Karl Marx

Palmerston

Neue Oder-Zeitung.  
No. 105, 3 March 1855.  
Mittagblatt

X. London, 27 Feb. (Palmerston.) To the outcry against the aristocracy, Palmerston has ironically replied with a ministry of 10 lords and 4 baronets – added to that, 10 lords, of whom 8 sit in the House of Peers. To the impatience over the compromise between the various fractions of the oligarchy, he responds with a compromise between the various families within the Whig fraction. In his ministry, the Grey clan is bought off, 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 G. C. Lewis, Chancellor of the Exchequer, is the brother-in-law of Earl Clarendon, the Foreign Secretary. India alone has fallen to an untitled person, though married into the Whig families, Vernon Smith. A kingdom for a horse! cried Richard III. A horse for a kingdom! cries Palmerston, imitating Caligula, and makes Vernon Smith the Great Mogul of India. “Lord Palmerston,” complains the Morning Advertiser, “has given us not only the most aristocratic administration of which our history affords an example, but he has composed his government out of the most miserable aristocratic material that was to be found.” But, consoles itself the worthy Advertiser, but “Palmerston is still not a free agent; he is still in chains and fetters etc.” As we predicted, Lord Palmerston has formed a cabinet of ciphers, with himself as the only digit. Lord John Russell, who threw him out of the Whig cabinet in 1851 undiplomatically, he has diplomatically sent off on his travels. He used the Peelites to take up the inheritance of Aberdeen. The premiership once secured, he dropped the Aberdeenites and, as Disraeli says, stole from Russell not only the Whig wardrobe but the Whigs themselves.

Despite the great similarity, indeed 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 cabinet at all, but Lord Palmerston instead of a cabinet. Although the personnel is largely the old one, the posts have been so distributed among it, its following in the House of Commons is so different, and it reappears under such completely altered circumstances that, whereas formerly it was a weak Whig ministry, it now forms the strong dictatorship of a single man, provided that Palmerston is no false Pitt, Bonaparte no false Napoleon, and Lord John Russell stays on his travels. 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 again shown that he is “clever”. But “clever” is an untranslatable epithet, ambiguous, many-sided. It embraces all the qualities of a man who knows how to get on in the world and understands his own advantage just as well as 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 bother, whom respect does not mislead, who considers principles as snares to bring his fellow man down. If Palmerston is so “clever”, will he not outwit the Russians just as he has outwitted Russell? So reasons 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 hereditary alternation of government between Whigs and Tories reintroduced. A real change, not confined to mere passive dissolution, might indeed only occur under a Tory government. Only when the Tories are at the helm does the immense pressure from without begin, and are the inevitable upheavals 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 had a Dutchman come across the sea to make him their king, it was in order to introduce a new epoch with the new dynasty – 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, for example, preponderates in a portion of posts in the army, through family connection, nepotism, favouritism, but the principle of gold gets its due, in that all officer posts are saleable and purchasable for hard cash. It is calculated that the officers currently serving in the regiments have a capital of £6 million fixed up in their posts. The poorer officer, in order not to lose his right acquired in the service and to be supplanted by a young money-bag, borrows capital to secure his promotion, and thus becomes a mortgaged being. As in the army, so in the Church, alongside the principle of family, 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 trade 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, by the name of Simpson, appeared yesterday before the Court of Queen’s Bench and demanded his fees from a certain Lamb, who had contractually bound himself to procure for him the presentation to the living of West Hackney for the rector Josiah Rodwell, Simpson having stipulated for 5% from buyer and seller, along with some incidental perquisites. Lamb had not fulfilled his obligation. The affair hung together as follows: Lamb is the son of the 70-year-old rector of two benefices in Sussex, whose market price is estimated at £16,000. The price is, of course, directly proportionate to the income of the living and inversely proportionate to the age of the incumbent. The younger Lamb is the patron of the livings held by the old Lamb and at the same time the brother of an even younger Lamb, the incumbent and parson of West Hackney. Since the rector of West Hackney is still very youthful, the market price of the next presentation to his sinecure stands relatively low. Although its income is £550 a year, together with a parsonage, its possessor sells the next presentation for only £1,000. His brother promises him the livings in Sussex on the father’s death, but sells, through Simpson, his thus vacated post in West Hackney for £3,000 to Josiah Rodwell, thereby pocketing a net profit of £2,000, his brother receiving a better benefice, and the broker at 5 per cent commission would have done a business of £300. It did not come out how the contract fell through. The court awarded the broker Simpson, “for work done”, a compensation of £50.

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