Karl Marx

Lord John Russel

Written from 25 July to 12 August 1855.

I

["Neue Oder-Zeitung" No. 347 of 28 July 1855]

London, 25 July. It is an old Whig axiom, which Lord John Russell loved to quote, that "parties resemble snails, in which the tail moves the head". Little did he suspect that the tail, to save itself, would cut off the head. If not the head of the "last of the Whig Cabinets", he was unquestionably the head of the Whig Party. Burke once said:

"The number of estates, country seats, castles, woodlands, etc., which have been extorted from the English people by the Russells is quite incredible" (quite incredible).

More incredible would be the reputation that Lord John Russell enjoys, and the prominent role he has dared to play for more than a quarter of a century, did not the "number of estates" which his family has usurped provide the key to the riddle.

Throughout his whole life, Lord John seemed only to hunt for posts and to cling to the posts he had bagged so obstinately as to forfeit every claim to power. Thus 1836-1841, when the post of leader of the Commons had fallen to him. Thus 1846 to 1852, when he called himself prime minister. The semblance of power that surrounded him as the leader of a state-treasury-storming opposition vanished each time on the day when he came to power. As soon as he turned from an Out <oppositionist> into an In <government member>, it was all up with him. In no other English statesman has power ever turned into impotence to the same degree. But no other has also ever known how to raise his impotence to power so well.

Apart from the influence of the ducal Bedford family, whose younger son Lord John is, the illusory power which he periodically commanded was supported by the lack of all qualities that generally enable a man to rule over other men. His diminutive view of all things communicated itself to others as if by contagion and contributed more to confusing the judgement of his hearers than the most ingenious distortion could have done. His true talent consists in the ability to reduce everything he touches to his own dwarfish dimensions, to contract the external world to an infinitesimally small scale and to transform it into a vulgar microcosm of his own invention. His instinct to belittle the great is only surpassed by his art of making the petty seem great.

Lord John Russell’s whole life was a life on false pretences – false pretences of parliamentary reform, false pretences of religious freedom, false pretences of free trade. So sincere was his faith in the sufficiency of false pretences that he deemed it altogether feasible not only to be a British statesman on false pretences, but also a poet, thinker, and historian on false pretences. Only in this way is it possible to account for the existence of such trifles as his tragedy “Don Carlos, or the Persecution” or his “Essay on the History of the English Government and Constitution from the Reign of Henry VII to the Present Time” or his “Memoirs of the Affairs of Europe since the Peace of Utrecht”. To the egotistical narrowness of his mind, every object presents nothing but a tabula rasa on which he is at liberty to write his own name. His opinions never depended on the reality of facts, but for him the facts themselves depend on the order in which he arranges them in phrases. As a speaker, he has left behind not a thought worth mentioning, not one profound maxim, no solid observation, no powerful description, no beautiful idea, no vivid allusion, no humorous picture, no true sentiment. “The tamest mediocrity”, as Roebuck admits in his History of the Reform Ministry, surprised his hearers, even when he performed the greatest act of his public life, when he brought his so-called Reform Bill into the House of Commons. He possesses a peculiar manner of combining his dry, dragging, monotonous, auctioneer-like delivery with schoolboyish illustrations from history and with a certain solemn gibberish about the “beauties of the constitution”, the “general liberties of the country”, “civilisation”, and “progress”. He falls into real warmth only when personally irritated or when his opponents goad him from his feigned attitude of arrogance and self-sufficiency into all the symptoms of passionate weakness. In England it is generally agreed to explain his countless blunders by a certain instinctive rashness. In fact, this rashness, too, is only false pretence. It reduces itself to the inevitable friction of evasions and expedients, calculated only for the present hour, with the unfavourable constellation of the following hour. Russell is not instinctive, but calculating; but small, like the man, is his calculation – always only a makeshift for the next hour. Hence constant vacillations and tortuous windings, rapid advances, ignominious retreats, defiant words prudently swallowed again, proud pledges shabbily redeemed and, if nothing else avails, tears and sobs to soften the world. Hence his whole life can be regarded either as a systematic sham <swindle> or as an uninterrupted blunder.

It may seem marvellous that any public character has survived such armies of stillborn measures, slaughtered projects, and aborted schemes. But as the polyp thrives by amputation, so Lord John Russell by abortion. The majority of his plans were brought forward only for the purpose of appeasing the discontent of his allies, the so-called Radicals, while an understanding with his opponents, the Conservatives, secured him the “burking” <“suppressing”> of these plans. Since the days of the reformed Parliament, who could name a single one of his “large and liberal measures”, his “great reform instalments”, on whose fate he made the fate of his Cabinet dependent? On the contrary. What contributed more than anything else to keep and prolong his ministry was the proposing of measures to satisfy the Liberals and their withdrawal to satisfy the Conservatives. There are periods in his life when Peel deliberately kept him at the helm so as not to be forced to do things which he knew Russell would only talk. In such epochs of secret understanding with the official opponent, Russell developed impudence towards his official allies. He became brave – on false pretences.

