increase. Thus it hap-
pened that America, which at the beginning
of the century was emphatically a sea-faring
nation, ceased so generally to have that character,
and did not, and could not, in the common order
of things maintain that character in a degree cor-
responding
to the population of the country. The
Navigation laws in force at the time of the change
in the material for shipbuilding, and in the propel-
ling power of vessels, were little calculated to
remedy the consequence. Grounded on protection,
they enacted, that no ship, other than native built,
should fly the American Flag or trade from port to
port in the United States. Hence the disadvan-
tage at which American shipowners were placed in
taking their part in the ocean-carrying trade be-
tween the United States and Europe. It was
found to be impossible to build vessels to compete
against the Cunard, the Inman, the Hamburgh, the
Bremen, and the Brest lines, constructed on the
Clyde, as the cost w ould be enormously increased
if ordered in New York, against no advantages.
But what is the consequence ?—Why, that Ame-
rican merchants have no share in the profits of the
carrying trade—that all the transport fleets are the
property of foreigners, and that one of the finest
schools for sailors is lost to the country. But it is
vain to attribute these results to such a paltry
• squadron as the Alabama, the Florida, and the
Shenandoah. A very material cause of the decay
of the shipbuilding in Maine, and other States, was
the change wrought in the expenses of living by the
War. Taxation makes everything dear, and dear
living makes high wages. In its turn, high wages
creates costly material, and a ship from the yards
of Maine almost from beginning to end is the na-
tional product of the country, American labour alone
producing it. It was because land was plentiful and
the country unburthened, that food was cheap, and
labour not costly in former days, when Maine
turned her forests into stately ships, and supplied
them to all nations. It was then that in the decade
between 1850 and 1860 the total tonnage of the
United States rose from 3,772,439 to 7,361,639,
valued at £44,318,496. Had it not been for the
change in shipbuilding material, which enabled
England to construct vessels more cheaply for her-
self, Maine and New York, Massachusetts, Penn-
sylvania, and Connecticut, notwithstanding the
burdens resulting from the war, would have con-
tinued to supply the world with ships, and the trade
would have been stimulated, not depressed, by th
depredations of the privateers. Indeed it has been
so much the fashion to attribute all the causes of
decay to the Alabama and her consorts that many
Americans actually believe that the shipbuilding
trade was also ruined by that miserable craft. Why
if she had been a magician instead of a vessel no
yard ought to have been proud of, she could not
have accomplished such a task—and Mr. LAIRD
who built her is elevated into importance as an
agent of an evil which he could no more accomplish
than locate himself on an estate in the moon. The
ravages of war are quickly repaired in peace, and
trade resumes its old channels, flowing where
the demand exists ; the ravages of storms, more
destructive still, are equally met, the risks in
both cases being covered by insurance, and in the
former falling really on the people at war. They
suffer and lose as nations who fight ought to do,
but war never destroyed the trade of a trading

people, though it may often have injured and
checked that trade. If the American marine
does not now begin to recover from the effects of
the contest, Americans must seek other causes than
the Alabama for the explanation, and if they look
into the matter our opinion is that they will easily
perceive them, as they are near the surface.