The Sun.
London, England, 1868-09-05 00:00:00

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SPIRIT OP Tilt PUBLIC JO'OSINIAL

It was necessary that Lord Mayo should inform his Con-
stituents that he was not a candidate for re-election ; but
his announcement that he is about to be Governor-General
of India sounds, in the opinion of the Saturday Review, too
much like a challenge to fortune. No man, if the ancient
maxim may be so far modified, ought to think himself
happy in the possession of office until he is sworn in. The
man who sold the lion's skin was killed in hunting him ;
and Sir John Lawrence has not yet completed his term,
which expires at the end of the year. If Parliament meets
between the 10th and 15th of December, the decisive vote
will be taken before Christmas ; and Lord Mayo can
scarcely anticipate with confidence that a hostile Ministry
may not have succeeded to power before New Year's Day.
He will himself have sailed for India in November, but
his ship will not outrun the telegraph ; and the successors
of Mr. Disraeli and Sir Stafford Northcote will not fail to
take advantage of any irregularity which may have been
incurred for the purpose of securing a great appoint-
ment to a member of the outgoing Cabinet.
It is an invidious and disagreeable duty to criticise the
intellectual or practical capacity of any man, and more
especially of an upright and intelligent public servant ;
but Lord Mayo has only himself and his friends to thank
for unpleasant commentaries on his personal qualifications
for high office. The statesmanlike faculties which ought
to have been indispensable conditions of the appointment
are, according to the legal jingle, certainly not patent,
and it is barely possible that they should be latent. Lord
Mayo expects to succeed a Viceroy who surpasses nearly
all his predecessors in his familiarity with the circum-
stances and administration of India. As Governor-
General of Canada, or as governor of a great Australian
colony, Lord Mayo would have been qualified, by good
sense and courtesy of demeanour, to perform constitu-
tional functions which require tact rather than originality
or genius. In India he may at any time be required to
determine, at short notice, some question involving the
fate of the empire.

The Spectator thinks the effect of the nomination of
Messrs. Seymour and Blair upon the Democratic chances
has been an unexpected and, on the whole, from the Demo-
cratic point of view, a favourable one. It was supposed
that it would deepen the distrust of Republicans, and,
therefore, increase their energy in opposition ; but Repub-
lican distrust was already as deep as it could be. On the
contrary, it has brought the more thorough-going men of
the Democratic party to the top, has encouraged them to
speak out, has secured them the allies who are always
attracted by audacity, and has relieved them from a kind
of necessity of hypocrisy which destroyed alike their
energy and their prestige. Fortunately for the Union the
Republicans of the North have been aroused by the frank-
ness of their old enemies, are closing their ranks, and
reducing their platform to the single question of the right
of the nation to rule its component parts. They are not
intending to substitute government by a majority for
government by a constitution, and have no design of
" wiping out State lines," or setting up a centralised
government at Washington. No plan so complete or so
scientific has entered into their heads, nor are they yet so
fully emancipated from their Sold dogma of the plenary
inspiration of all paragraphs, words, letters, and commas
in the Constitution. They are simply determined that
when the nation and the State are in open and violent
conflict the nation shall rule, and that to preventsuch con-
flicts the loyal section of the Southern population shall
have votes. The Southerners and their allies are asked to
surrender nothing except those distinctions of colour which
caused the war, and not even those if they can reconcile
them with the real and thorough abolition of a system of
society dangerous to the life of the Republic. If they
would consent to legislate for the blacks as they legislate
for white women, the North would not hesitate to place
the negroes in the women's position—to invest them, that
is, with every civil, legal, and social right, but no political
power. We have never hesitated to say that until the negro
and the mean white have both been educated that position
would be far better for the dark man, for the South, and
for the Union, than one of nominal equality ;.but this posi-
tion the South clearly refuses to grant—as witness the
scenes in Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas—and the Nos th,
therefore, falls back upon negro suffrage, not out of
hostility to State rights, but out of regard for the national
life. To say the Republicans are therefore trying to set
up a revolutionary government at Washington is an abuse
of words. The whole of their difficulties have arisen from
their dislike to revolutionary measures. They could have
governed the South as Bengal is governed, easily enough,
and it is their very respect for State rights, their horror of
breaking with the Constitution, which has produced all
their embarrassments. They demand as little as they
possibly can—as we think, far too little—but that little
they cannot surrender, be State rights what they may,
without sacrificing the nation. We admit the doubtful-
ness, to say the least, of most accounts front the Pacific
States, and the unanimity of the vote Kentucky, and
Maryland, and States of their temper will throw for Mr.
Seymour. We perceive a!so, or• think we perceive, a
symptom which we frankly confess we do not understand,
the ex's:ence in the ranks of R-publican politicians of a
half-consc:ous d's!aste for General Grant, or distrust of
him, for we hardly know which it is. Whether they dis-
trust his ability as statesman, or dislike his " lenity " to
the South—a lenity quite consistent with faithfulness to
his duty—or are annoyed with his persistent silence, or
think him rather the choice of the people than their own,
we cannot at this distance detect, but the feeling- is unmis-
takably there. Nevertheless, in spite of all these things,
we believe he will be the next President of the United
States. The power of election does not belong to the
politicians, but to the freeholders, and they no snore share
the Isoliticians' feeling about General Grant than the
English electors share the members feeling about Mr.
Gladstone. They intend to reward the general who saved
the country, and to assert the supremacy of the nation
over any part of the nation, and to forbid serfage by one
and the same act, the election of the Republican nominee
to the Presidency of the Union.

