Karl Marx

[Neue Oder-Zeitung No. 139, 23 March 1855]

London, 20 March. The Duke of Newcastle ordered the recall of Lord Lucan; Lord Panmure published Raglan’s letter against him, and Lord Hardinge, the fabulous Constable of the English army, refused him an inquiry and a court-martial. Despite the opposition of two ministries, of the commander-in-chief in the Crimea and the chief of the Horse Guards in London, Lord Lucan proved by his detailed statement yesterday in the House of Lords that not he, but Raglan alone, is responsible for the sacrifice of the light cavalry at Balaclava, and that the Aberdeen and Palmerston ministries, in order to save the pliant, weak-minded and pliable general in the Crimea, threw Lord Lucan as prey to the discontent of the public. The public monster had to be fed. Decisive in this question is a half-finished letter, found on the body of General Cathcart, addressed to his wife and dated 2 November, 3 days before the battle of Inkerman and 8 days after the cavalry charge at Balaclava. In this letter it says literally:

‘Neither Lord Lucan nor Lord Cardigan were to blame, but on the contrary, for they obeyed orders.’

The Times, in an article on the Vienna Conferences, today lets fall the characteristic marginal gloss that, should the Congress become serious, the main difficulties are to be expected from the Turkish side. It would be the Sultan, not the Tsar, from whom the principal concessions would have to be extorted within the limits of the Four Points.

The day before yesterday The Times mystified its public once again with the ‘authentic’ announcement that, before 19 March, the great cannonade and the final storming of Sevastopol had undoubtedly taken place. Whence this sudden turn from desperate hopelessness to sanguine superstition? The Times began its Crimean campaign against the fallen coalition and its ‘Ceterum censeo’ that a committee of inquiry was necessary, at the very moment when Gladstone threatened its monopoly by proposing to abolish the stamp duty and to limit the weight of newspapers that were to be sent through the post for one penny to 4 ounces—less than the weight of a copy of The Times. As soon as Gladstone was overthrown, his successor, Sir G[eorge] C[ornewall] Lewis, withdrew the bill, and The Times, hoping he would leave everything as before, suddenly transformed its black-bilious view of the Crimea into a moving panorama, radiant with hope of successes, and in which even the army acts once more, for which it delivered the funeral oration three months ago. Today its view is again darkened, because yesterday, contrary to all expectation, Sir G. C. Lewis also brought in a bill for the abolition of the newspaper stamp duty. Hatred of the retrospective review-writer for fresh news! exclaims The Times. Lewis was, as is well known, editor of the Edinburgh Review.

We shall return to the bill as soon as it lies before the House of Commons in detail, but note in the meantime that it is a concession to the Manchester School, to which the merit belongs of having tirelessly agitated for the implementation of free competition in the sphere of the press. The concession of the Palmerston ministry to the Manchester School is a captatio benevolentiae for the event of the dissolution of the House of Commons and new parliamentary elections.