We shall cast a retrospective glance at his performances from 1830 until now. This genius of everydayness deserves it.

II

["Neue Oder-Zeitung" No. 359 of 4 August 1855]

London, 1 August.

“If I were a painter,” said Cobbett, “there I would place the English constitution, under the figure of an old oak, rotten at the root, its root dead, its trunk hollow, tottering on its foundation, tossed to and fro by every gust of wind, and here I would set down Lord John Russell, in the person of a wren, endeavouring to set everything to rights by pecking after some tiny insects on the half-decayed bark of one of the lowest branches. Some even suspect that he gnaws at the buds, under pretence of clearing the bark of noxious insects.”

So diminutive were Russell’s reform attempts in his antediluvian period of 1813-1830, but diminutive as they were, they were not even sincere. He did not hesitate for a moment to repudiate them, on the mere scent of a ministerial post.

Since 1807 the Whigs had vainly languished for a share in the tax-consuming function, when in 1827 the formation of Canning’s Cabinet, with which they pretended to sympathise on subjects of trade and foreign policy, seemed to offer them the long-sought opportunity. Russell at that time had one of his wren-motions for parliamentary reform on the order of the day, when Canning declared his firm resolve to resist any parliamentary reform to the end of his life. Up rose Lord John to withdraw his motion.

“Parliamentary reform,” he said, “was a question on which great diversity of opinion prevailed among those who defended it, and the leaders of the Whigs had always been unwilling to recognise it as a party question. It was now for the last time that he brought this question forward.”

He ended his speech with the insolent declaration: “The people no longer desire parliamentary reform.” He, who had always boasted of his noisy opposition to Castlereagh’s notorious six coercive acts of 1819, now abstained from all voting on a motion by Hume for the repeal of one of these acts, which exposed a man to lifelong transportation for any printed work in which even the tendency was found to expose either of the Houses of Parliament to contempt.

Thus, at the close of the first period of his parliamentary life, we find Lord John Russell giving the lie to his more than ten years’ reform professions and in complete agreement with Horace Walpole’s, that prototype of the Whigs, remark to Conway:

“Popular bills are never seriously proposed, but always only as a party instrument, and not as a pledge for the realisation of such extravagant ideas!”

It was thus in no way Russell’s fault if, instead of bringing forward the reform motion for the last time in May 1827, he had to repeat it four years later, on 1 March 1831, in the shape of the famous Reform Bill. This Bill, on which he still bases his claim to the admiration of the world in general and of England in particular, had by no means him for its author. In its main features, the breaking up of the greater part of the electoral boroughs, the addition of county members, the franchise for copyholders, leaseholders and 24 of the most important English trading and manufacturing towns, it was a copy of the Bill which Earl Grey (the head of the Reform Ministry of 1830) had introduced to the House of Commons in 1797, when in opposition, but had wisely forgotten when he found himself in the Cabinet in 1806. It is the same Bill, superficially modified. Wellington’s expulsion from the Cabinet because he declared against parliamentary reform, the French July revolution, the threatening great Political Unions formed by the middle and working classes in Birmingham, Manchester, London, etc., the peasant war in the agricultural counties, the red cock that carried its fire through the most fertile districts of England – all these circumstances forced the Whigs to propose some Reform Bill. They yielded, sullenly, hesitatingly, after vainly repeated attempts to secure their posts through a compromise with the Tories. They were prevented from doing so at once by the formidable attitude of the people and the rigid intransigence of the Tories. Scarcely, however, had the Reform Bill been raised to law and put into practice, when, to use Bright’s words (of 6 June 1849), the people “began to feel that it had been duped”.

Never perhaps has a mighty and, to all appearance, successful popular movement run out into such puny seeming results. Not only were the working classes excluded from all political influence, the middle classes themselves soon discovered that it was no figure of speech when Lord Althorp, the soul of the Reform Cabinet, called out to his Tory opponents:

“The Reform Bill is the most aristocratic measure that was ever offered to the nation.”

