Never in the whole annals of representative government has 
an administration been turned out half as ignominiously as the 
celebrated Cabinet of “all the Talents” in England. To be in a 
minority is a thing which may happen to anybody, but to be 
defeated by 305 against 148, by more than two to one, in an 
assembly like the Commons’ House of Great Britain, that was a 
distinction reserved for the galaxy of genius commanded by ce cher 
Aberdeen. 

There is no doubt the Cabinet considered its days as numbered 
as soon as Parliament met.’ The scandalous proceedings in the 
Crimea, the utter ruin of the army, the helplessness of all and 
every one connected with the administration of the war, the outcry 
in the country, fed by the diatribes of The Times, the evident 
determination of John Bull to know for once who was to blame, or 
at least to wreak his wrath upon some one or another—all this 
must have proved to the Cabinet that the time had arrived when 
they must put their house in order. 

Notices of threatening questions and motions were given in 
abundance and at once; above all, the notice of Mr. Roebuck’s 
threatening motion, for a committee to inquire into the conduct of 
the war, and of all parties who had any responsibility in its 
administration. This brought matters to an issue at once. Lord 
John Russell’s political scent made it at once clear to him that this 
motion would be adopted in spite of minorities*°; and a 
statesman like him, who boasts of more minorities than years, 
could not well afford to be again outvoted. Accordingly, Lord 
John Russell, with that spirit of pusillanimity and pettifogging 
meanness, which is visible during his entire career, through a 

cloak of important talkativity and constitutional precedentism, 
thought discretion the better part of valor,” and decamped from 
office without giving his colleagues even a moment’s notice. Now, 
although he is a man who can hardly expect to be missed 
anywhere, yet it appears that “all the talents” were entirely upset 
by his sudden retreat. The press of Great Britain unanimously 
condemned the little statesman, but what of that? All the press 
and all its condemnations could not set the ministerial “higgledy 
piggledy” up again; and in this state of disorganization, with the 
Duke of Newcastle resigning the War Office, and Lord Palmerston 
not having taken possession of it, the Cabinet had to meet Mr. 
Roebuck’s formidable motion. 

Mr. Roebuck is a little lawyer, who would be just as funny a 
little Whig as Lord John Russell, and quite as inoffensive, had he 
only been more successful in his parliamentary career. But the 
ci-devant” briefless barrister, and present parliamentary spouter, 
has failed, with all his sharpness and activity, to amass any political 
capital worth speaking of. Though generally a sort of secret and 
confidential understrapper to any Whig Ministry, he never 
succeeded in reaching that position which insures Place, the great 
goal of all British Liberals. Our friend Roebuck, blighted in his 
blandest hopes, underestimated by his own party, ridiculed by his 
opponents, gradually felt the milk of human kindness turning 
sour within his bosom, and became, by and by, as invidious, 
unsociable, unpleasant, provoking a little cur as ever barked on 
the floor of a House of Parliament. In this capacity he has served, 
in turns, all men who knew how to handle him, without ever 
gaining claims upon the gratitude or consideration of any party; 
and nobody knew how to make a better use of him than our old 
friend Palmerston, whose game he again was made to play on the 
26th ult. 

Mr. Roebuck’s motion, as it actually stood, could hardly have 
any sense in an assembly like the British House of Commons. 
Everybody knows what clumsy, lazy, time-killing things the 
Committees of the Commons are; an investigation of the conduct 
of this war by such a committee would be of no practical use 
whatever, for its results would come many a month too late to do 
any good—even if any good did result from the inquiry. It is only 
in a revolutionary, dictatorial assembly like the French National 
Convention of 1793 that such committees might do any good. But 

there the Government itself is nothing but such a committee— its 
agents are the commissioners of the assembly itself, and, therefore, 
in such an assembly similar motions would be superfluous. Yet, 
Mr. Sidney Herbert was not entirely wrong in pointing out that 
the motion (surely quite unintentionally on Mr. Roebuck’s part) 
had a somewhat unconstitutional character, and in asking, with his 
usual historical accuracy, whether the House of Commons 
intended sending Commissioners to the Crimea, the same as the 
Directory (sic) did to General Dumouriez.* We may as well observe 
here that this same precious chronology which makes the 
Directory (instituted 1795) send Commissaries to Dumouriez, 
whom this latter General had arrested and delivered up to the 
Austrians as early as 1793—that this chronology is quite of a piece 
with the confusion of time and space reigning in all the operations 
of Mr. Sidney Herbert and colleagues. To return to Mr. Roebuck’s 
motion, the informality alluded to served as a pretext to a great 
many candidates for place, not to vote for it, and thus to remain 
free to enter into any possible combination. And yet, the majority 
against Ministers was so crushing! 

