In recording the advent of Lord Palmerston’s Government to 
what we are confident must prove a brief and not verv brilliant 
career, it seems not improper to cast a glance at the history of its 
predecessor, of which it is hard to say whether the splendor of its 
opening pretensions, the momentous nature of the events in which 
it participated, its unprecedented incapacity, or the ignominy of its 
downfall will the most distinguish the future record of its 
existence. 

It will be remembered that Lord Aberdeen and his Coalition 
came into office through the vote which upset, on the 16th 
December, 1852, the Derby Administration. Disraeli, in a vote 
upon his budget, was left in a minority of nineteen, under the 
pretext that his extension of the house-tax and of the general area 
of direct taxation was not in harmony with Whig and Peelite 
principles of sound political economy. The vote, however, was in 
reality carried by the Irish Brigade,**' whose motives, as is well 
known, are of a far less theoretical nature; and even the so-called 
Liberals and liberal Conservatives had to belie their words by their 
acts when they repeated in their own budget many of Disraeli’s 
proposals and most of his arguments. At all events, the Tories 
were turned out, and, after some struggles and fruitless attempts, 
this Coalition was formed, by which, according to The London 
Times,* England had now arrived “at the commencement of the 
political millennium.”” This millennium lasted exactly two years 

“ The Times, No. 21316, January 4, 1853, leader.— Ed. 

and one month; it ended in universal defeat and disaster, amid 
the general indignation of the British people. The very Times 
which inaugurated the reign of “All the Talents” as a millennium, 
was, of all journals, the one which contributed most toward its 
downfall. 

The Talents met Parliament on the 10th of February, 1853. 
They recited over again the identical Whig programme which 
Lord John Russell had already once inaugurated in 1850 and 
which had then very soon led to a ministerial turn-out. As to the 
main question, Parliamentary Reform, that was a matter which 
could not be thought of before “next session.” For the present the 
country was to be satisfied with minor, but more plentiful and 
more practical administrative reforms, such as law-reform, railway- 
regulations, and improvements in education. The retirement of 
Lord John Russell from the Foreign office, where he was replaced 
by Lord Clarendon, was the first of the changes which characterize 
this talented administration, and which all ended in the institution 
of new places, new sinecures, new salaries’ for its faithful 
supporters. Russell was for a time a member of the Cabinet, 
without any function but that of Leader of the House of 
Commons, and without salary; but he very soon applied for 
the latter commodity, and finally was elevated to the style and 
title of President of the Council, with a good round sum per 
annum. 

On the 24th of February Lord John brought in his bill for 
removal of Jewish Disabilities, which ended in nothing, being 
burked by the House of Lords. On the 4th of April, he followed it 
up by his Educational Reform bill. Both bills were as tame and 
innocuous as could be expected from a Do-Nothing Ministry. 
Meanwhile, Palmerston, in his position as Home Secretary, 
discovered the new gunpowder-plot, the great Kossuth-Hale 
rocket affair.**? Palmerston, it will be recollected, had Mr. Hale’s 
rocket factory searched, and a quantity of rockets and composition 
seized; the matter was made a great deal of, and when discussed 
in Parliament, on April 15, Palmerston gave it still greater 
importance by his mysterious language. But about one point he 
used no mystery; he declared himself the general informer of the 
Continental police, with regard to refugees, quite as openly as Sir 
James Graham had done in 1844, on the occasion of the opening 
of Mazzini’s letters. At last, however, the affair had to be virtually 
abandoned by the noble informer, in as much as Mr. Hale could 
only be charged with having carried on a manufacture of 
explosive matter at an unlawful proximity to the suburbs of 

London; and the great plot for blowing up all Europe was 
reduced to a simple, fineable contravention of police regulations! 

It was now Russell’s turn again. On May 31, in a speech in the 
House, he offended the Roman Catholics—the men who had put 
him in office—in such a manner that the Irish members of the 
Administration at once resigned. This was more than the “strong 
Government” could stand. The support of the Irish Brigade was 
the first condition of its existence, and, consequently, Aberdeen, in 
a letter to one of the Irish members, had to disavow his colleague, 
and Russell had to retract in Parliament.* 