The new county representation far outweighed the increase of votes granted to the towns. This franchise, given to tenants-at-will, made the counties even more completely tools of the aristocracy. The substitution of £10 householders for the payers of scot and lot deprived a large part of the urban population of their franchise. The granting and withdrawing of the right to vote was calculated, on the whole, not to increase the influence of the middle classes, but to exclude Tory and promote Whig influence. By a series of the most extraordinary subterfuges, tricks and frauds, the inequality of the electoral districts was maintained, the monstrous disproportion between number of representatives and population and importance of the constituencies re-established. While some 56 rotten boroughs, each with a handful of inhabitants, were abolished, entire counties and populous towns were turned into rotten boroughs. John Russell himself admits, in a letter to his Stroud constituents “On the Principles of the Reform Bill” (1839), that “the £10 franchise was fettered by regulations of all kinds, and the annual registration of voters made a source of chicanery and expense.” Where intimidation and traditional influence could not be perpetuated, they were replaced by bribery, which, since the passing of the Reform Bill, became the cornerstone of the British constitution. Such was the Reform Bill of which Russell was the trumpeter, without being its author. The only clauses that are demonstrably his own invention are the clause requiring all freeholders, except the clergy, to have a year’s possession of their land, and the other clause by which Tavistock, the “rotten borough” of the Russell family, kept its privileges unimpaired.

Russell was only a subordinate member of the Reform Ministry (from 1830 to November 1834), namely Paymaster of the Forces without a voice in the Cabinet. He was perhaps the most insignificant among his colleagues, but, for all that, the youngest son of the influential Duke of Bedford. It was therefore agreed to leave him the honour of introducing the Reform Bill into the House of Commons. One obstacle stood in the way of this family arrangement. During the reform movement before 1830, Russell had always figured as “Henry Brougham’s little man.” The Reform Bill could not be entrusted to Russell for introduction as long as Brougham sat beside him in the House of Commons. The obstacle was removed by hurling the vain plebeian into the House of Lords onto the woolsack. As the more important members of the original Reform Cabinet soon entered the Upper House (for instance, Althorp in 1834), died out, or went over to the Tories, not only did the entire legacy of the Reform Ministry fall to Russell, but he was soon regarded as the father of the child at whose baptism he had merely stood godfather. He flourished on the false pretext of being the author of a Reform Bill which was itself a falsification and an escamotage. Otherwise, during the years 1830-1834, he distinguished himself only by the vexatious bitterness with which he opposed every inquiry into the pension list.

III

[“Neue Oder-Zeitung” No. 363, 7 August 1855]

London, 3 August. We return to the characterisation of Russell. We shall dwell on him at greater length, partly because he is the classical representative of modern Whiggism, and partly because his history, at least from one aspect, includes the history of the reformed Parliament down to the present time.

In his preface to the Reform Bill, Russell made the following declaration with regard to the ballot (voting by ballot) and short parliaments—the Whigs, as is well known, turned the one-year parliaments of England into triennial parliaments in 1694, and into septennial parliaments in 1717:

“There can be no doubt that the ballot has much to recommend it. The arguments advanced in its favour are as ingenious and striking as any I ever heard advanced on any disputed point. Nevertheless, the House must beware of coming to a hasty decision ... The question of short parliaments is of the utmost importance. I leave it to another member of the House to bring it forward at a future time, as I must not overload my great subject with details.”

On 6 June 1833, he maintained that he had

“refrained from moving these two measures in order to avoid a collision with the House of Lords, although opinions (!) deeply rooted in his breast convinced him that they were essential to the happiness, the prosperity, and the welfare of the country.” (Here one has at the same time an example of his species of rhetoric.)

In consequence of this “deeply rooted conviction,” he showed himself throughout his whole ministerial career a constant and implacable enemy of the ballot and of short parliaments. At the time these declarations were made, they served as a double expedient. They calmed the suspicious democrats of the House of Commons; they intimidated the recalcitrant aristocrats of the House of Lords. However, as soon as Russell had secured the favour of the new Court of Queen Victoria (see Brougham’s reply to Russell’s letter to the electors of Stroud, 1839) and now fancied himself an immortal office-holder, he came forward with his declaration of November 1837, in which he justified “the extreme length to which the Reform Bill had gone” on the ground that it blocked the possibility of any further advance.

“The object of the Reform Bill,” he said, “was to increase the preponderance of the landed interest, and it was intended as the permanent settlement of a great constitutional question.”

