The Sun.
London, England, 1868-05-02 00:00:00

SPIRIT OP THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

The Saturday Review speaks of the present Ministry as
the most unlucky of all Ministries heard of by the present
generation. Lord Derby, of all others, has done as much
as possible to damage the Ministry by counselling it to
disdain the decision of the House of Commons. Mr. Dis-
raeli knew his business far too well to pretend that he was
entitled to treat such a decision as that of Friday morning
as a nullity. He knew that it made it incumbent on him
to announce his intentions, and to state what the Ministry
proposed to do under such a defeat. It is obvious that
either he must resign now, or he must dissolve now, or he

must announce his intention of dissolving early next year.
It is generally taken for granted that this last will be the

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course he will take, and Lord Derby has stated in the

plainest language that this is what he should recommend.
But there are difficulties which stand in the way. The

Ministry will stay in at the mercy of its opponents. It
will be told what to do, and then not allowed to do it. To

pass the Scotch and Irish Reform Bills, the Bribery Bill,
and the Boundaries Bill, is the first and most immediate
of its duties. The Liberal party is not now dispirited and

broken up. It is like an army that has won great battles,
and is bound together by the memory of what has been
done. Mr. Gladstone will of course have hard work to

keep his followers together, and tact and courtesy are not
much in his line ; but he is in a much stiongerposition than
he was last session, and if he can keep his party together,
it is he, and not the occupants of the Treasury Bench, who

will reallypass the bills and carry on the work of the session.
To dissolve now would be in no way justified by the position
of the Ministry. They have no right to inflict so great a
burden on the country unless they are morally certain of
altering their position. If they dissolved and were beaten,
as they probably would be, this would be only a costly and
cumbersome method of resigning, and they had much
better resign at once. It is entirely for Mr. Disraeli to
judge, and if he likes to go through the misery of trying to
manage the House for three months more, in face of a hos-
tile and resolute majority, he will be justified by the pecu-
liar circumstances of the case in taking that course. But
both for his own credit and in the interests of his party,
which is infinitely stronger or, Church questions when in
opposition, and also to avoid exposing parliamentary
government to a severe and painful test, his best course,
we have no hesitation in saying, would be to resign at once.
It is true that, of all courses he could take, this would be

the most dangerous and embarrassing to the Liberal party;
but he cannot be expected•to care much about this, and at
any rate it is for himself to decide whether he will retain
office merely to oblige his adversaries.
Sir W. Heathcote argued that if once you admit th©

principle of ecclesiastical equality—especially if you go so
far as to demand that the Church of the State must be the
Church of the majority of the whole people—the precedent
of destroying the Irish Church cannot fail to be used with
great force against the English Church ; the Catholics
will ask for ecclesiastical equality, not only in Ireland, but
in the United Kingdom. They will say, if you establish
the Church of the majority in England and Scotland, and
if we are to have equality, you must establish the
church of the majority in Ireland ; and if you do not

do this, you are bound to give us equality the other way,
by disestablishing the Church of the majority in Scotland

and England.

Sir W. Heathcote added that if a vast

majority, not only over every other sect taken singly, but
over the total of all sects combined, is not enough to

justify establishment of Roman Catholicism in Ireland,
the very bare majority which the Church of England may
claim, but can scarcely be expected to hold continuously,

ever all other sects combined, ;ill surely not be sufficient to

justify long the English establishment. The Spectator answers

that, so far as this argument goes, it is undoubtedly a

real one. But it is quite inadequate to the hard work
to which it has been put, for two reasons. First,
to apologise for injustice to Ireland in order to
prevent what we should hold a great calamity in England

—even if there were any danger of it—would under
certain circumstances, justify any manner of atrocity it
Ireland. Suppose it proved that unless we re-established
the penal code in Ireland we might have to fear civil war
in England, would any just or sane man support the re,
establishment of the penal code by that reason ? If dis-
establishment in England were to follow ever so surely
from disestablishment in Ireland, that would be a great
calamity, but not a calamity for the sake of which we are
justified in maintaining a wrong. But, in the second
place, the true answer to the argument for logical assimi-
lation of our system in all parts of the empire is, that this
is not the true direction of legislation or of modern poli-
tical science at all. Our modern politicians are opening
theilr minds more and more to the doctrine that you must
treat different races and different localities on different
principles—principles adapted to their various circum-
stances—if you wish to secure their political well-being.
We have already recognised this for Scotland. We are
now at last recognising. it for Ireland. And therefore
the spirit of modern poliiics energetically repudiates the
notion of a logical identity of system in the parti-coloured
elements of a peat composite empire. The debate, as a
whole, has proved the utter discomfiture and helplessness
of the Conservatives, and, thanks to the violent rashness
of " the presiding genius " of the Tory party, has gone
far towards so discrediting the Government, as to render
its continuance in office difficult, if not impossible.

