The Parties and Cliques

Neue Oder-Zeitung.
No. 65, 8 February 1855.
Mittagblatt

X. London, 5 February. (The Parties and Cliques.) The duration of the present ministerial crisis is more or less normal, since such crises in England have lasted on average 9 to 10 days. In his famous work On the Capabilities of Man, Quetelet astounds by demonstrating that the annual total of misfortunes, crimes, etc., for civilised countries can be determined in advance with almost mathematical precision. By contrast, the normal duration of English ministerial crises in various epochs of the 19th century is nothing astonishing, since here, as is well known, a given circle of combinations always has to be run through, a given number of posts has to be negotiated, and a given sum of intrigues has to paralyse itself. Only the character of the combinations that the dissolution of the old parties this time compels is extraordinary. The fact of this dissolution made the formation of the fallen coalition ministry possible and inevitable. The governing caste, which in England by no means coincides with the ruling class, will be driven from one coalition to the next until exhaustive proof is furnished that it has lost its vocation for governing.

The Derbyites, as is known, had pronounced themselves most pathetically against coalitions. The first step of Lord Derby, as soon as the Queen charged him with forming a new cabinet, was to attempt a coalition, not only with Palmerston—to whom Disraeli, during the Roebuck debate, had expressly declared that the proposed censure motion was directed no less against him than against the Duke of Newcastle or Aberdeen—but also with Gladstone and Sidney Herbert, that is, with the Peelites, who are pursued by the Tories with specific hatred as the proximate instruments of the dissolution of their party. Russell, for his part charged with forming a cabinet, tries a coalition with the very same Peelites whose presence in the old ministry he had made the pretext for his resignation, and who gave him the lie in a solemn parliamentary session. Palmerston, finally, when he brings his ministry about, only publishes a second, slightly altered edition of the old coalition ministry. The Grey clan of the Whigs will perhaps replace the Russell clan of the Whigs, etc. The old parliamentary parties entrusted with the monopoly of government exist now only in the form of coteries, but the same causes which deprived these coteries of the power to form parties, to distinguish themselves, rob them of the power to unite. No epoch of England’s parliamentary history therefore shows the splintering into such a mass of insignificant and chance cliques as precisely the epoch of the coalition ministry. Numerically significant are only two of these cliques, the Derbyites and the Russellites. In their train is a much-ramified group of powerful old families with a numerous clientele. But precisely this numerical strength constitutes the weakness of both the Derbyites and Russellites. Too small to form an independent parliamentary majority, they are too large, and have too many place-hunters in their own bosom to provide for, to be able to purchase sufficient support from outside by bestowing important posts. The numerically weak cliques of the Peelites, Greyites, Palmerstonians, etc., are therefore more suited for the formation of coalition ministries. But what enables them to form ministries—the weakness of each of these cliques—makes their parliamentary majority a matter of chance that can be broken any day, be it by a combination of the Derbyites and Russellites, be it by a combination of the Manchester School, etc., with the Derbyites.

From another point of view the newly attempted ministerial combinations are equally interesting. In all of them there were members of the old cabinet. In the latest, the most important member of that cabinet is at the head. And did not the House of Commons, by adopting the Roebuck motion against all the members of the old coalition—as Palmerston himself explained in his reply to Disraeli—institute not only a censure vote but also a committee of inquiry? The committee has not yet been appointed, the inquiry has not yet been opened, and the accused once more take the helm of state? But if Parliament possesses the power to overthrow the ministry, the ministry possesses the power to dissolve Parliament. What effect the prospect of a dissolution must have on the present Parliament may be seen from the declaration made by Sir J. Trollope on 1 March 1853 in the House of Commons. “There are now sitting,” he remarked, “no fewer than 14 committees which the House has formed from among its members to investigate the briberies that occurred at the last parliamentary elections. If one continues at the same rate, the whole Parliament will soon be dissolved into committees of inquiry into electoral bribery. More than that. The number of accused Members of Parliament is so overwhelming that the unchallenged remainder does not suffice to judge them or even to inquir against them.” It would be hard to lose the seats so dearly bought right at the beginning of the third legislature—out of patriotism.

15 gift of Government, an accession of patronage which was the less despicable as the Directors’ salaries were raised from £300 to £900, 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 luxurious 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 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 remodelled 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 *mixtum 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 2½ per cent. Exchequer bonds, instead 1 per cent. Exchequer bills, the public thus losing 1½ 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 six 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 1st 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 the 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 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 honour and character of the Russian Emperor, which would move him to withdraw his troops from the Principalities!” On the 3rd 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 Russell’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 Parliament.

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. Afterwards 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 24th March, he considered it his duty not to bring it forward before the end of June. On the 17th 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 correspondence, 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 honour 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 May, 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.

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 meantime 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.