In short, he came forward with his finality declaration, which earned him the title of “Finality-John.” He was, however, no more in earnest about “finality,” about standing still, than about going forward. It is true, he opposed Hume’s motion for parliamentary reform in 1848. With the combined power of the Whigs, Tories, and Peelites, he again defeated Hume when the latter made a similar motion in 1849, by a majority of 268 to 82. Emboldened by the conservative reserve, he defiantly challenged:

“When we framed and proposed the Reform Bill, we desired to adapt the representation of this House to the other powers of the State, and to keep it in harmony with the constitution. Mr. Bright and his associates are so exceedingly narrow-minded, their judgment and their intellect are confined within such narrow limits, that it is positively impossible to make them comprehend the great principles on which our ancestors founded the constitution of the country, and which we, their successors, humbly admire and seek to imitate. The House of Commons, in the 17 years which have elapsed since the Reform Bill, has satisfied all just expectations. The existing system, although somewhat irregular, works well, and works well precisely because of its irregularity.”

But when, in 1851, Russell suffered a defeat on the occasion of Locke King’s motion to extend the county franchise to occupiers of a yearly value of £10—when he found himself compelled to resign for a few days—the necessity of a new Reform Bill suddenly dawned upon his “broad-minded” intellect. He pledged himself to the House to bring one in. He concealed what his “measure” was to consist of, but he drew a bill on it, payable at the next session of Parliament.

“The claim of the present Ministry to the place it occupies,” declared the Westminster Review, the organ of the so-called Radicals allied with Russell, at that time, “had become the byword of scorn and reproach, and at last, when its fall and the destruction of its party seemed inevitable, Lord John came out with the promise of a new Reform Bill for 1852. Stick to your posts, he cries, until that time, and I will satisfy your yearning with a broad and liberal reform measure.”

In 1852 he did, in fact, propose a Reform Bill, this time of his very own invention, but of such marvellously Lilliputian proportions that neither the Conservatives thought it worth attacking, nor the Liberals worth defending. At any rate, the reform abortion provided the little man with the pretext, when at last he had to retire from the ministry, to fling a Scythian arrow in flight at his victorious successor, the Earl of Derby. He made his exit with the pompous threat that he would “insist on the extension of the suffrage.” The extension of the suffrage had now become a “matter of the heart” to him. Hardly ejected from the Cabinet, this child of expediency, now dubbed “Foul weather Jack” (Schlecht-Wetter-Hans) by his own supporters, invited to his private residence in Chesham Place the various fractions from whose marriage the sickly monster of the Coalition was born. He did not forget to send for the “exceedingly narrow-minded” Brights and Cobdens, in solemn assembly to apologise to them for his own broad-mindedness, and to issue them a fresh bill on a “larger” reform account. As a member of the Coalition Cabinet, in 1854, he amused the Commons with yet another reform project, which he knew was destined to be sacrificed, like another Iphigenia, by him, another Agamemnon, for the benefit of another Trojan expedition. He performed the sacrifice in the melodramatic style of Metastasio, his eyes filled with tears, which, however, dried up as soon as the “unsubstantial” seat he occupied in the Cabinet was exchanged, by means of a paltry intrigue against Mr. Strutt, one of his own partisans, for the presidency of the Council, salary £2,000.

The second reform scheme was intended to prop up his falling Cabinet, the third to bring down the Tory Cabinet. The second was an evasion, the third a piece of chicanery. The second he framed so that nobody wanted to take it up; the third he brought forward at a moment when nobody could take it up. In both he proved that, if destiny intended him for a minister, nature intended him for a tinker, like Christopher Sly. Even the first and only realised Reform Bill he understood only in its oligarchic trick, not in its historic dodge.

IV

[“Neue Oder-Zeitung” No. 365, 8 August 1855]

London, 4 August. With the outbreak of the anti-Jacobin war, the influence of the Whigs in England began to ebb, sinking ever lower. They therefore turned their eyes to Ireland, decided to throw it into the scales, and wrote on their party banner: Irish Emancipation. When they came into office for a moment in 1806, they did indeed bring forward a small Irish Emancipation Bill in the House of Commons, carried it through the second reading, and then voluntarily withdrew it again, in order to flatter the bigoted idiocy of George III. In 1812 they sought, though in vain, to press themselves upon the Prince Regent (afterwards George IV) as the only possible instruments of reconciliation with Ireland. Before and during the reform agitation they cringed before and around O’Connell, and the “hopes of Ireland” served them as a mighty war-engine. Nevertheless, at the first meeting of the first reformed Parliament, the first act of the Reform Ministry consisted in a declaration of war against Ireland, in the “brutal and bloody” measure of the “Coercion Bill,” which subjected Ireland to martial law. The Whigs fulfilled their old promises “with fire, imprisonment, transportation, and even death.” O’Connell was prosecuted and sentenced for insurrection. Meanwhile, the Whigs had the

