The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1838-12-04 00:00:00

CONTEMPORARY PRESS.

LORD DURHAM.
(From the Blackburn Standard. )
We have from the onset written that Lord Durham's
mission has proved a painful and humiliating political
abortion, as might reasonably have been expected;
and need only refer to the sentiments and opinions
expressed by us on his lordship's receiving the ap--
pointment in question. Admitting the necessity pro-
duced for some such appointment, through the pre-
vious unmanly and truckling administration of the
law and constitutional authority of the mother coun-
try, by a ministry whose almost every act has been a
paradox to the inevitable necessities of- all sound
government, we could neither approve the plans
adopted, the haste of their completion, nor the indi-
vidual selected for the fulfilment of the onerous and
undefined duties. When we express our humble
opinion that Lord Durham was nearly the last man
amongst the titled aristocracy of England (not posi-
tively avowed levellers, as Lord King and one or two
others) who should have had such a carte blanche sur-
rendered to his discretion, the sequel proves that we
are strictly correct ; -whilst we disclaim all sinister
feeling towards Lord Durham personally, in coming
to such conclusion, and however painful the attendant
issues to our ill-fated and misgoverned country.
Every candid man, the least practically acquainted
with the principles and practice of the laws and con-
stitution of England, and desirous of their retention—
of sustaining the indefeasibility of Magna Charta, the
security of the Bill of Rights, and the privileges of
Trial by Jury, must admit the necessity of measures
a posteriori, imposed by Lord Durham's own rash-
ness, his ignorance or contempt for the author-Ay of
the fairest principles of English law, or the grossly
Ignorant legal advice under which he may have acted.
No man in his senses will deny that the banishment
of State prisoners, or their forcible detention, without
trial, in a place beyond his jurisdiction, was an illegal
act—an act subversive of every attribute of the British
constitution, and for which Lord Durham (despite his
high commission, flanked by all the talents of com-
bined whiggery and Whig chancellor law) .might have
been impeached ! We know nothing of Lord Brough-
am's alleged motives ; we come to the facts of the
case—to that painfully responsible complexity in which
the question stood upon its own merits in the House
of Lords, that portion of the domestic legislature of
Great Britain especially called upon and fully autho-
rised in its trust capacity to protect the liberty of the
subject under every circumstance. as well as to gua-
rantee the due execution of the law, but more espe-
cially so in the all grave awl important matter of the
Canadian pacification, the redress for past wrongs and
offences, and the institution of a new legislative sys-
tem, to be sanctioned by the authority of the British
crown and parliament. It were surely too much to
advance that a British parliament should not interfere
in a matter of such weighty import; and having so
interfered, Lord Durham is not quite so blameable in
the secondary case, and on the ground of personal
feeling for surrendering a post, the dignity and moral
pot~ ers of which he had in the first place compromised
by his own imprudence or weak judgment, and ane he
could no longer retain in honour or power, under the
mean desertion of that expedient band of time-serving
philosophical confederates, miscalled " a ministry,"
which deserted, sacriticed " their noble friend" in the
hour of his necessity, after straining in breathless
haste the rules of all courtly decorum in his appoint-
ment, rather than fall nobly with his error. The
country at large, the nation of Englishmen, cannot
possibly have more than one opinion on the conduct
of men thus falsely tostirnin,,, the high functions of
statesmen, or pretending to the finer sentiments of
gentlemen. Its baseness is too palpable to admit of
measured terms of reprobation; and not all the toil