What, asks the Imperial Review, is the course which
public duty makes it incumbent on the Government to
follow at this juncture ? The leader of the Opposition
arrogates to himself more than regal powers, in order to
carry out a policy which will inaugurate among us the
reign of absolute democracy. And there are not wanting
sage advisers who urge that a Ministry discredited by two
such crushing defeats should abandon the position in which

their sovereignha.splaced them, and give up to the assailants
of the constitution the citadel which loyalty and patriotism
render it their duty to defend. The memorable debates in
which an overwhelming Opposition attacked and defeated,
over and over again, the Cabinet which Mr. Pitt had
formed, in obedience to the summons of his sovereign, were

;at the time held to have reduced all other disputed ques-
tions to the simple issue, whether England "was to be ruled
by the sceptre of King George 111. or by the tongue of
Charles James Fox." Not dissimilar is the present
situation ; and we may confidently expect, after a few more
such exhibitions as Mr. Gladstone made on Thursday
night, that the question will cease to be, as far as the
constituencies are concerned, one concerning the ex-
istence of the Church in Ireland, and will become
battle between Mr. Gladstone, on one side, and constitu.

tional government on the other. If the rumours which
we hear are true, and Mr. Gladstone intends, on Monday,
to supersede the recognised practice of the House, and to
insist on taking his remaining resolutions into considera-
tion before public business proceeds ; if, moreover, he it
not calumniated when credited with a determination, ir.
the event of his first move proving unsuccessful, to en-
deavour to cut down the national expenditure at a single
blow by two millions, and to deduct one penny from the
income tax, we may be nearer the supreme moment of the
struggle than is generally supposed. The exigencies of
the public service may render it the first duty of the
Minister at the present moment not to dissolve the House
of Commons. But if the House of Commons declines to
transact public business the course is clear, and Mr.
Disraeli is not the man to shrink from his duty.

The London Review rejoices at the success of the Abys-
sinian expedition, and feels grateful to the general whose
abilities have attained for us that rarest of British exploits
—success without previous disaster. There is little doubt
that whenever we can place a British army fairly before
an enemy it will give a good account of him. But it is in
bringing matters to this point that our weakness lies ; and
it is not too much to say that our soldiers have less to
fear from their enemies than from their friends. Organi-
sation is our weak point. We can fight well enough ; but
our commissariat has a faculty for breaking down, and
our generals are too prone to rely upon the pluck of the
human material they handle, and to neglect precautions
which would materially facilitate the work of war. If
ever there was an occasion on which it was likely, from
our antecedents in such, that we should commit many
egregious blunders before we accomplished our object, it
was this very expedition. The probability was so great,
that we could hardly have murmured if it had taken twice
the time and cost us double the outlay we had calculated
upon, to carry it to a successful issue. The ground over
which the expedition had to pass was unknown, beyond
the fact that it would present many natural diffi-
culties which would not be easily overcome ; and, as
always happens, prophets of evil were not wanting to
dismay the conductors of the expedition with the threat
of dangers which seemed to render success althost hopeless.
Even the most hopeful were impressed by the difficulty
of penetrating a country which was almost unknown, and
of traversing it over three-fourths of its length with
force strong enough to take care of itself upon its journey,
and to cope successfully with any army which Theodore
might oppose to it when it came to its journey's end.
The exploit required, above all things, that quality for
the want of which we have been conspicuous. We can
afford to speak respectfully, even of King Theodore, now
that this troublesome actor has quitted the scene. He has
neither fled from us into the mountains, where he might
have set us at defiance till the rainy season was over, nor
has he murdered his prisoners on our approach. Either
course was open to him, and there was a third and worse
which he could have adopted—namely, murdering the
captives first, and retreating into the mountains after-
wards. But he did not adopt this, either. If all that
has been said of him be true, the manner of his death went
far to redeem the cruelties he stands charged with. He
surrendered the captives, but he refused to surrender his
fortress or himself. Even when his army deserted him, he
met the British force almost single-handed, and died,
according to one account, by his own hand. There is a
touch of kingly dignity in this. He could easily have fled,
but he did not. He had sworn to meet the British first,
Clough only he and his standard-bearer should confront
them. Semi-savage though he was, he kept his word in a
right 19Ya1 manner.