Karl Marx 
Lord John Russell 

New-York Daily Tribune. 
Nr. 4479, 28. August 1855 

Lord John Russell. 

We have recently had occasion to notice the funeral obsequies of this 
politically departed statesman, and to utter a few farewell words above 
his grave. The part which his birth, and his position as the only present- 

5 able member of the great revolutionary family and old Whig house of 
Bedford, enabled him to play in the drama of European affairs, and the 
connection of his name with some of the great progressive measures of 
the day, seem to us to entitle him to a somewhat more lengthened and 
analytic obituary. 

10 "If I was a painter," said old Cobbett, "there would I place the old 
oak, (the British Constitution,) corroded at the root, his top dead, his 
trunk hollow, loosened at his base, rocking with every blast, and there 
would I place Lord John Russell, in the person of a tom-tit, endeavoring 
to put all right by picking at a nest of animalculse seated in the half-rot- 

15 ten bark of one of the meanest branches. There are some who even think 
that he is eating the buds while he pretends to clear the tree of injurious 
insects." So minute were Lord John Russell's reform efforts during his 
antediluvian career from 1813 to 1830; but minute as they were, they 
were not sincere, and he did not hesitate to retreat from them whenever 

20 they clashed with the attainment or retention of place. 

Since 1807 the Whigs had pined in vain for a bite at the rich cherry of 
official salary and plunder, when in 1827 the formation of Canning's 
cabinet, with whom they pretended to agree on the subject of commerce 
and of foreign policy, seemed to afford them the long-sought-for oppor- 

25 tunity. Russell, at that time, had given notice of one of his tom-tit Par- 
liamentary reform motions. But upon Canning's stern declaration that he 
should oppose Parliamentary reform to the end of his life, up rose Lord 
John in great haste and withdrew his motion, declaring that "Parliamen- 

Karl Marx 

tary reform was a question on which there was a great diversity of opin- 
ion among those who advocated it, and to which the leaders of the 
Whigs were always unwilling to be pledged as to a party question. It was 
now for the last time that he brought forward this question. The people 
no longer wished for reform." 5 

While sitting at Canning's back, he, who had made a merit of his noisy 
opposition to Castlereagh's six gagging acts, refrained from voting on 
Mr. Hume's motion for the repeal of one of those six acts which made a 
man liable to banishment for life for uttering in print anything which had 
even a "tendency" to bring either house of Parliament into contempt. 10 
Thus, at the conclusion of the first period of his Parliamentary life, we 
find him fully concurring with the opinion of that Whig prototype, Ho- 
race Walpole, that "popular bills are never really proposed but as an 
engine of party, and not as a pledge for the realization of any such 
extravagant ideas." It was, then, by no means Lord J. Russell's fault that 15 
the motion for Parliamentary reform, instead of being brought forward 
for the "last" time in 1827, was to make its reappearance four years later, 
on March Ist, 1831, in the shape of the famous bill. This bill, which he 
still exhibits as his great claim to the admiration of the world in general, 
and the gratitude of the English nation in particular, he had not even the 20 
merit of being the author of. In its principal features—the breaking up of 
the nomination boroughs, the addition of county members, the enfran- 
chisement of copy-holders, lease-holders, and some of the chief commer- 
cial towns—it was copied from the Reform bill which Lord Grey (the 
chief of the Reform-Ministry in 1831) had moved in the House of Com- 25 
mons as far back as the year 1797, and which he had taken good care to 
drop when a member of the Fox cabinet in 1806. It was the identical bill, 
slightly modified. 

The ejection of Wellington from office, because he had declared 
against Reform; the French Revolution of July; the threatening political 30 
unions formed by the middling and working classes at Birmingham, 
Manchester, London, and elsewhere; the rural war; the "bonfires" all 
over the most fertile counties of England—("Out of the fires came the 
Reform," says a celebrated writer)—all these circumstances absolutely 
compelled the Whigs to propose some measure of Reform. It was their 35 
only means of rushing into office. They gave way grudgingly, slowly, and 
after vainly reiterated efforts at one time to shuffle out of the only liberal 
clauses of their own measure, and again to abandon it altogether, and to 
keep their places by a compromise with the Tories. They were prevented 
by the formidable attitude of the people, and the uncompromising op- 40 
position of the Tories. Hardly, however, had the Reform bill become law, 