The Coercion Bill for Ireland was brought in and carried only on the explicit undertaking that another Bill, a Bill on the
English Established Church in Ireland,
would be introduced. This Bill – they had further bound themselves – was to contain a clause placing certain
surpluses
from the revenues of the Established Church in Ireland at the disposal of Parliament. Parliament, in turn, was to dispose of them in the interest of Ireland. The importance of this clause lay in the recognition of the principle that Parliament possesses the power of expropriating the Established Church – a principle of which Lord John Russell ought to have been all the more firmly convinced, inasmuch as the entire immense fortune of his family consists of former church property. The Whigs promised to stand or fall by that Church Bill. But as soon as the Coercion Bill had been voted through, they, on the pretext of avoiding a collision with the House of Lords, withdrew the above-mentioned clause, the only one that gave their Church Bill any value. They outvoted and defeated their own proposal. This happened in 1834.

Towards the end of the same year, however, an electric shock seemed to have reanimated the Irish sympathies of the Whigs. They had, you see, been obliged to clear the Cabinet for Sir Robert Peel in the autumn of 1834. They had been flung back onto the Opposition benches. And at once we find our John Russell busily engaged in the work of reconciliation with Ireland. He was the principal agent in the negotiations for the Lichfield House Compact, which was concluded in January 1835. In it, the Whigs cede to O’Connell the patronage (appointment to offices, etc.) in Ireland, while O’Connell secures them the Irish votes inside and outside Parliament. But a
pretext
was necessary to drive the Tories out of Downing Street. Russell, with characteristic “impudence”, chose the
church revenues
of Ireland as the battlefield and, as his war cry, the very same
clause –
which had become notorious under the name of the
Appropriation Clause
– that he and his colleagues of the Reform Ministry had
themselves
withdrawn and sacrificed shortly before. Peel was indeed defeated under the cry of the “Appropriation Clause”. The Melbourne Cabinet was formed, and Lord John Russell installed himself as Home Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons. He now praised himself, on the one hand, for his intellectual firmness, because, though now in office, he continued to stick to his
opinions
on the Appropriation Clause; and, on the other hand, for his moral moderation, because he refrained from
acting
on these opinions. He never translated them from words into deeds. As Prime Minister, in 1846, his moral moderation triumphed over his intellectual firmness to such an extent that he repudiated even the “opinion”. He knew, he exclaimed, of no more fatal

measures than those that threatened the Established Church in its substantial root, its revenues.

In February 1833, John Russell denounced the Irish
Repeal agitation
in the name of the Reform Ministry.

“Its real aim,” he cried to the Commons, was “without ceremony to overthrow the united Parliament and to put in place of the King, Lords, and Commons of the United Kingdom a Parliament whose leader and head would be O’Connell.”

In February 1834 the Repeal agitation was again denounced in the Speech from the Throne, and the Reform Ministry proposed an address in order

“to declare in the most solemn manner that it is the irrevocable determination of Parliament to maintain the legislative Union of the three kingdoms inviolate and undisturbed.”

But scarcely had they been stranded on the Opposition sandbanks when John Russell declared:

“As regards the
Repeal of the Union,
that subject lies open to amendment and question like any other act of the legislature,”

that is, neither more nor less than any Beer Bill.

In March 1846, John Russell overthrows Peel’s administration through a coalition with the Tories, who were burning to chastise the apostasy of their leader from the Corn Laws. The pretext was furnished by Peel’s Irish
“Arms Bill”,
against which Russell, in moral indignation, lodged an unconditional protest. He becomes Premier. His first act consists in moving that very same “Arms Bill”. However, he cuts a sorry figure to no purpose. O’Connell had just conjured up monster meetings against Peel’s Bill, he had had petitions drawn up bearing 50,000 signatures; he was in Dublin, from where he set all the springs of the agitation in motion. King Dan (the popular title of Daniel O’Connell) would have lost kingdom and revenue if he had appeared as Russell’s accomplice at this moment. He therefore gave the little man threatening notice to withdraw his Arms Bill at once. Russell withdrew it. O’Connell, as, despite his secret game with the Whigs, he understood masterfully, added humiliation to their defeat. So that no doubt might remain at
whose behest
the retreat was sounded, he announced the withdrawal of the Arms Bill to the Repealers in Conciliation Hall in Dublin on 17 August,
the very same day
that John Russell announced it to the House of Commons. In 1844, Russell denounced Sir Robert Peel because he had “filled Ireland with troops and was not governing the country, but occupying it militarily”.

