The Sun.
London, England, 1868-10-22 00:00:00

MR. GRANT DUFF AT ELGIN;

Mr. Grant Duff delivered his annual address at Elgin
on Wednesday evening. Eleven years ago the consti-
tuency returned him to Parliament. " Those eleven years
had been filled with momentous events, and would occupy
a far greater space on the canvas of history than many
a placid and unfruitful century. Eleven years aio
Italy was still groaning under the dukes and the
Bourbons.' Spain had just stepped back into the posi-
tion she occupied before the Liberal movement of 1854.
Serfdom still lay like a black cloud over European Russia,
and men were still speculating timidly and doubtfully as
to the possible abolition of slavery at some far-off and
millennial period in the United States of North America.
The Germanic Diet still droned on at Frankfort,
weaving one Thursday, to unweave the next, its ever-
lasting Penelope's web. Hungary was still brooding
in gloomy isolation over the blood of 1819 and the
heaped•up wrongs of generations; while Austria, crushed
by the combined weight of military and priestly despotism,
was still, in the words of her great political poet, asking with
bated breath the freedom to be free.' These were but a few
of the ancient injustices and venerable impositions which
the year 1857 left still standing when he breathed his last,
and of which we might now happily say, `Gone is
gone, dead is dead.' Great changes had occurred in
this country also, but they had rather been changes in
public opinion, ominous of future legislative change, than
changes recognised and perfected through the parlia-
mentary agency by which this nation set its seal to
the changes for which it had become prepared." With a
reference to the Reform question, which he was glad
to say was so far settled, Mr. Duff passed to
a personal criticism of Mr. Bright. He alluded to the
alteration of the position of that gentleman. Fur many
years he had stood in very peculiar relations to suc-
cessive Liberal Governments; sometimes he Lad been a
buttress, sometimes a battering ram. He had generally
been more important than any three ordinary Cabinet
Ministers, but his place had always been apart, and bis
support dependent on Ministerial good behaviour. We had
been accustomed to think that our great tribune would
rather lower himself by taking office. Now, however, the
situation was changed ; we could not think what a post-
Niagara Liberal Cabinet would be without Mr. Bright,
and one could not help seeing from a certain alteration in
his way of putting things that the shadows of coming Minis-
terial responsibility were falling athwart his mind. Doubters
told us that he would injure his reputation—that he
was no administrator. He was not an administrator, of
that eminently respectable class who came and went
without much comment. He was a statesman. It was
the first characteristic of a statesman to have a faculty of
being right in great matters, and had not Mr. Bright been
right about most of those things as to which nearly all of the
so-called eminent heads were for years hopelessly wrong—
right about free trade, right about America, and right about
Reform? Among all the sayings and inditings of our official
statesmen since 1832, excepting, perhaps, those of Sir
George Lewis, what was there to compare with the two
volumes of speeches by Mr. Bright, and the two volumes
of pamphlets by Mr. Cobden? Mr. Bright, for instance,
had been right on the question of the Irish Church. On
the educational question, Mr. Duff remarked that he
wished the English universities to be made more like the
Scotch, in the way of being free, than they were at present.
Passing to the expenditure, Mr. Grant Duff declared that
what we now wanted was to bring into power, and keep
in power, Ministers with whom economy was a paramount
consideration. The Civil Service Estimates, although

they required watching, were not seriously to be complained
of. It was the fearful expense of the so-called great
services—the army and navy—which, in the words of
the poet, made the Titan stagger under "the too vast
orb of his fate." Was this expense to go on for
ever? If not, then some one must take the initiative in
bringing about a change ; and it was this country, which
feared nobody and menaced nobody, that must take the
first step. If once Europe saw that France and England
had seriously entered upon a reduction of armaments,
a proposal for a Congres3 to discuss the amount of
force which each State should keep up would meet
with few difficulties. He advocated partial disarmament.
very strongly. We must reduce the expenses of our colo-
nial army. Take the case of the Australian colonies.
We kept there, for purely colonial purposes, three British
regiments ; partly at our expense, partly at that of the
colonies. Why did 'we do this? What enemy did we
!ear? Or did we desire to retain our connection with
them an hour longer than th©y wished to retain their
connection with us? He trusted the time would soon come
when we should only keep garrisons in those smaller de-
pendencies which we held rather as points of vantage and
stepping-stones across the great oceanic spaces than as colo-
nies in the ordinary sense of the term. He had always
thought that the question of army reform would obtain a
more direct impetus than any other from the enlarge-
ment of the constituencies. He sincerely hoped that it
was so, and nothing would give him greater pleasure
than to find that soldiers' grievances were beginning to be
forced on the consideration of candidates and members.
We must change the present system in the army, so that it
should be " neither more aristocratic nor democratic than
any other part of society." Purchase must be abolished.
As to our foreign policy, he was a friendto non-intervention,
properly understood, but maintained that non-intervention
was but half our lesson, and that international co-operation
was the other half of it. With increasing knowledge of foreign
affairs would come an increased disinclination to hamper
ourselves with entangling alliances, or to allow our policy
to be guided by feeling and enthusiasm, however gene.
rous. Long before our policy had become thoroughly
pervaded by an international spirit, the more candid of
our foreign critics would see the direction things were
taking—that Albion could no longer be called perfidious,
even by her bitterest enemies. He detested what had been
calledwell
the natural
tl e
impulse"bloody
onf a
eddmlesa ofe spirit was to go, asn of those days
the old song had it, "to fight the foreign loons in their
ain countrce." He should like to see the Foreign Office
and the two services which depended upon it—:
the diplomatic and the consular—used every day more
and more as an instrument for receiving all the informa-
tion that could be obtained with regard to the state of
foreign countries, and reflecting the knowledge so acquired
in a broad and steady light all over the United Kingdom.
Unquestionably our Foreign Office had done of late years
much more in this way than it used to do, but he was con-
fident that greater encouragement might stimulate our
existing consular and diplomatic peiyants to greater
exertions.