The debate itself was characterized particularly by the different 
departments of the Government quarreling among themselves. 
Each of them threw the blame upon the other. Sidney Herbert, 
Secretary at War, said it was all the fault of the transport service; 
Bernal Osborne,? Secretary of the Admiralty, said it was the 
viciously rotten system at the Horse Guards*' which was at the 
bottom of all the mischief; Admiral Berkeley, one of the Lords of 
the Admiralty, pretty distinctly advised Mr. Herbert to pull his 
own nose, &c. Similar amenities passed in the House of Lords, at 
the same time, between the Duke of Newcastle, War Minister, and 
Viscount Hardinge, Commander-in-Chief.© Mr. Herbert’s position, 
it is true, was rendered extremely difficult by Lord John Russell, 
who, in explanations respecting his resignation, confessed that all 
that the press had said on the state of the Crimean army was 
substantially correct, and that the condition of the troops was 
“horrid and heart-rending.” After this, Sidney Herbert could do 

“ Lord John Russell’s speech in the House of Commons on January 26, 1855. 
The Times, No. 21962, January 27, 1855.— Ed. 

no better than to give in to the facts without a murmur, and to 
make a series of extremely lame and partly unfounded excuses. 
He had to confess, even more pointedly, the complete incapacity 
and disorganization of the War Administration. We have succeeded 
with comparative ease in bringing 240,000 tuns of stores of all 
descriptions, and a numerous army, after a 3,000 miles’ journey, 
to Balaklava; and now follows a glowing account of all the 
clothing, the housing, the provisions, the luxuries even, sent in 
profusion to the army. But, alas! It was not at Balaklava they were 
wanted, but six miles higher up the country. Three thousand miles 
we can carry all the stores; but three thousand and six— 
impossible! The fact that they had to go six miles further has 
ruined everything! 

For all that, his deprecating attitude might have aroused some 
pity for him, had it not been for the speeches of Layard, Stafford, 
and his own colleague, Gladstone.* The two former members had 
but lately returned from the East; they had been eye-witnesses to 
what they recounted. And far from merely repeating what the 
papers had already published, they gave instances of neglect, 
mismanagement and incapacity; they described scenes of horror 
far surpassing what had been known before. Horses, shipped on 
sailing transports from Varna to Balaklava without any provender 
to feed them; knapsacks made to journey five or six times from 
the Crimea to the Bosphorus, while the men were starving, and 
cold and wet for want of their clothes contained in them; 
“reconvalescents” sent back for active duty to the Crimea while 
too weak to stand on their legs; then the disgraceful state of 
neglect, of exposure, of filth, to which the sick and wounded were 
exposed in Scutari, as well as in Balaklava and on board the 
transports—all this formed a picture, compared to which the 
descriptions of “Our Own Correspondent,” or of private letters 
from the East, were pale in the extreme. 

To counteract the terrible effect of these descriptions, the sapi- 
ent self-complacency of Mr. Gladstone had to take its stand on the 
breach; and, unfortunately for Sidney Herbert, he retracted all the 
confessions made by his colleagues on the first night of the debate. 
Herbert had been asked point-blank by Roebuck: You sent 54,000 
men from this country; there are now only 14,000 under arms; 
what has become of the remaining 40,000? Herbert merely replied 

by reminding Roebuck that some of them had died already at 
Gallipoli and Varna; he never questioned the general correctness 
of the numbers quoted as lost or disabled. But Gladstone now 
turns out to be better informed than the Secretary at War, and 
actually makes the army number, not 14,000, but 28,200 men, 
besides from 3,000 to 4,000 marines and sailors serving on shore, 
“at the dates of the last returns which have reached us!” Of 
course, Gladstone takes good care not to say what these “dates of 
the last returns” are. But in view of the exemplary idleness 
displayed in all departments, and most particularly in the Brigade, 
Divisional and General Staffs, as evinced by the slow returns of 
casualties, we may be allowed to suppose that Mr. Gladstone’s 
wonderful returns bear a date somewhere about the first of 
December, 1854, and include a great many men who were 
definitively knocked up by the six weeks bad weather and 
overwork following that date. Gladstone appears actually to have 
that blind faith in official documents which he on former 
occasions expected the public to have in his financial statements. 