In 1848, Russell occupied Ireland militarily, imposed the Treason Felony Act upon it, proclaimed the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and boasted of Clarendon’s “energetic measures”. This energy too was a false pretext. In Ireland there stood, on the one side, the O’Connellites and the priests, secretly in understanding with the Whigs; on the other, Smith O’Brien and his followers. The latter were simply dupes <the deceived; the led-on>, who took the Repeal game seriously and therefore came to a farcical end. The “energetic measures” taken by Russell’s government and the brutalities it set in motion were therefore not called for by the circumstances. They aimed, not at upholding English rule in Ireland, but at prolonging the Whig regime in England.

V

[“Neue Oder-Zeitung” No. 369, 10 August 1855]

London, 6 August. The
Corn Laws
were introduced in England in 1815 because Tories and Whigs had agreed to raise their ground-rent by a tax on the nation. This was achieved not only through the fact that the Corn Laws – the laws against the importation of foreign corn – artificially raised corn prices in certain years. Looking at the average period from 1815 to 1846, still more important, perhaps, was the illusion of the farmers that Corn Laws were capable of keeping corn prices at a height fixed
a priori
under all circumstances. This illusion affected the leases. In order to freshen it up constantly, we find Parliament constantly busy with new and improved editions of the Corn Law of 1815. If corn prices proved recalcitrant, if they fell despite the dictates of the Corn Laws, then parliamentary committees were appointed to investigate the causes of the “agricultural distress” (the distress in the agricultural districts). The “agricultural distress”, insofar as it was the subject of parliamentary inquiries, was in fact confined to the disproportion between the prices that the farmer paid the landowner for the soil and the prices at which he sold his agricultural products to the public – to the
disproportion between ground-rent and corn prices
. It was therefore simply to be resolved by a reduction of ground-rent, the revenue source of the landed aristocracy. Instead

of this, the latter naturally preferred to “reduce” corn prices by legislative means; one Corn Law was displaced by another slightly modified one; the adverse effect was explained away by inessential details, which a new Act of Parliament might correct. Thus, if the price of corn was kept above its natural level under certain circumstances, the price of
ground-rent
was kept above its natural level under
all
circumstances. Since what was at stake here was “the most sacred interests” of the landed aristocracy, its ready cash revenue, its two factions, Tories and Whigs, were equally willing to venerate “the Corn Laws” as fixed stars elevated
above
their party struggle. The Whigs even resisted the temptation to harbour liberal “views” on this subject, all the more so because at that time the prospect seemed remote of being able to cover any possible losses in the ground-rent by regaining the leasehold on government posts. In order to secure the vote of the financial aristocracy, both factions voted the Bank Act of 1819, by which public debts contracted in depreciated money had to be serviced at interest in full-weight coin. The nation, which had perhaps received a loan of £50, had to pay back £100. Thus the assent of the financial aristocracy to the Corn Laws was purchased. Fraudulent increase of the state revenue for fraudulent increase of the ground-rent – such was the compact between the financial aristocracy and the landed aristocracy. One will not, then, be astonished when Lord
John Russell,
in the parliamentary elections of 1835 and 1837, condemns every
Corn Law reform
as harmful, absurd, impracticable, and unnecessary. From the very beginning of his ministerial career he rejected any such proposal, at first in a lofty manner, then with passion. In his defence of high corn duties he left Sir Robert Peel far behind. The prospect of famine in the years 1838 and 1839 was unable to shake either him or the other members of the Melbourne Cabinet. What the distress of the nation could not do, the distress of the Cabinet could. A deficit in the Exchequer of £7,500,000 and Palmerston’s foreign policy, which threatened to bring about a war with France, induced the House of Commons, on Peel’s motion, to pass a vote of no confidence in the Melbourne Cabinet. This occurred on 4 June 1841. The Whigs, always as greedy to snatch at places as they are incapable of filling them and unwilling to give them up, attempted, though in vain, to escape their fate by a dissolution of Parliament. Then there awoke in John Russell’s profound soul the idea of conjuring away the Anti-Corn Law agitation, just as he had helped to conjure away the Reform movement. He therefore suddenly declared himself in favour of a “moderate fixed duty” instead of the sliding scale – friend as he

is of “moderate” political chastity and of “moderate” reforms. He did not scruple to parade through the streets of London in a procession of government electoral candidates, accompanied by standard-bearers who had stuck two loaves of bread on their poles, in screaming contrast to one another: one, a twopenny loaf with the inscription
“Peel Loaf”,
and the other, a one-shilling loaf with the inscription
“Russell Loaf”
. This time, however, the nation did not allow itself to be deceived. It knew from experience that the Whigs promised loaves and paid with stones. Despite Russell’s ridiculous carnival procession, the new election gave the Whig government a minority of 76. It had to break camp at last. Russell revenged himself for the poor service the moderate fixed duty had rendered him in 1841 by quietly allowing Peel’s “sliding scale” to crystallise into law in 1842. He now despised the “moderate fixed duty”; he turned his back on it; he dropped it, without dropping a word about it.

