Neue Oder-Zeitung.
No. 263, 9 June 1855.
Midday Edition

X. London, 6 June. (Parliamentary.) Palmerston has again demonstrated his old mastery in handling diplomacy through Parliament and Parliament through diplomacy. The policy of the ministry was to be discussed on the basis of the amendments by Baring, Heathcote and Lowe. The amendments rested all together on the basis of the Vienna Conference. During Whitsun week Palmerston spirited away the Vienna Conference, invoking against Austria the past parliamentary debate, and before the reassembled Parliament he spirits away the debate, invoking the past Conference, which now exists only in legend. With the Vienna Conference fall the amendments resting on its presupposition, with the amendments falls the discussion on the policy of the ministry, with this discussion the necessity for the ministry to declare itself on the tendency, purpose and object of the "new" war. This object, so David Urquhart, alias Daoud Bey, assures us, is none other than to familiarise the allied troops with the summer diseases of the Crimea, after they have tried out the winter diseases of the Crimea. And if Urquhart does not understand everything, he understands his Palmerston. Only he deceives himself as to the power of the secret intention over public history. Palmerston thus declares to the reassembled Parliament that no subject remains for deliberation and that the House can now do nothing better than direct a war address to the Crown, i.e. give the ministry a vote of confidence. For the moment he founders on the obstinacy of the parliamentarians, who have rehearsed long speeches on the amendments and want to get their commodity to market. However, through the dissolution of the Conference he has broken the point off these speeches, and the horror vacui, boredom, will drive Parliament to accept his address. To save itself from the speeches, it will reach for the address.

Lowe's amendment had changed its meaning with the changed situation. Originally it signified breaking off the Vienna Conference. Now it signifies sanctioning the Vienna Conference and the ministerial diplomacy, insofar as it elevates the reduction of Russian sea power in the Euxine, formulated by Russell, to the ultimate purpose, the actual object of the war. A stumbling block for the peace party, insofar as it is too much, for the war party, insofar as it is too little, it is a stumbling block for the ministry, insofar as it demands any object at all, an avowed object of the war. Hence the phenomenon that peace men and Tories were now in favour of, and the ministry against, continuing the debate on Lowe's amendment; hence Palmerston's attempt to throw it overboard. The attempt failed. He therefore adjourned the debate until Thursday evening. A day gained. In the interim the Vienna farewell protocol has been printed. It is laid before the House. A new incidental point arises, and Palmerston can hope, with his dissolving views, to remove the actual subject at issue from the eye of the debate.

The two-day parliamentary discussion was as tedious, dragging, confused as can only be expected of speeches whose point has been broken off in advance. It offered, however, the characteristic spectacle that, whereas before the vote on Disraeli's resolution the peace men coquetted with the ministry, they now coquetted with the opposition—we mean the opposition by trade. It showed furthermore the entente cordiale between the Peelites and the Manchester School. The Peelites are plainly flattering themselves that, after the peace, they will rule England at the head of the industrial bourgeoisie. Thus, after long wanderings, the Peelites would finally have a real party behind them, and the industrialists would finally have found professional statesmen. While the peace men have thus won Gladstone, Graham & Co., they have lost the "radical" Sir William Molesworth, a friend of more than twenty years. Molesworth must have read in the Hobbes he edited "that understanding comes through the ears". He therefore appealed not to the understanding, but to the ears. He did what Hamlet forbids the player to do. He over-tyrannised the tyrant, was more Russell than Russell himself. He had also read in his Hobbes that all men are equal, because each can take the other's life. Since his concern is now to eke out his ministerial life, he spoke in the spirit of the men who can take it from him. It remained curious to see this calculating machine break into dithyrambs. Not even Babbage would have foreseen that in his "Philosophy of Machines".

Milner Gibson, the baronet from the environs of Manchester, was monotonous, soporific, dried up and desiccating. He has evidently learned from the neighbouring metropolis of English industry to deliver as much as possible at the lowest possible production costs. He is a man whose whole appearance betrays that he bores himself. Why should he seek to amuse his fellow man? Tit for tat! Moreover, he plainly counts wit, spirit, liveliness among the faux frais de production, and it is the first law of the economic school to which he belongs to avoid "false costs". Bulwer hovered between the heroic mood of his "King-Maker" and the contemplative one of his "Eugene Aram". In the first he hurled down the gauntlet to Russia and in the second he wreathed a myrtle garland round the head of Metternich. Milner Gibson, Molesworth and Bulwer were the coryphaei of the first evening, Cobden, Graham and Russell of the second. Cobden's speech alone merits an analysis, which space and time do not permit at this moment. Let us only note that he asserts Bonaparte was ready to accept the last Austrian proposals. The late Sir Robert Peel's Dirty Boy, who lately has taken to "sentiments", "broken hearts" and "love of truth", spoke a self-apologia for his neighbour, namely Sir James Graham. He had forbidden Napier to act in the Baltic Sea until the season had arrived when any action is ruinous for the English fleet. He had forbidden Dundas to bombard Odessa. He had thus neutralised the English fleet in the Baltic as well as in the Black Sea. He justifies himself with the size of the fleets he equipped. The mere existence of these fleets was the proof of English power. Their action was therefore superfluous. A few days ago Napier addressed a laconic letter to a friend of Urquhart's, which Urquhart read out at the Stafford meeting. This letter reads verbatim: "Sir! I hold Sir J. Graham capable of any baseness. Ch. Napier."

Russell, finally, surpassed himself. At the beginning of his speech he declared the great question before the house was the following: "If we wish to make peace, what peace terms can we obtain? If we wish to continue the war, for what purposes do we continue it?" As regards the first question, one found his answer in the Vienna Protocols. As regards the second, the object of the war, his answer must be a very general one, namely none at all. If one wished to take the phrase "security for Turkey" as an answer, he had no objection. One interpretation of this "security" was given in the Vienna Note; another in the four points; to find a third was not Russell's business, but the war's. It was Napoleon's principle that the war must cover its own costs; it is Russell's principle that the war must find its own object.