I will not enter into a more lengthened analysis of the debate. 
Beside a host of dii minorum gentium,* Disraeli spoke, also 
Walpole, the late Tory Home Secretary, and finally Palmerston, 
who “nobly” stood up for his calumniated colleagues.” Not a word 
had he said in the whole course of the debate, until he had 
ascertained its drift clearly. Then, and then only, he got up. The 
rumors brought up to the Treasury Bench by their understrap- 
pers, the general disposition of the House, made a defeat 
certain—a defeat which ruined his colleagues, but could not 
injure him. Though ostensibly turned out along with the 
remainder, he was so safe of his position, he was so sure to profit 
by their retirement, that it devolved upon him, almost as a duty 
of courtesy, to bow them out. And of this he acquitted himself by 
his speech just before the division. 

Palmerston, indeed, has managed his resources well. Voted to 
be, on the Pacifico question, the “truly English Minister,” *? he 
has held that character ever since, to such an extent that in spite 
of all astounding revelations, John Bull always thought himself 
sold to some foreign power as soon as Palmerston left the Foreign 
Office. Ejected out of this office by Lord John Russell in a very 

unceremonious way, he frightened that little man into silence 
respecting the causes of this ejection, and from that moment the 
“truly English Minister” excited a fresh interest as the innocent 
victim of ambitious and incapable colleagues, as the man whom 
the Whigs had betrayed. After the downfall of the Derby 
Ministry, he was put into the Home Office, a position which again 
made him appear the victim. They could not do without the great 
man whom they all hated, and as they would not put him into that 
position which belonged to him, they put him off with a place far 
too low for such a genius. So thought John Bull, and was prouder 
still of his Palmerston, when he saw how the truly English Minister 
bustled about in his subordinate place, meddling with Justices of 
the Peace, interfering with cabmen, reprimanding Boards of 
Sewerage, trying his powers of eloquence upon the licensing 
system, grappling with the great Smoke Question, attempting 
police centralization, and putting a barrier in the way of 
intramural interments. The truly English Minister! His rule of 
conduct, his source of information, his treasury of new measures 
and reforms, were the interminable letters of “Paterfamilias”* i 

The Times. Of course, nobody was better pleased than ae 
familias, whose like form the majority of the voting middle classes 
of England, and Palmerston became their idol. “See what a great 
man can make of a little place! what former Home Secretary ever 
thought of removing such nuisances!” For all that, neither were 
cabs reformed, nor smoke suppressed, nor intramural church- 
yards done away with, nor the police centralized, nor any of these 
great reforms carried—but that was the fault of Palmerston’s 
envious and thick-headed colleagues! By and by, this bustling, 
meddling propensity was considered as the proof of great energy 
and activity; and this unsteadiest of all English statesmen, who 
never could bring either a negotiation or a bill in Parliament to a 
satisfactory issue, this politician who stirs about for the fun of the 
thing, and whose measures all end in being allowed to go quietly 
to sleep—this same Palmerston was puffed up as the only man 
whom his country could count upon in great emergencies. The 
truth is, he contributed a great deal to this puffing himself. Not 
content with being co-proprietor of The Morning Post, where he 
was advertised every day as the future savior of his country, he 
hired fellows like the Chevalier Wykoff to spread his praise in 
France and America; he bribed, a few months ago, The Daily 
News, by communication of telegraphic dispatches and other 

useful hints; he had a hand in the management of almost every 
paper in London. The mismanagement of the war brought on that 
emergency in which he intended to rise great, unattained and 
unattainable, upon the ruins of the Coalition. In this decisive 
moment he procured the unreserved support of The Times. How 
he managed to bring this about, what contract he made with Mr. 
Delane, of course we cannot tell. Thus, the day after the vote, the 
whole daily press of London, The Herald only excepted, with one 
voice cried out for Palmerston as Premier; and we suppose he 
thought he had obtained the object of his wishes. Unfortunately, 
the Queen has seen too much of the truly English Minister, and 
will not submit to him, if she can help it. 

Written on February 2, 1855 Reproduced from the New-York 

Tribune, No. 1016, February 20, 1855