During the years 1841-1845 the Anti-Corn-Law League grew to colossal dimensions. The old compact between the landed aristocracy and the financial aristocracy no longer secured the Corn Laws, for the industrial bourgeoisie had more and more become the leading component of the middle classes instead of the financial aristocracy. For the industrial bourgeoisie, however, the abolition of the Corn Laws was a question of life. Reduction of the costs of production, expansion of foreign trade, increase of profit, reduction of the main source of revenue and hence of the power of the landed aristocracy, rise in its own political power – the Corn Law repeal of the industrial bourgeoisie. In the autumn of 1845 it found terrible allies in the potato blight in Ireland, the dearness of grain in England, and a bad harvest in the greater part of Europe. Sir Robert Peel, intimidated by the threatening conjunctures, therefore held a series of cabinet meetings at the end of October and in the first weeks of November 1845, in which he proposed the suspension of the Corn Laws and even alluded to the necessity of their definitive revocation. A delay in the decisions of the cabinet was caused by the stubborn resistance of his colleague Stanley (now Lord Derby).

John Russell, at that time on a pleasure trip in Edinburgh during the parliamentary recess, got wind of the proceedings in Peel’s cabinet. He resolved to take advantage of the delay caused by Stanley, to anticipate Peel in a popular position, to give himself the appearance of having determined Peel, and thus to rob his presumable deed of all moral weight. Accordingly, on 22 November 1845, he addressed a letter full of peevish and malicious insinuations against Peel from Edinburgh to his City constituents, under the pretext that the ministers were dallying too long in arriving at a decision on the Irish distress. The periodic famine in Ireland in the years 1831, [18]35, [18]37 and [18]39 had never been able to shake Russell’s and his colleagues’ faith in the Corn Laws. But now he was all fire. Even so monstrous a misfortune as the famine of two nations conjured up before the eyes of the little man nothing but visions of mousetraps for the rival “at the post”. In his letter he sought to conceal the real motive of his sudden conversion to free trade under the following sinner’s confession:

“I confess that, on the subject in general, my views have undergone a great change in the course of 20 years. I used to be of the opinion that corn formed an exception to the general rules of political economy; but observation and experience have convinced me that we must abstain from any interference in the supply of food.”

In the same letter he reproached Peel with having not yet interfered in the supply of food to Ireland. Peel caught the little man in his own trap. He resigned, but left a note for the Queen in which he promised Russell his support, should he undertake to carry through the abolition of the Corn Laws. The Queen sent for Russell and commissioned him to form a new cabinet. He came, saw – and declared himself unable, even with the support of his rival. That was not what he had meant by the affair. For him it had only been a false pretext, and they threatened to take him at his word! Peel returned to office and abolished the Corn Laws. The Tory party was broken and dissolved by his act. Russell allied himself with it to overthrow Peel. Hence his claims to the title of “free trade minister”, which he paraded in Parliament a few days ago.

VI

[“Neue Oder-Zeitung” No. 377 of 15 August 1855]

London, 12 August. We return once more to Lord John Russell, to conclude his characterisation. At the beginning of his career he acquired a sort of name on the pretext of tolerance, and at the end of his career on the pretext of bigotry; once by his motion for “repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts”, the other time by his “Ecclesiastical Titles Bill”. The Test and Corporation Acts prevented Dissenters from holding public offices. They had long become a dead letter when Russell moved his well-known repeal motion in 1828. He defended it on the grounds that he was convinced “the repeal of the acts would increase the security of the established church”. A contemporary writer reports to us: “No one was more astonished at the passing of the motion than the mover himself.” The mystery is simply solved by the observation that the Tory ministry itself proposed the Catholic Emancipation Bill a year later (1829), and therefore absolutely had to wish to be provisionally rid of the “Test and Corporation Acts”. For the rest, the Dissenters have received nothing from Lord John but promises, whenever he found himself in opposition. In the ministry he opposed even the abolition of church rates.