The main feature of this session was the East India bill, by 
which the Ministry proposed, without any material improvement 
of Indian government, to renew the East India Company’s charter 
for twenty years. This was too bad, even for such a Parliament, 
and had to be abandoned. The charter was to be revocable by 
Parliament at a year’s notice. Sir Charles Wood, the late bungling 
Chancellor of the Exchequer of the Russell Cabinet, now proved 
his capabilities in the Board of Control, or Indian Board. The 
whole of the reforms proposed were confined to a few petty 
alterations of doubtful effect in the judicial system, and the 
throwing open of civil employments and the scientific military 
service to public competition. But these reforms were merely 
pretexts; the real gist of the bill was this: Sir Charles Wood got his 
salary as President of the Board of Control raised from £1,200 to 
£5,000; instead of 24 India Directors elected by the Company, 
there were to be only 18, six of whom were in the gift of 
Government, an accession of patronage which was the less 
despicable as the Directors’ salaries were raised from £300 to 
£500, while the Chairman and Deputy-Chairman received £1,000. 
Not satisfied with this waste of public money, the Governor- 
General of India, formerly at the same time Governor of Bengal, 
was now to have a separate Governor of that Presidency under 
him, while a new Presidency, with a new Governor, was to be 
created on the Indus. Every one of these Governors must, of 
course, have his Council, and overpaid and Juxurious sinecures the 
seats in these Councils are. How happy India should be, governed 
as it is, at last, according to unsophisticated Whig principles! 

Then came the Budget. This splendid financial combination, 
along with Mr. Gladstone’s scheme for doing away with the 

“ Aberdeen to Monsell, June 3, 1853. The Times, No. 21447, June 6, 1853; 
No. 21448, June 7, 1853.— Ed. 

national debt, has been so fully illustrated in The Tribune* that it is 
needless to recount its features. Many of them were taken from 
Disraeli’s budget, which had so much roused the virtuous 
indignation of Gladstone; nevertheless the reduction of the tea 
duty, and the extension of direct taxation, were common to both 
budgets. Some of its most important measures were forced upon 
the great financier after his opposition against them had been 
repeatedly voted down in Parliament; thus the repeal of the 
Advertisement duty, and the extension of the Succession duty to 
landed property. The reform of the Licensing system, several 
times remodeled pending the discussion, had to be dropped. The 
budget, brought out with pretensions to a complete system, 
transformed itself during the debate into a confused muixtum 
compositum? of unconnected little items, hardly worth a hundredth 
part of the talk they occasioned. 

As to the reduction of the national debt, Gladstone broke down 
still more completely. This scheme, brought forward with still 
greater pretensions than the budget, resulted in creating 2'/, per 
cent. Exchequer bonds, instead 1 per cent. Exchequer bills, the 
public thus losing 1'/> per cent.on the whole amount; in the 
necessity for the repayment, at the greatest public inconvenience, 
of the whole amount of the Exchequer bills, as well as of 8 
millions of South Sea‘ stock; and in the total failure of his 
Exchequer bonds, which nobody would take. By this wonderful 
arrangement, Mr. Gladstone had the satisfaction of seeing the 
balance in the Exchequer diminished, on the Ist April 1854, from 
£7,800,000 which it was a year before, to £2,800,000, thus. 
reducing, on the very eve of a war, the available funds of the 
public treasury by five millions. All this in the face of the secret 
correspondence of Sir H.Seymour, by which the Government 
must have known a year beforehand that a war with Russia was 
inevitable. 

The new Irish Landlords and Tenants’ bill,“** brought in under 
Lord Derby, by the Tory Napier, passed the Commons with at 
least some show of consent on the part of the Ministry; the Lords 
threw it out, and Aberdeen stated, on the 9th of August, his 
satisfaction at this result. The Transportation bill,**? Navigation 
bill, and others which passed into law, had been inherited from 
the Derby Cabinet. The bills on Parliamentary Reform, National 

Education Reform, and almost all bills on Law Reform, had to be 
postponed. The British Whigs seem to consider it a misfortune 
that any of their measures should escape this fate. The only bill 
which passed, and which may be considered as the rightful 
property of this Ministry, is the Great Cab Act, which had to be 
reformed the day after its passage, in consequence of a general 
rebellion of the cabmen. Not even a set of regulations for cabs 
could All the Talents bring into successful existence. 

On the 20th of August,1853, Palmerston dismissed Parliament 
with the assurance that the people might be tranquil as to the 
Eastern difficulties; the evacuation of the Principalities was 
guaranteed by “his confidence in the honor and character of the 
Russian Emperor, which would move him to withdraw his troops 
from the Principalities!” On the 3d December, the Turkish fleet 
was destroyed by the Russians at Sinope. On the 12th, the Four 
Powers sent a note to Constantinople, in which, in reality, far 
more concessions were asked from the Porte than even in the 
preceding note of the Vienna Conference.”° On the 14th, the 
British Ministry telegraphed to Vienna that the Sinope affair was 
not considered an obstacle to the continuation of the negotiations. 
Palmerston consented expressly to this; but on the next day 
he resigned—ostensibly for some difference respecting Rus- 
sell’s Reform bill, in reality, in order to make the public believe 
that he had resigned on grounds of foreign and war-policy. 
His purpose being obtained, he re-entered the Cabinet after a 
few days and thus avoided all unpleasant explanations in Parlia- 
ment. 