Lord John Russell 

and begun to work, when, to quote Mr. Bright's words, "the people 
began to feel that they had been cheated." Never, perhaps, had a mighty, 
and, to all appearances, successful popular movement been turned into 
such a mock result. Not only were the working classes altogether exclud- 
5 ed from any political influence, but the middle classes themselves dis- 
covered that Lord Althorp, the soul of the Reform cabinet, had not used 
a rhetorical figure when telling his Tory adversaries that "the Reform bill 
was the most aristocratic act ever offered to the nation." 
The new county representation still largely preponderated over that of 
10 the towns. The franchise of the tenants-at-will occupying at an annual 
value of £50, rendered the counties, still more efficiently than before, the 
tools of the aristocracy. The substitution of the £10 householders for the 
payers of scot and lot, actually disfranchised a great number of former 
town voters. The new arrangements were, on the whole, calculated not 
15 for increasing middle class influence, but for the exclusion of Tory and 
the promotion of Whig patronage. By a series of the most extraordinary 
tricks, frauds, and juggles, the inequality of the electoral districts was 
maintained, the monstrous disproportion between representation and 
constituency reconstructed. If some fifty-six rotten boroughs, each with a 
20 handful of inhabitants, were extinguished, whole counties and populous 
towns were transformed into rotten boroughs. Lord John Russell himself 
confesses, in his letter to the electors of Stroud, on the principles of the 
Reform Act, that "the £10 franchise was fettered by regulation, and the 
annual registration was made a source of vexation and expense." Intim- 
25 idation and patronage, where they could not be perpetuated, were re- 
placed by bribery, which, from the passage of the Reform bill, became 
the main prop of the British Constitution. Such was the Reform of which 
Lord John was the mouthpiece, but not the author. The only clauses 
since proved to be due to his invention are that which compels all free- 
30 holders, except parsons, to have had a year of possession, and the other 
clause preserving Tavistock, the family rotten-borough of the Russells. 
Russell was but a subordinate member of the Reform Ministry, without a 
vote in the cabinet, viz: Paymaster of the Forces, from November, 1830, 
to November, 1834. He was, perhaps, the most insignificant man among 
35 them. But from his being the son of the mighty Duke of Bedford he was 
singled out for the honor of introducing the bill into the House of Com- 
mons. 
Beside the Reform-bill discussion, Lord John distinguished himself by 
the acrimony and virulence with which he opposed all inquiry into the 
40 pension-list. Some years later, when all the prominent members of the 
original Reform cabinet, having been removed to the Lords, died out, or 

Karl Marx 

separated from the Whigs, Lord John not only entered upon their inher- 
itance, but soon passed in the eyes of the country as the natural father of 
the bill of which had been but the godfather by courtesy. On bringing in 
the Reform bill, he said: "There can be no doubt that the ballot has much 
to recommend it; the arguments which I have heard advanced in its favor 5 
are as ingenious as any that I ever heard on any subject." As to Short 
Parliaments, "that was a question of the utmost importance, which he 
left to be brought before the House by some other member at a future 
time, in order not to embarrass the great subject with details." On the 7th 
June, 1833, he pretended to have "refrained from bringing forward those 10 
two measures in order to avoid a collision with the Lords, although 
opinions deeply seated in his heart. He was convinced of their being most 
essential to the happiness, prosperity and welfare of this country." 
Whether in consequence of this deeply-seated conviction or not, he 
proved during his whole ministerial career the constant and relentless 15 
adversary of the ballot and short parliaments. But when these declara- 
tions were made they served as expedients, in the first place, to allay the 
suspicious democrats in the House of Commons, and in the second, to 
frighten the refractory aristocrats in the House of Lords. But as soon as 
he had got possession of the new Court of Queen Victoria and fancied 20 
himself an immortal place-holder, out he came with his declaration of 
November, 1837, wherein he justified the "extreme" length to which the 
"Reform bill had gone" on the plea of barring the possibility of ever 
going further. He stated coolly that "the object of the Reform bill was to 
increase the predominance of the landed interest, and it was intended as a 25 
permanent settlement of a great constitutional question." From this fi- 
nality statement he earned the soubriquet of Finality-John. But this fi- 
nality was as false a pretense as his reform itself. It is true, he resisted 
Hume's motion for Parliamentary Reform in 1848. With the combined 
forces of Whigs, Tories, and Peelites, he again defeated Hume on a sim- 30 
ilar motion in 1849. Emboldened by his conservative army of reserve, 
he then most haughtily spoke to the purport that "in framing and pro- 
posing the Reform bill, what we wished was to adapt the representation 
of this House to the other powers of the State, and keep it in harmony 
with the Constitution. Mr. Bright and those who agree with him are so 35 
exceedingly narrow-minded, they have intellect and understanding bound 
up in such a narrow round, that it is quite impossible to get them to 
understand the great principles on which our ancestors founded the Con- 
stitution of the country, and which we, their successors, humbly admire 
and endeavor to follow. The existing system, though somewhat anoma- 40 
lous, worked well: the better for the anomalies." 

