The electoral lists are being closed. Their clearest sum is 
Palmerston’s triumph, a great change in the personnel of the 
House, involving about one-fourth of its members, and_ its 
unprecedented loss in intellectual character. The computations, 
however, of the English papers as to the numerical force of the 
Ministerial majority, their bickerings and squabbles about these 
computations, and still more, their classifications under exploded 
rubrics of the newly-returned members, are silly work altogether. 
While The Morning Post, for instance, glories in a Ministerial 
majority of 80 votes, the Disraeli Press estimates the loss of its own 
men at four in the boroughs and about 20 in the counties. 
According to The London Times, the exclusion of the Peelites and 
the Manchester men*" and professional Protectionists has restored 
Parliament to its status quo ante, and delivered it back to its 
legitimate owners, the antediluvian parties of Whigs and Tories. It 
would fain persuade the world that 

“the British people have gone back to what they were some thirty years ago.” 

The Disraeli Press is not very far from indorsing The Times’s 
opinion. This optimist creed, with which the oligarchy may try to 
comfort themselves, is, however, no more absurd than that of the 
sham Radicals, such as The Examiner. 

“A Reform Parliament,” says it, ““answers to Lord Palmerston’s appeal.’” 

He has asked for a lot of lackeys, and the enlightened country, 
that is to say, a small minority of privileged electors, returns his 

5 The Times, No. 22648, April 7, 1857, leading article.— Ed. 

compliment by sending him a band of tribunes of the people! 
While roaring “Palmerston forever!” they are only playing a trick 
on the wily Viscount! If the new Parliament initiate a great 
movement, it will be certainly no fault of its own, and Great 
Britain, like Sinbad the Sailor, will find it more difficult to throw 
off the old man than to saddle him on her shoulders.’ 

In comparing the new House to its predecessors, it seems 
opportune to begin with the old parliamentary sections that have 
completely vanished during the electoral struggle—the Peelite 
fraction and the Manchester School. 

In contradistinction to Whigs, Tories and the Manchester 
School, the Peelite fraction did not represent a class or fractions of 
a class. They were a mere Parliamentary clique, which, without the 
walls of both Houses, might number friends, but could never 
muster an army. Relics of a bygone administration; estranged 
from the Tories by the Corn-Law?”” treason of their late chief”; 
loth to dissolve in the Whig ranks from the memory of old feuds, 
and the conviction, cherished by themselves and accepted to a 
certain degree by the public, that the administrative talent of the 
country centered in them; prevented by their aristocratic connec- 
tions from mixing into one mass with the Manchester School, sure 
of influencing Parliamentary debates from the rhetorical ability of 
some of their members,—this pretentious nucleus of self-styled 
statesmen fluctuated uncertain, impossible of classification, and 
representing under the form of a peculiar Parliamentary party the 
decomposition of all Parliamentary parties effected by Peel’s 
free-trade legislation. This principle of dissolution to which they 
owed their origin, they worked out by helping to overthrow the 
Derby Ministry, and by giving their nominal chief‘ to the 
combination of parties known as the Coalition Cabinet or the 
Cabinet of all the talents.’’* On the visible precipitation of the 
Parliamentary dissolving process, on their band devolved the 
honor of hoisting the colors under which the mutual suicide of the 
old parties was to be consummated. While thus securing to 
themselves for a moment a supreme position, they were simultane- 
ously destroying the only reason for their existence as a separate 
body. The joint stock power of the combined parties ended 
necessarily in their common impotence and their joint prostration 
before one man. The Peelites held the ladder on which 
Palmerston mounted. 