In 1854, the performance opened with the resignation of one of 
the junior Lords of the Treasury, Mr. Sadleir, who also was the 
Ministerial broker of the Irish brigade. Scandalous disclosures in 
an Irish Court of law, deprived the Administration of his talents. 
Afterward fresh scandalous matter came forward. Mr. Gladstone, 
the virtuous Gladstone, attempted to procure the governorship of 
Australia for one of his relations, his own secretary, a certain 
Lawley, known only as a betting-man and a jobber on the Stock 
Exchange; but, fortunately, the matter crept out too soon. In the 
same way, the same Gladstone was unpleasantly connected with 
vice by the absconding with a considerable amount of public 
money, of one O’Flaherty, a man employed under him and placed 
in his post by him. Another individual, of the name of Hayward, 
wrote a voluminous pamphlet of no literary or scientific value 
against Disraeli, and was rewarded by Gladstone with an office in 
the Poor-Law Board. 

Parliament met in the beginning of February. On the 6th 
Palmerston gave notice of a bill for the organization of the militia 
in Ireland and Scotland; but, as war was actually declared on the 
27th March, he considered it his duty not to bring it forward 
before the end of June. On the 13th Russell brought in his 
Reform bill, only to withdraw it ten weeks later, “with tears in his 
eyes,” also because war had been declared.* In March, Gladstone 
comes forward with his budget, asking merely “for the sum which 
would be necessary to bring back the 25,000 men about to leave the 
British shores.”” Thanks to his colleagues, he is now saved that 
trouble. In the meantime the Czar, by the publication of the 
secret correspondence, forced the French and English Cabinets to 
declare war. This secret correspondenee, beginning with one of 
Russell’s dispatches of the 11th January, 1853,° proved that at that 
time the British Ministers were fully aware of the aggressive 
intentions of Russia. All their assertions about the honor and 
character of Nicholas, and the pacific and moderate attitude of 
Russia, now looked like so many barefaced untruths, invented 
merely to humbug John Bull. 

On the 7th of April, Lord Grey, feeling a strong vocation for 
the post of Minister of War, in order to ruin discipline in the army 
as he had ruined allegiance in almost every British Colony during 
his former Colonial administration—Lord Grey launched a 
philippic against the present organization of the War Department. 
He asked for a consolidation of all its offices under one War 
Minister. This speech gave Ministers an opportunity to create, in 
June, a new Secretaryship for War, by separating the War 
Department from the Colonial Department. Thus everything was 
left as defective as heretofore, while merely a new office with a 
new salary was created. The whole of that session of Parliament 
may be summed up thus: seven principal bills were brought in; of 
these, the bills for the change of the Law of Settlement,’ for 
Public Education in Scotland, and for the reconstruction of 
Parliamentary oaths*—another shape of the Jews bill—were 
defeated; three others, the Bribery Prevention bill, the Civil 
Service Reorganization bill, and the Reform bill, were withdrawn; 
one bill, the Oxford University Reform bill, passed, but in a 
dreadfully mutilated state. 

Times, No. 21713, April 12, 1854.— Ed. 

> Mr. Gladstone’s speech in the House of Commons on March 6, 1854. The 
Times, No. 21682, March 7, 1854.— Ed. 

The conduct of the war, the diplomatic efforts of the Coalition 
need not here be alluded to. They are fresh in the memory of 
everybody. Parliament, prorogued on the 12th of August last, met 
again in December to pass hurriedly two measures of the utmost 
urgency; the Foreign Legion bill, and the bill permitting the 
Militia, as such, to volunteer for service abroad. Both of them have 
remained, to this day, a dead letter. In the mean time the news of 
the disastrous state of the British army in the Crimea arrived. The 
public indignation was roused; the facts were glaring and 
undeniable; Ministers had to think of retreat. Parliament met in 
January, Roebuck gave notice of his motion, Lord J. Russell at 
once disappeared, and a defeat unparalleled in Parliamentary 
history upset All the Talents after but a few days’ debate. 

Great Britain has had many a seedy administration to boast of, 
but a Cabinet so seedy, needy and greedy, and at the same time so 
presumptuous as All the Talents, never existed. They began with 
unbounded boasting, lived upon hair-splitting and defeat, and 
ended in disgrace as complete as it is possible for man to attain. 

Written on February 1, 1855 Reproduced from the New-York