Karl Marx

Palmerston [and the English Oligarchy]

[“Neue Oder-Zeitung” Nr. 105 vom 3. März 1855]

London, 27 February. Palmerston has ironically responded to the outcry against the aristocracy with a ministry of 10 lords and 4 baronets — plus 10 lords, 8 of whom sit in the House of Peers. To the impatience over the compromise between the various fractions of the oligarchy, he retorts with a compromise between various families within the Whig faction. In his ministry the Grey clan is accommodated, the ducal Sutherland family, and finally the Clarendon family. The Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, is a cousin of Earl Grey, whose brother-in-law is Sir Charles Wood, the First Lord of the Admiralty; Earl Granville and the Duke of Argyll represent the Sutherland family. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Chancellor of the Exchequer, is a brother-in-law of the Earl of Clarendon, the Foreign Secretary. India alone has fallen to an untitled man, though married into the Whig families, Mr Vernon Smith. A kingdom for a horse! cried Richard III. A horse for a kingdom! cries Palmerston, imitating Caligula, and makes Vernon Smith the Grand Mogul of India.

“Lord Palmerston,” complains the Morning Advertiser, “has not only given us the most aristocratic administration of which our history affords example, but he has put together his government out of the most miserable aristocratic material that could be found.” But, the worthy Advertiser consoles itself, “but Palmerston is still not a free agent, he is still in chains and bonds, etc.”

As we predicted <See present volume, p. 89>, Lord Palmerston has formed a cabinet of ciphers, with himself as the only digit. Lord John Russell, who undiplomatically threw him out of the Whig cabinet in 1851, he has diplomatically sent travelling. He used the Peelites to take up the legacy of Aberdeen. Once the premiership was secured, he dropped the Aberdeenites and, as Disraeli says, stole not only the Whig wardrobe from Russell, but the Whigs themselves. Despite the great similarity, indeed the almost identity of the present government with Russell’s Whig administration of 1846-1852, nothing would be more mistaken than to confuse them. This time it is not a matter of a cabinet at all, but of Lord Palmerston in place of a cabinet. Although the personnel is largely the old, the offices are so distributed among them, its following in the House of Commons is so different, and it reappears under such completely changed circumstances, that whereas it was previously a weak Whig ministry, it now forms the strong dictatorship of a single man — provided that Palmerston is no sham Pitt, Bonaparte no sham Napoleon, and Lord John Russell remains travelling. Vexed as the English bourgeois is by the unexpected turn of events, he is for the moment amused by the unscrupulous dexterity with which Palmerston has duped and overreached friend and foe. Palmerston, says the City merchant, has once again shown that he is “clever”. “Clever” is, however, an untranslatable epithet, ambiguous, many-sided. It embraces all the qualities of a man who knows how to put himself forward and is just as well versed in his own advantage as in the harm of others. Moral as the English bourgeois is, respectable as he is, he admires above all the man who is “clever”, whom morality does not embarrass, whom respect does not distract, who regards principles as snares with which to trip up his fellow-men. If Palmerston is so “clever”, will he not outwit the Russians just as he outwitted Russell? Thus the politician of the higher English middle class.

As for the Tories, they believe the good old times restored, the evil coalition spell broken, and the traditional alternation of government between Whigs and Tories reintroduced. A real change, not limited to mere passive dissolution, would indeed likely come only under a Tory government. Only when the Tories are at the helm does the mighty pressure from without — the pressure from without — begin, and the inevitable upheavals are set in motion. Thus Catholic emancipation under the Wellington ministry, thus the repeal of the Corn Laws under the Peel ministry, thus — if not the Reform Bill, at least the Reform agitation, which was more significant than its result.

When the English specially brought a Dutchman over the sea <William III of Orange> to make him king, it was to introduce with the new dynasty a new epoch — the epoch of the marriage of the landed aristocracy and the financial aristocracy. Since that time we find the privilege of blood and the privilege of gold in constitutional equilibrium down to the present day. Blood, e.g., predominates in part of the appointments in the army through family connection, nepotism, favouritism, but the principle of gold gets its due by all officers’ commissions being saleable and purchasable for hard cash. It is calculated that the officers currently serving in the regiments have a capital of £6 million fixed in their commissions. The poorer officer, in order not to lose the right acquired in the service and be outbid by a young moneybag, borrows capital to secure his advancement, and thus becomes an encumbered being.

As in the army, so in the church the principle of the family is accompanied by the cash principle. If one part of the church falls to the younger sons of the aristocracy, the other belongs to the highest bidder. The traffic in the “souls of the English people” — so far as they belong to the established church — is no less regular than the slave trade in Virginia. In this trade there exist not only buyers and sellers, but also brokers. One such “clerical” broker, named Simpson, appeared yesterday before the Court of Queen’s Bench <Chief Court> and demanded his fees from a certain Lamb, who had contractually undertaken to procure for him the presentation to the living of Westhackney for the Rev. Josiah Rodwell, Simpson having stipulated for 5 per cent from buyer and seller, together with some incidental perquisites. Lamb had not fulfilled his obligation. The matter was thus connected: Lamb is the son of the 70-year-old rector of two livings in Sussex, whose market price is estimated at £16,000. The price is naturally in direct proportion to the revenue of the living, and in inverse proportion to the age of the incumbent. The young Lamb is the patron of the livings held by the old Lamb, and at the same time the brother of a still younger Lamb, the incumbent and parson of Westhackney. Since the rector of Westhackney is still very young, the market price of the next presentation to his sinecure stands comparatively low. Although its revenue is £550 a year, together with a parson’s house, its owner sells the next presentation for only £1,000. His brother promises him the livings in Sussex on the death of the father, but sells, through Simpson, his thus vacated place in Westhackney for £3,000 to Josiah Rodwell, thereby pocketing a net profit of £2,000, his brother gets a better living, and the broker would have made a deal of £300 at 5 per cent commission. It did not come out how the contract fell through. The court awarded broker Simpson £50 compensation “for work done”.