Lord John Russell 

However, being defeated in 1851 in his opposition to Locke King's bill 
for extending the county franchise to £10 occupiers, and even forced to 
resign for some days, Lord John suddenly made up his large mind on the 
necessity of anew Reform bill. He did not state what his measure was to 

5 be, but he gave a promissory note payable at the next session of Parlia- 
ment. How this move was judged of by his own confederates may be seen 
from The Westminster Review: "The pretense of the present Ministry to 
office had become a byword of scorn and reproach; and at length, when 
its exclusion and party annihilation seemed imminent, forth comes Lord 

10 John with the promise of a new Reform Bill for 1852. Keep me in office, 
he says, till that time, and I will satisfy your longings by a large and 
liberal measure of reform. The Reformers of the House of Commons 
yielded to that reasoning." In 1852 he indeed proposed a Reform bill, 
this time of his own invention, but of such Lilliputian features that nei- 

15 ther the Conservatives thought it worth while to attack nor the Liberals 
to support it. Still, it afforded the little man a pretext when resigning his 
ministry for throwing in his flight a Scythian dart at Lord Derby, by 
uttering the pompous threat that he would "insist on the extension of the 
suffrage." Hardly out of office, this child of expediency, now emphati- 

20 cally called by his own followers Foul-Weather Jack, summoned to his 
private residence at Chesham-place the different sections of the Liberal 
party to make solemn asseverations of his own large-mindedness, and to 
hand to them another promissory bill of a larger amount of reform. 
When a member ofthe Coalition cabinet, he amused the House with a 

25 Reform bill which he knew would prove another Iphigenia, to be sacri- 
ficed by himself, another Agamemnon, for the benefit of another Trojan 
war. He performed the sacrifice indeed in true melodramatic style, his 
eyes filled with tears, but these soon passed away. 

Another of the false pretenses on which he sought a niche in the temple 

30 of fame was his efforts on behalf of Ireland. Since the Anti-Jacobin war, 
the Whigs, feeling themselves at an extremely low ebb in England, en- 
deavored to fortify their position by an offensive and defensive alliance 
with Ireland. Stepping into office in 1806, they introduced and carried 
through the second reading a small Irish Emancipation bill, which they 

35 then withdrew to flatter the bigot idiocy of George III. Before and during 
the Reform agitation they fawned upon O'Connell, and the hopes raised 
in Ireland served them as powerful engines of party. Yet their first act at 
the first meeting of the Reformed Parliament was a declaration of civil 
war against Ireland, a "brutal and bloody measure," the Irish Coercion 

40 "Red-Coat Tribunal bill," according to which men were to be tried in 
Ireland by military officers, instead of by Judges and Juries. O'Connell 

