The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1854-04-11 00:00:00

LORD JOHN RUSSELL.

We never, at any time, reposed much faith in the
judgment or sagacity of Lord John Russell ; and, of late
years, our opinion of him, in these respects, has, we con-
fess, materially declined. We have been, in our own
sphere of action, engaged in most of the political struggles
which have taken place within the memory of the present
generation ; and we trust that these have not passed by
without some wholesome lessons. To change of opinion,
where honestly induced and through conviction, every
.one is bound to be fair and lenient • because, undeniably,
in our own day there has been a great unravehnent of
social questions, and mere party prejudice is no longer
allowed to be paramount. Perhaps the only living states-
man of eminence, who cleaves to thei old system, and is
Y n
inveterate in his addiction to intrigue and what he
cans 64 tradition," is Lord John Russell. Put him into
Utopia, might
establish his first thought would be how he
l'ght
establish the exclusive supremacy of the Whigs. He is
much and so inveterately a party man, that he seems so
care little what becomes of the country, provided only
that he, and his, sit at the receipt of customs. He
showed that long
ago—not in the days of
He—the
htohteylovahtliig,
but in those of his pragmatic
Constitutnalist—characterised the opinion of the u
house as "t
he whisper of a faction and did not disdain
the violent and frantic sympathy of mobs, when such
demonstrations tended to his own p articular purpose, or
aided the ascendancy of his party. Ever since he has
pursued the same course. No man can tell when he is in
thorough earnest, or when he is not. He invited, by
word and deed, Romish aggression ; and, when the ag-
gression came, he started up at once as an indignant
Protestant champion, and flung down his diminutive
gauntlet, in the name of Great Britain, to the Pope of
Rome And yet, at the bidding of the Irish Romanist
Phalanx, we find this second Luther a strenuous supporter
of Maynooth, and of the nunneries ! Had his ancestor,
John, the first Lord Russell—who in 1540 and 1550
obtained grants from the Crown of the possessions of the
Abbey of Tavistock and the Monastery of Woburn—been
equally zealous for the protection of convents, he probably
m
would have rem • aed, as he was born, an utterly unacred
gentleman.

Two articles are devoted to the subject of the
quarrel with Russia. The first, entitled " The
• a na' r Thlssia," shows

that the loss arising from the interruption of com-
merce would be felt far more severely by Russia
than by England, and that while our export trade
to Turkey has been gradually improving, that to
Russia has been diminishing. It is further shown
that, while the exports to Turkey of wholly manu-
factured articles amounted in 1850 to nearly two
millions and a-half, those to Russia were only
£140,455, the balance being made up of yarn and
machinery for the supply of the Russian manufac-
turers. A second article is devoted to " The Blue
Books and the Eastern Question," and a third is
entitled " The Cost of the Coalition Ministry." It
proves by the undoubted testimony of the corres-
pondence which has recently been published that
the dispute, which is now likely to embroil the
whole of Europe in war, is wholly and solely attri-
butable to the insincerity of the Premier, and the
differences of opinion in the Cabinet ; so that the
country is paying a frightfully extravagant price
for the Coalition Ministry. Referring to the events
which have taken place, and the dangers which
threaten, the writer asks who is to blame for all
this, and answers—