His anti-Pope clamour is, however, still more characteristic of the hollowness of the man and the pettiness of his motives. We have seen that in 1848 and 1849 he defeated the reform motions of his own allies by a union of the Whigs with the Peelites and Tories. Thus dependent on the conservative opposition, his ministry had become very fragile and vacillating in the year 1850, when the papal bull for the establishment of a Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and the appointment of Cardinal Wiseman as Archbishop of Westminster provoked a superficial excitement among the most hypocritical and silliest part of the English people. Russell, in any case, was not surprised by the steps of the Pope. His father-in-law, Lord Minto, was in Rome when the “Roman Gazette” <“Gazetta di Roma”> published Wiseman’s appointment in 1848. Indeed, we learn from Cardinal Wiseman’s “Letter to the English People” that the Pope had already communicated the bull for the establishment of the hierarchy in England to Lord Minto in 1848. Russell himself took some preparatory steps by having the titles of the Catholic clergy officially recognised by Clarendon and Grey in Ireland and the colonies. Now, however, considering the weakness of his cabinet, troubled by the historical memory that the anti-Pope clamour had thrown the Whigs out of government in 1807, fearing that Stanley might imitate Perceval and anticipate him during the absence of Parliament, just as he had sought to anticipate Sir Robert Peel with the Corn Law repeal – persecuted by all these forebodings and spectres, the little man made a salto mortale into unbridled Protestant passion. On 4 November 1850 he published the notorious “Letter to the Bishop of Durham”, in which he assures the bishop:

“I agree with you in considering the latest attack of the Pope upon our Protestantism as insolent and insidious, and I therefore feel as indignant as you can be about this matter.”

He speaks of “the active attempts which at this moment are at work for the restriction of the mind and the bondage of the soul”. He calls the Catholic ceremonies “mummery of superstition, upon which the great mass of the nation looks with contempt”, and he finally promises the bishop to initiate new laws against papal usurpation, should the old ones prove insufficient. The same Lord John had declared in 1845, though at that time out of office:

“I believe that we can repeal those clauses which prevent a Roman Catholic bishop from assuming titles borne by the bishops of the established church. Nothing can be more absurd and childish than to maintain such distinctions.”

In 1851 he introduced his Ecclesiastical Titles Bill to uphold these “absurd and childish distinctions”. But since he was defeated during that year by a combination of the Irish Brigade with Peelites, Manchester men, etc. – on the occasion of Locke King’s motion for the extension of the franchise – his Protestant zeal evaporated, and he promised an amendment of the bill, which indeed came into the world stillborn.

As his anti-Pope zeal was a false pretext, so was his zeal for Jewish emancipation. All the world knows that his Jewish Disabilities Bill <Bill for the Removal of the Jews’ Legal Disabilities> is an annual farce – bait for the votes over which the Austrian Baron Rothschild disposes in the City. A false pretext, his declarations against slavery.

“Your opposition,” Lord Brougham writes to him, “to all motions in favour of the Negroes and your resistance even to the mere attempt to check the newly established slave trade widened the breach between you and the country. The imagination that you, the opponents of all anti-slavery motions in 1838, the enemies of every interference with the existing assemblies of the colonies composed of slave-holders, that you should suddenly have so fallen in love with the Negroes as to risk your posts in 1839 on a bill for their benefit, would betray a remarkable disposition for self-deception.”

A false pretext, his legal reforms. When Parliament passed a vote of no confidence in the Whig cabinet in 1841 and the impending dissolution of the House of Commons promised little success, Russell tried to rush a Chancery Bill <Chancery Court Bill> through the House, in order

“to cure one of the most pressing evils of our system, the delay in the Courts of Equity, by means of the creation of two new judges of equity” (judges who take not strict law but equity as their guiding rule).

Russell called this bill of his “a great instalment of legal reform”. His real aim was to smuggle two Whig friends into the newly created posts before the expected formation of a Tory cabinet. Sir Edward Sugden (now Baron St. Leonards), seeing through him, moved the amendment that the bill should only come into force on 10 October (that is, after the meeting of the newly elected House). Although not the slightest change was made in the content of the bill, which Russell held to be so “urgent”, he immediately withdrew it after the adoption of the amendment. It had become a “farce” and had lost its salt.

Colonial reforms, educational schemes, “liberties of the subject”, public press and public meetings, war enthusiasm and yearning for peace – all false pretexts for Lord John Russell. The entire man is a false pretext, his whole life a lie, his whole activity a continuous chain of petty intrigues aimed at the attainment of shabby ends – the swallowing of public monies and the usurpation of the mere semblance of power. No one has ever so strikingly verified the biblical saying that no man can add one cubit to his stature. Placed by birth, connections, and social accidents on a gigantic pedestal, he always remained the same homunculus – a dwarf dancing on the tip of a pyramid. History has perhaps never exhibited another man – so great in his littleness.