Karl Marx 

was prosecuted for sedition. The Whigs fulfilled their ancient promises 
with "fire, imprisonment, transportation and even with death." They car- 
ried, however, the Coercion bill only on the express stipulation that they 
would bring in and carry an Irish Church bill, with a clause stipulating 
that a certain portion of the revenues of the Established Church in Ire- 5 
land should be placed at the disposal of Parliament, with the view to 
employ it for the benefit of Ireland. This clause was important from 
acknowledging the principle that Parliament had the power of expro- 
priating the Established Church, a principle John Russell ought to be 
convinced of, the whole immense property of his family being formed of 10 
church plunder. Having engaged to stand or fall by that bill, they has- 
tened, on the ground of avoiding a collision with the Lords, to take out 
that very clause, the only part in the bill of any value at all. They then 
voted against and defeated their own measure. But when Peel came in, at 
the end of 1834, their Irish sympathizers were roused again as by an 15 
electric shock. John Russell was the principal agent in bringing about, in 
1835, the Lichfield House compact, through which the Whigs surren- 
dered to O'Connell the Irish patronage, and O'Connell secured to them 
the Irish votes. But there was wanting a pretext for ejecting the Tories. 
John, with characteristic impudence, chose as battle-field the Ecclesias- 20 
tical Revenues of Ireland. He attacked and turned out Sir Robert Peel 
because of his resistance to that very clause, now called the appropriation 
clause, which the Reform Ministry themselves had abandoned. The Mel- 
bourne cabinet was formed, and Lord John became leader in the House 
of Commons. He now began to boast on the one hand of his mental 25 
firmness, because although now in office he still adhered to his opinions 
on the appropriation clause; and on the other hand of his moral moder- 
ation in not acting upon those same opinions. He never acted upon 
them. In 1846, when Premier, he contrived to get rid of the opinions too. 
He professed that he could not conceive a more fatal measure than the 30 
disestablishment of the Church, and declined to take any further notice 
of the project of 1835. 

In February, 1833, John Russell as a member of the Reform Ministry 
denounced Irish Repeal, and stated that the real object of the agitation 
was "to overturn at once the United Parliament, and to establish, in 35 
place of King, Lords, and Commons of the United Kingdom, some par- 
liament of which Mr. O'Connell was to be the leader and the chief." In 
February, 1834, the Repeal agitation was again denounced in the King's 
speech, and the Reform Ministry proposed an address "to record in the 
most solemn manner the fixed determination of Parliament to maintain 40 
unimpaired and undisturbed the legislative union." Immediately on being 

Lord John Russell 

shifted to the opposition benches, the very same John Russell declared 
that, "with respect to the repeal of the union, the subject was open to 
amendment or question, like any other act of the legislature." 
In March, 1846, Lord J. Russell in strange alliance with the Tories, 
5 then burning with the passion to punish Peel for the repeal of the Corn 
Laws, broke up Peel's administration by an unconditional opposition to 
their Irish arms bill. He became Premier, and the first act of his govern- 
ment was an attempt to renew that same bill. In 1844 he had denounced 
Peel for "having filled Ireland with troops, and with not governing but 
10 militarily occupying that country." In 1848 he occupied Ireland milita- 
rily, passed the felony acts, proclaimed the suspension of the habeas 
corpus, and gloried in the vigorous measures of the Clarendon reign. 
Let us now look at his Free-trade pretenses. The Corn Laws had been 
enacted in 1815, by the concurrence of Tories and Whigs. At the parlia- 
15 mentary elections of 1835 and 1837, John Russell stigmatized Corn Law 
reform as "mischievous, absurd, impracticable and unnecessary." Since 
he came into office he had resisted all such demands, "at first contemp- 
tuously, and then vehemently." He was a more thorough advocate for 
high Corn duties than Sir Robert Peel. During the prospect of dearth, 
20 (18 3 8-39) he and Melbourne did not contemplate any alterations in the 
existing duties. The deficit, however, in the Whig exchequer rising to 
£7,500,000, and Palmerston's foreign policy threatening to involve Eng- 
land in a war with France, induced the House of Commons to pass, on 
June 3, 1841, upon the motion of Sir Robert Peel, a vote of no-confi- 
25 dence in the Melbourne cabinet. The Whigs, always as eager to grasp at 
places as unable to fill and unwilling to leave them, endeavored, although 
in vain, to escape their fate by a dissolution of Parliament. Then in the 
deep soul of Lord John awoke the idea of stultifying the Anti-Corn-Law 
agitation, as he had hoped to stultify the Reform movement. He declared 
30 himself all at once in favor of a moderate fixed duty—friend of moderate 
political chastity and of moderate reforms as he is. He had even the 
effrontery to parade himself through the streets of London in a proces- 
sion of the Government candidates carrying banners, on which were ex- 
hibited in contrast two loaves, a loaf of a two-penny size inscribed the 
35 Peel Loaf, and a loaf of a Is. size inscribed the Russell Loaf. The nation, 
however, knew from experience that the Whigs were wont to promise 
bread and to give stones, and, notwithstanding Russell's ridiculous street 
theatricals, the new election left the Whig cabinet in a minority of 76, and 
they were forced to decamp at last. 
40 During the years 184115, the Anti-Corn-Law League became formi- 
dable. In the Autumn of 1845, it found new and terrible allies in the 

