Karl Marx
Russell’s Dismissal

Neue Oder-Zeitung.
No. 333, July 20, 1855.
Mittagblatt

X. London, July 17. (Russell’s Dismissal), voluntary or involuntary, parries Bulwer’s motion, just as Bulwer parried Roebuck’s motion. This view, which we expressed in our correspondence of July 11, has been fully confirmed by yesterday’s sitting of the House of Commons. It is an old Whig axiom that “parties are like snails, whose tail moves the head.” The present Whig Cabinet is, however, rather a polyp cabinet; it seems to thrive by amputation. It survives the loss of its limbs, its head, of everything except its tail. Russell was indeed not the head of the Cabinet, but he was the head of the party that forms the Cabinet and is represented by it. Bouverie, the Vice-President of the Board of Trade, represents the tail of the Whig polyp. He discovered that the Whig body must be decapitated in order to preserve the Whig rump, and communicated this discovery to Palmerston in the name and on behalf of the Whig tail. Russell yesterday assured this tail of his “contempt.” Disraeli tormented Bouverie with a “physiology of friendship” and a natural history of the various ways in which the species-being, known under the name of “friend,” had secreted itself. Finally, Bouverie’s attempt at justification, that he and the tail had pushed Russell aside in order to save Russell, completes the genre picture of this party of place-hunters.

If the natural head of the Whig party has thus been amputated, its usurped head, Lord Palmerston, has all the more firmly grown on to the rump. After the fall of Aberdeen and Newcastle, he made use of Gladstone, Graham and Herbert to take up the inheritance of the Coalition Cabinet. After the resignation of Gladstone, Graham and Herbert, he used Lord John Russell to form a pure Whig Cabinet. Finally, he uses the Whig tail to make Russell vanish, and thus become sole ruler in the Cabinet. All these metamorphoses were just so many steps towards the formation of a pure Palmerston Cabinet. We saw from Russell’s declarations that he repeatedly tendered his resignation to Palmerston, but was each time persuaded by him to withdraw it. In exactly the same way Palmerston persuaded the Aberdeen Cabinet to resist Roebuck’s Committee of Inquiry to the utmost. Both times with the same success and for the same purpose.

Bulwer’s motion was so directly linked to Russell that it fell to the ground as soon as the corpus delicti, Russell, disappeared from the Cabinet. Bulwer was therefore forced to declare that he withdrew his motion. He could not, however, resist the temptation to deliver the speech that was to have supported his motion. He forgot that the motion which gave grounds for his speech was missing. Palmerston took advantage of this unfortunate situation. He at once threw himself into a gladiatorial posture after the fight had been called off. He became insolent, blustering, boastful, but thereby drew upon himself a chastisement from Disraeli’s hand which, as his play of features showed, made even him, the consummate comedian, lose his accustomed cynical composure. The most important thing in Disraeli’s reply, however, was the following declaration: “I know that the views which Lord Russell brought back from Vienna were favourably received, not only by a majority, but by the entirety of his colleagues, and that only circumstances which they had not anticipated prevented the cordial and unanimous adoption of the noble Lord’s plan. I make this statement not without sufficient authority. I make it with the same conviction with which I spoke six weeks ago of the equivocal language and uncertain conduct of the government, the correctness of which subsequent events have proved. I make it with the conviction that even before the close of this session the evidence for this assertion will be in the hands of the House.” The “circumstances” to which Disraeli alludes above were, as he explains in the course of his speech, “the difficulties which were thrown in the way from the French side.” Disraeli hints that the correspondence of Clarendon destined for parliamentary use stands in contradiction to the secret instructions of the Ministry. He concluded his speech with the following words: “There exists a belief in the country that guilt is prevalent in the conduct of our affairs. A foreign document appears (Buol’s circular), the excitement among the people grows, they think, they speak, their representatives in the House ask questions. What happens? The most eminent of your statesmen dares not meet the controversy which such questions provoke. He disappears in a mysterious fashion. But who dares to meet it? The first Minister of the Crown, who tonight addressed the House in accents and in a language utterly unworthy of his position and of the occasion, and which have convinced me that, if the honour and interests of the country are any longer entrusted to his guidance, it is only done in order to degrade the former and betray the latter.”

Roebuck outdid Disraeli in the vehemence of language. “I demand to know who now are the traitors in the Cabinet?” First Aberdeen and Newcastle. Then Graham and Gladstone and Herbert. Then Russell. Who is the sequens?

Meanwhile, the position of the man who has ruled the coalition in secret, just as he now officially rules the Ministry, is fairly secure. Should any vote of no confidence still be passed before the close of the session, which is not probable, he will dissolve Parliament. In any event, he has six months before him to direct the foreign policy of England without restriction, not even troubled by the noise and the sham fights of the House of Commons.