Karl Marx

["Neue Oder-Zeitung" Nr. 267 vom 12. Juni 1855]

London, June 9. The great parliamentary debate has ended, or rather has perished – in a torrent of words. Baring’s motion passed without objection “amidst the general laughter of the House”. The motion, insipid as it is, concludes with a warlike address to the Crown. Did the House declare the war “une guerre pour rire” <“a war for laughter”> or did it declare itself “un parlement pour rire” <“a parliament for laughter”>? In any case, the real conclusion of the two-week debate lay not in the adoption of Baring’s motion – a mere formality – but in the general laughter, the spontaneous, unparliamentary muscular spasm, the indiscreet cry of nature, in which the “Honourable House” buried motions and counter-motions, amendments and sub-amendments, the Ministry and the Opposition, speeches, counter-speeches, sermons, deductions, piercing sarcasm and pathetic adjuration, prayer for peace and clamour for war, tact and tactlessness, itself and its vote. The House saved itself from the ridiculous situation by laughing at itself. Thus it confessed that in its parliamentary medium world-historical earnestness is first twisted into conventional earnestness, until the affected earnestness flips over into natural merriment.

Every attempt to drive Palmerston towards formulating ministerial policy, towards a declaration on the subject, tendency, and aim of the war, failed completely. He declared outright: “It is impossible to question a minister, indeed any one of your acquaintances, about the subject of the war.” What served him above all were the peace men. You wish to know why we are waging war? There is Richard Cobden, who wants peace at any price. Do you not prefer war without any price to peace at any price? Strike at Richard Cobden! In this way he constantly interposed Cobden or Bright or Graham or Gladstone between himself and his antagonists.

The cotton heroes served him not only as wadding with which he padded his military coat. More than that. He manufactured gunpowder out of cotton. At the same time it became apparent during the debate that Palmerston now possesses in Russell, as formerly in Aberdeen, a lightning conductor, a lightning conductor belonging to the cabinet itself, for his sacrosanct person. To that end he had sent Russell to Vienna, for the purpose of converting him into his lightning conductor. And just as earlier Layard and Co. held Aberdeen responsible for the “shortcomings” <“deficiencies”> of the heroic Palmerston, so now Roebuck holds Russell responsible. As he was hampered then by the Peelites, so now he is hampered by the Russellites in the “wingbeat” of his “free soul”. He has these weights dangling from him, not, like Black Forest clocks, to make him go, but to enable him to strike false.

All the cliques of the House of Commons have emerged damaged from the conventional sham fight. The Peelites have at last admitted that they were hitherto officers without armies. They have abandoned the claim to form a separate faction and have openly attached themselves to the Manchester School. Entrusted with the direction of the armies and the navy during the first year of the war, they have, through the confession of faith in eternal peace, foolishly denounced themselves as the traitors within the coalition, to the gleeful astonishment of Palmerston-Russell. They have made themselves impossible.

The Manchester School indeed wants peace, in order to be able to wage war industrially, abroad and at home. It wants the rule of the English bourgeoisie on the world market, where battle is to be fought solely with its weapons, bales of cotton, and in England itself, where the aristocrat is to be eliminated as superfluous for modern production, and the proletarian, as a mere tool of this production, is to be subjugated, but it itself, as the director of production, is also to direct the state and appropriate the dignities of state. And now Cobden denounces a clergyman, Dr. Griffiths, because he declared the House of Lords superfluous at a public meeting. And Bright weeps over the fate of the royal children, whom the ruin connected with the war will compel to wash their own shirts. Both denounce popular agitation. These are the heroes of the Anti-Corn Law League, who, borne aloft on the waves of popular agitation, denounced the “barbaric splendour of the Crown”, lords, landed aristocracy, etc., as “false costs of production”? Their whole point lay in the struggle against the aristocracy, the peace homily not excepted. And now they denounce the masses to the aristocracy! Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. <And in order to live, to lose the reasons for living. (Juvenal, Satira VIII. 85)> The Manchester School, in this debate, has renounced the ground of its existence.

The Tories, for their part, have uncovered a peace party in their own bosom and have proved that they have preserved the tradition of being representatives of English nationalism as little as their hatred of the “Bonapartes”.

Finally, the ministerialists? Nothing characterises them better than their convulsive clinging to a motion which Palmerston himself had been obliged to reject a week earlier, which the mover wanted to drop, which Walpole accepted on behalf of the Tories, Gladstone on behalf of the peace men, and the House on behalf of “general hilarity”.

The “Morning Herald” has received the following dispatch from the Gulf of Finland:

“Sixteen miles from Kronstadt, May 28. The ‘Orion’ has carried out a reconnaissance. She reports that the Russian squadron at Kronstadt consists of 6 seaworthy ships of the line, nearly as many dismasted ships of the line, 13 ships of the line which, judging by their appearance, have been converted into floating batteries, 8 large steamers, and a great number of gunboats – it was not possible to count them. On a visit to Bomarsund we found everything there in the state in which we had left it; the Russians have done nothing to rebuild the fortifications. Not a single inhabitant showed himself. The penalties imposed on those who traded with the allied squadrons last year have made the population very cautious.”