Karl Marx 

famine in Ireland, the corn-dearth in England, and the failure of the 
harvest all over Europe. Sir Robert Peel therefore at the end of October, 
and between the Ist and the 6th November, held a series of cabinet 
Councils, in which he proposed the suspension of the Corn Laws, and 
even hinted at the necessity of repealing them altogether. A delay in the 5 
resolutions of the cabinet was caused by the unexpected resistance of 
Lord Stanley, the colleague of Sir Robert Peel. John Russell, then on a 
pleasure trip at Edinburgh, got scent of what passed in Peel's cabinet 
council. He resolved at once to improve the delay caused by Stanley's 
opposition, to cheat Peel out of a popular position by anticipating him, 10 
to give himself the appearance of having forced Free trade upon Peel, 
and thus deprive the acts of his rival of all their moral weight. According- 
ly, on Nov. 22, 1845, he addressed from Edinburgh a letter to his city 
electors full of malignant imputations against Sir Robert Peel, on the 
pretext that the cabinet was adjourning its action concerning the Irish 15 
distress. The periodical Irish famines of 1831, '35, '37 and '39, had never 
induced Lord John and his colleagues so much as to reconsider the Corn 
Laws. But now he was all fire. Such a terrible disaster as the famine of 
two nations conjured nothing before the eyes of that little man but vi- 
sions of clap-traps against his rival place-holder. In his letter he tried to 20 
conceal the real motive of his sudden conversion to Free trade under a 
shabby confession, sneered at in all England; "I confess that on the ge- 
neral subject my views have, in the course of twenty years, undergone a 
great alteration. I used to be of opinion that corn was an exception to the 
general rules of political economy; but observation and experience have 25 
convinced me that we ought to abstain from all interference with the 
supply of food." In the same letter, the little man urged that it was the 
duty of Sir Robert Peel to interfere with the supply of food for Ireland. 
Lord John Russell is supposed to have opened his career with efforts 
for religious tolerance, and closed it with the anti-Popery cry. It is true 30 
that he brought forward in 1828 a motion for the repeal of the Test and 
Corporation acts; but, as we learn from a contemporaneous author, "io 
the astonishment of the mover himself, the motion was carried by a ma- 
jority of 44." The acts had, in fact, become a dead letter, and the Tory 
ministry that carried, in the year after, the Catholic Emancipation bill, 35 
was glad to get rid of the Dissenters’ disabilities. Russell defended his 
measure on the ground that "he was fully convinced that it would tend to 
the security of the Church of England as by law established.” When in 
office, he always opposed the separation of Church and States—the great 
thing the Dissenters prayed for. He even opposed the small concession of 40 
abolishing the church-rates. His anti-Popery cry is still more character- 

Lord John Russell 

istic of the shallowness of the man and the littleness of his motives. We 
have seen that in 1848 and 1849 he baffled the Reform motions of his 
own allies by the support of the Tories. His tenure of office, therefore, 
had become very precarious, because dependent on the sufferance of his 
5 opponents. Such was his position in 1850, at the time when the Pope's 
bull for the erection of a Roman Chatholic hierarchy in England and the 
nomination of Cardinal Wiseman to the Archbishopric of Westminster 
was creating a factitious excitement among the shallow-headed, stupid 
and hypocritical portion of the English people. As to John himself, the 

10 Pope did not take him by surprise. His father-in-law, Lord Minto, was 
still at Rome when the Roman Gazette, in January, 1848, published the 
nomination of Wiseman to the Archbishopric. We know further, from 
Wiseman's letter to the English people, that the same Lord Minto had in 
the same year shown to him by the Pope the bull for the establishment of 