Having already, in 1852, lost half of their forces on the electoral 
battle-field, the elections of 1857 have swept away their whole 
rank and file. The two Phillimores, Lord Hervey, Sir G. Clark, Sir 
Stafford Northcote, Lord W. Powlett, A. Gordon, Sutton, Har- 
court, Lushington, Smythe, Sir J. W. Hogg of East Indian 
memory, Roundell Palmer, and lastly, Mr. Cardwell, are all gone. 
The last-named gentleman had, on Palmerston’s accession to the 
Premiership, had the Chancellorship of the Exchequer offered to 
him,. which he declined, however, on the advice of Gladstone, 
Graham & Co. Yet, in the dying session of the now buried House 
of Commons, hoping to take the wind out of Gladstone’s sails, he 
seceded from his friends and voted on the Budget division with 
Palmerston. Finally, during the Canton debates, being apprehen- 
sive lest the tide should turn, he again shifted sides, returned to 
the Peelite circle, and countersigned Mr. Cobden’s motion of 
censure. This gentlenian is thus a true pattern of the curious 
association, distinctive of the Peelite clique, of moral nicety with 
unscrupulous place-hunting. The whole Peelite rank and file being 
now gone to the wall, there remain only its three generals, 
Mr. Gladstone, Sir James Graham and Mr. Herbert, three units 
unable to form a trinity, opposite as they are to one another by 
origin and predilections; Sir James Graham having started into 
public life from Radicalism, Mr. Gladstone from high Toryism, 
and Mr. Herbert as a nondescript. 

One revelation made by Mr. Herbert on the hustings to his 
South Wilts constituents is characteristic of the manner in which 
Palmerston did the Peelites. Nothing had made them so unpopular 
as the conduct of the Russian war, and especially the sparing of 
Odessa,*'? which was accounted for by Mr. Herbert being the 
nephew of Prince Woronzoff. Foremost in spreading the en- 
venomed calumny were Palmerston’s myrmidons, such as The 
Morning Post, The Sun, and The Morning Advertiser. Now, 
Mr. Herbert told his electors that he had actually signed an order to 
attack Odessa, and that on his secession from office Lord 
Palmerston issued the order to spare the place.* This ranks on one 
line with Lord John Russell’s revelation on the City of London 
hustings.” He notoriously broke down in consequence of his 
Vienna Embassy.°*”° During the election turmoil, the beery Morning 

on April 1, 1857, The Times, No. 22644, April 2, 1857.— Ed. 

1857, The Times, No. 22640, March 28, 1857.— Ed. 

Advertiser, the licensed victualers’ own paper and Palmerston’s 
mob-organ—he has organs of all sorts and for all tastes, from the 
fashionable saloon to the tap-room—almost drowned its hoary 
voice in the cry of Russell’s great Vienna treason. Provoked by 
these impudent tactics, Russell found at last the courage to tell the 
world that Lord Clarendon had refused him the permission to 
publish the instructions drawn up by Palmerston himself, written 
in his-own handwriting, and dictating that very Vienna policy for 
which he (Russell) had once lost his popularity. A Greek 
philosopher said that his compatriots, the poets, had invented 
worse stories about the Hellenic gods than any man would dare 
tell of his deadliest enemy. Modern France and England exalt as 
their gods Bonapartes and Palmerstons, who want no poets to 
blacken them. 

From what has been said, it is evident that the few Peelite 
generals who have outlived their army will reappear in Parliament 
no longer in their corporate, but in their individual capacity only. 
As an individual, Mr. Gladstone, now cleared from the obstruc- 
tions of a coterie, roused by passion, and undoubtedly the greatest 
orator in the new Commons, may play a more conspicuous part 
than ever before. During their protracted Parliamentary duel, 
Gladstone and Disraeli, as occurs sometimes in ardent encounters, 
have from time to time dropped each his own weapons to seize 
those of his adversary. To a certain degree Gladstone has laid hold 
on Disraeli’s polemical pungency, while Disraeli has caught 
Gladstone’s pompous unction— Disraeli being hardly the winner in 
this exchange. 

In taking leave of the Peelites, we may still point out the satire 
of history which, dating the birth of that fraction from the 
decomposition by the Anti-Corn-Law League of the old Parliamen- 
tary parties, registers its death simultaneously with the Parliamen- 
tary extinction of the Manchester School. 

Written on April 7, 1857 Reproduced from the newspaper 
Tribune, No. 4994, April 22, 1857