The entire body of candiates, says the Imperial Review,
may still be divided, as it might have been any time these
forty years, into three classes • ' honest Conservatives,
honest Radicals, and scarcely honest Whigs ; men who
wish substantially to preserve the Consitution, men who
wish substantially to subvert it; and men who care very
little whether it is subverted or preserved, provided they
can contrive to keep the main direction of it or of its substi-
tute in their own hands. When genuine Conservatism is
neither very stron nor very vigilan*,_ Whigs affect a
spurious Conservatism of their wn. When, on the other
hand, it is both watchful, active, and influential, the law of
their existence compels them to affect a spurious
Radicalism. Their attitude at the present moment is
the best proof imaginable that the party to which
they are historically opposed is in the soundest
possible condition. For, in spite of all that has been
said on the subject, we very much doubt if
the Whigs had abandoned all hope, although it is
clear that they have lost all chance of governing
England once more. The appearance on the scene of
such candidates as Lord Hyde, in South Warwickshire,
Mr. J. L. Warren, in Mid-Cheshire, the Hon. George
Brodrick, at Woodstock, and the indescribable Lord
Amberley, in South Devon, are quite enough, even were
they unattended with other incidents, to raise the suspicion
that a very old game is being attempted yet once again.
None of these gentlemen have the smallest difficulty in
subscribing their names to the most extreme Radical pro-
gramme ; but however moderate may be our estimate of
their sagacity 2 we cannot think them fatuous enough to
believe, much less to hope, that it will ever be carried out.
Look where we will, we see the same farce being played
—that of RadicAls by instinct, position, and ambition,
being. shoved aside by men who wear the mask of
Radicalism, for the double purpose of crushing their rivals
and confronting their foes.

Naturally the Church question occupies a prominent
place in Mr. Bright's declaration of policy. He deals with
this, says the London Review, in a very characteristic,
and, at the same, a very prudent manner. All argument
he puts aside at once and decidedly. He treats the prac-
tical question as settled, and only in combating Mr.
Disraeli's taunts of Ritualist-Romanist conspiracy does he
overthrow with one trenchant phrase the entire fabric of
ingenious misconstruction which the Tories have piled
over the policy of Mr. Gladstone. "We do not touch
religion at all.' are the words of the war-cry that
the great Radical champion has given his party, and they
come opportunely to defeat the tactics of clerical firebrands
and astute sowers of tares. The ill-judging r3al of these
must be met in time, and it cannot be better opposed than
by the terse sentence in which Mr. Bright has asserted
the political character of Mr. Gladstone's policy. "We
do not touch religion at all." On this issue let the battle
be fought. The latter part of Mr. Bright's address is the
only part in which he rises to anything like fervour,
though all that he says is permeated with a quiet earnest-
ness which is quite as effective as the loudest declamation.
But in his concluding sentence Mr. Bright encounters his
ancient enemy, " the minority clause," and kindles at the.
bight and thought of it. When Mr. Bright is in a passion
he is. very much in a passion. He says to himself,
"I do weft to be angry ; r.nd piles up crushing epithets
one over the other at a rate which takes ae ay the
quiet observer's breath, though it clearly fails to satisfy
the impatient wrath of Mr. Bright. l 4 or our own part,
while we- disapprove as much ag Mr. Bright of the
minority clause in principle, we cannot look upon it as so
mischievous in practice as he would have it to be. In the
comities it will probably seat two or three Liberal mem-
bers. In the great boroughs, where, as Mr. Bright says,
it was introduced with the design of reducing those
Radical and progressive constituencies to the level of small
boroughs that only return one member to Parliament, it
has altogether failed, if such was, indeed, the object of its
promoters.
The speeches of the Liberal members, says the John
Bull, confirm the view that a further appeal must be
made to the people on the Irish Church. In Cornwall
we are told that upwards of 100 Liberals have resolved to
vote for the Conservative candidate ; at Southampton
there is a rumour that a hitherto leading Liberal is about
to solicit the suffrages of the electors in the Conservative
interest ; in East Suffolk a rural dean, formerly an active
partisan of the Liberal party, is keenly canvassing for
signatures for the Church and State Society's address
to the Queen, supporting the Tory party. With these,
and many similar signs of the times, the moderate
Liberals are crettieg rather uncomfortable. The
clerical supporters of Mr. Gladstone whisper in his
ear that he is really going too far and too fast.
Either Mr. Gladstone will be frightened (which is very
improbable) at the democratic feeling he has raised, and,
with Sir R. Palmer, Mr. A. Peel, and others, refuse to
carry out the extreme views of his tail, in which case it is
hardly. worth the trouble of bringing about two Ministe.
rial crises ; or he will be led on by his impetuosity and the
force of circumstances, against his own better will, to sup-
port, when the time comes, the practical abolition of the
House of Lords, the disestabbshment of the Church of
p1ig4nd2.E4411.4 diyi4ou of the baud.