15 the hierarchy in England. Under Russell's Premiership, Clarendon and 
Grey had officially given the Catholic Bishops in Ireland and the Colo- 
nies the titles they pretended to. In 1845, when out of office, John Russell 
declared: "I believe that we may repeal those disallowing clauses which 
prevent a Roman Catholic Bishop from assuming a title held by a Bishop 

20 of the Establishment. Nothing can be more absurd and puerile than to 
keep such distinctions." But now, considering the weakness of his Cab- 
inet, recollecting that the Whig cabinet of 1806 had been expelled by the 
anti-Popery cry, fearing lest Lord Stanley might be tempted to imitate 
Perceval's example and out-general him during the recess of Parliament, 

25 as he had endeavored to out-general Peel by his own Edinburgh letter, he 
flew suddenly into an unbounded Protestant passion, and addressed his 
scurrilous letter to the Bishop of Durham on the 4th November, 
1852—-just the day before the anniversary of Guy Fawkes. In this letter 
he tells the Bishop: "I agree with you in considering the late aggression of 

30 the Pope upon our Protestantism as insolent and insidious, and I there- 
fore feel as indignant as you can do upon the subject." He speaks of "the 
laborious endeavors which are now making to confine the intellect and 
enslave the soul." He calls the Catholic ceremonies "mummeries of su- 
perstition, upon which the great mass of the nation looks with con- 

35 tempt;" and he finally promises to enact new laws against the Papal 
assumption, in case the old ones should not prove sufficient. In 1851 he 
brought forward his Ecclesiastical Titles bill; but, being beaten on Locke 
King's motion, by a combination of the Irish Brigade with the Radicals, 
Manchester men and Peelites, he recanted and promised an alteration of 

40 his bill, which died of consumption before it had come out of the House. 
Some months later, being ejected from office, he fawned again on what 
he had called the Pope's minions. 

Karl Marx 

As his anti-Popery zeal was a false pretense, so was his Jewish Eman- 
cipation zeal. His Jewish Disabilities bill has obtained reputation as an 
annual farce enacted to secure to Lord John the city votes at the disposal 
of the Austrian Baron Rothschild. His colonial reforms, educational 
schemes, anti-slavery moves, were false pretenses all. "Your opposition," 5 
writes Baron Brougham to him in 1839, "to all the motions in favor of 
the negroes, and your resistance even to the attempts for stopping the 
newly-established slave-trade, widened the breach between you and the 
country. The fancy that you, the opposers of all motions on the slave- 
trade in 1838, the enemies of every interference with the Assemblies, 10 
should all of a sudden have become so enamored of the negro cause as 
almost to risk their tenure of place upon a bill for its furtherance in 1839, 
would argue a strange aptitude for being gulled." His legal Reform at- 
tempts^— false pretenses! After the expulsion of the Melbourne cabinet 
had become imminent, upon the vote of no-confidence passed against 15 
them on June 4, 1841, John Russell endeavored to hurry through the 
House a Chancery bill, in order "to remedy one of the most urgent evils 
of our legal system, the delays in the Courts of Equity, by the creation of 
two new Equity Judges." He announced this bill as "a large installment 
of legal reform." His real intention was to appoint two of his followers to 20 
places in a tribunal not yet created before the Tories had yet come in. Sir 
Edward Sugden, to ward him off, carried a motion that the bill should 
not take effect before the 10th of October. Although no change whatever 
was made in the substance of his large and most urgent Legal Reform 
installment, John Russell, without any kind ofexcuse, threw up the whole 25 
bill at once. His tenderness for the liberty of the subject, his belief in 
the public press, and, as we have lately seen and shown, his warlike 
enthusiasm and his peace-loving moderation—false pretenses, all! 

The whole man is one false pretense, his whole life one great lie, his 
whole activity a chain of minute intrigues for shabby ends, the swallow- 30 
ing of the public money and the usurpation of the mere show of power. 
No other man has verified to such a degree the truth of the Biblical 
axiom that no man is able to add one inch to his natural hight. Placed by 
birth, connections and social accidents on a collosal pedestal, he always 
remained the same homunculus—a malignant and distorted dwarf on the 35 
top of a pyramid. The history of the world exhibits, perhaps, no other 
man so great in littleness.