filched out of his own hand? So felt his lordship-at least it is charitable to think so, considering the unwarrantable lengths to which he has carried his opposition. And however inexcusable may be his lordship's conceit that he has a monopoly in the manufacture of Reform Bills, we do not think that his alarm was at all exaggerated as to the ruinous effect to himself of Ministerial success in the question of Parliamentary Reform. Such success would have extinguished him. The light of his renown has paled long ago, but the success of the Government Reform Bill would have come down upon him like an actual extinguisher, and thrust him out of sight amidst stench and darkness. He has succeeded in evading such a fate for the present; but unless he be blest with a greater measure of success than we have any desire to see, his desperate struggles will only sink him deeper in the abyss from which he seeks to escape. We heard a great deal last summer about Lord John's patriotism and "nobility of nature" when he lent an indirect support to the Government on the India Bill. His sole motive then was, to prevent the defeat of the Ministry on a question which would have replaced his rival Lord Palmerston in office. At that time it was Lord Palmerston, and not he, who had a rival Bill to the Ministerial one; and Lord John had no desire to help out the Conservatives merely to help in Lord Palmerston. He wished to keep them for his own sport. He knew that they must take up the Reform question in spring, and that on that question the lead would devolve upon him, and not upon the ex-Premier. Hence the Opposition battue against the Ministry which he marred last summer he has been foremost in getting up now. And he arranged matters so astutely that his rival could not avoid acting along with him. He showed Lord Palmerston beforehand the terms of his motion, in order to leave him no excuse; and Lord Palmerston found himself forced either to forfeit the support of the Liberal party and his own prospects of office, or else join in an attack which, if successful, might be expected to place the pre

miership in the hands of Lord John. So circumstanced, Lord Palmerston joined in the attack. But in his speech he maintained with extraordinary elaboration that this was not a vote of censure, that the Ministry ought not to resign, and that they should just take back their Bill and mend it. Although advanced under cover of banter, we believe the noble viscount was quite in earnest in expressing these sentiments. While Lord John Russell pointedly treated the motion as a vote of censure, in order to compel the resignation of the Ministry, Lord Palmerston showed as plainly as he dared his desire that the Ministry should not be driven from office on a question which would give the lead to his rival. The Ministry, however, were strong enough to take a course of their own. They would not stoop to the humiliating course proposed by Lord Palmerston; but even with the Reform "cry" against them, they were ready to appeal to the country against the reckless factiousness of Lord John and the Opposition. There can be no doubt that they tendered to her Majesty their resignations, and that these were not accepted, for the obvious reason that there was no other section of the House strong enough to take their place. But without making any use of the royal name, the Ministry took the whole responsibility of the dissolution upon themselves, and boldly made the appeal which has now been answered in their favour.

Doubtless, when Parliament reassembles, the Opposition chiefs will make it a ground of complaint against the Ministry that Parliament was dissolved when such a crisis was approaching in foreign politics. Any ground of complaint, however illfounded, is eagerly caught at by Opposition chiefs, to be tricked out in solemn words, and then hurled at the heads of the Ministry. And as the Opposition chiefs have suffered from the dissolution-as the dissolution, in fact, has rendered bootless their successful machinationthey will not fail to resent it, by charging it as a grave fault against the Ministry. For our own part, we rather think fortunate than other

it

wise that Parliament was not sitting when the present imbroglio on the Continent first began to be transferred from the cabinet to the field. By the month of June the real character of the contest will have, to a considerable extent, revealed itself; and to that extent we shall have escaped the grave evil of members of Parliament prematurely committing themselves to a side in the contest, and talking with greater vehemence than discretion about matters which as yet they do not comprehend. But even if this argument were as palatable to the House as it is consonant with reason, the Ministry have no need to have recourse to it. If the Opposition chiefs were so averse to a dissolution, why did they provoke one? If they were desirous that the Government should address foreign Powers with the whole weight of Parliament at its back, why did they choose that time for inflicting upon it a Parliamentary defeat ?-a defeat, too, most uncalled for, and almost without a precedent. Or if it be said that the Ministry would have best met the crisis in foreign affairs by simply submitting to the defeat and recasting their bill, we would ask-whether would the British Government have shown itself strongest in the eyes of other Powers by stooping quietly to degradation at home, or by manfully and hopefully appealing to the country for approval and support? So far as regards foreign politics, we believe the country has actually been a gainer by the dissolution. Certainly, in no respect has it been a loser. Immediately on the meeting of Parliament, we believe the Ministry are prepared to lay on the table of both Houses documents connected with the recent negotiations with France, Austria, and Sardinia, which will prove to demonstration how able and indefatigable have been their efforts to maintain the peace of Europe, and that, if war has actually broken out, it was only because some of the Powers were secretly resolved to force matters to that issue.

The new strength which the Ministerial ranks have received from the elections; the fact also that certain thoroughgoing partisans on the Lib

eral side have been replaced by men of independent opinions; and also, let us say, the increased gravity of the Continental crisis, will doubtless prove to the Opposition chiefs that they must conduct their attacks upon the Ministry with less undisguised factiousness. But that their attacks will be renewed, there need be no manner of doubt. It is a scramble for office. Punch hit the truth very well in his cartoon of the "real ugly rush," in which burly Bright, jaunty Palmerston, and little Lord John are all seen crushing might and main to get in at the door of Downing Street. The country is sufficiently acquainted with the antecedents of each of these candidates and competitors for office. Mr Bright we may put aside for the present. A gentleman of his peculiar notions on the subject of the national defences is not likely to suit the taste of the country at such a juncture as the present; and moreover it is not long since we did him the honour to bestow upon his absurdities a very special dissection.

Lord John Russell, of course, has a better chance than the Radical Quaker-although, if Lord John be Premier, it will be part of the bargain that Mr Bright be included in his Cabinet. We need not now enlarge upon the restless ambition which has always characterised his lordship, and the utter want of scruple which he displays when engaged in the pleasant task of upsetting a rival. But let us simply consider his qualifications for the premiership at a time when foreign affairs are so troubled, and when the ambition of certain Continental Powers threatens to tear in pieces all existing treaties, so as by-and-by to draw this country also into the vortex of war. Now, of all statesmen of eminence in this country, there is not one less suited than Lord John Russell to encounter such a storm. In foreign politics he has all along either confessed himself incapable or proved himself a blunderer. It transpired in the dispute between him and Lord Palmerston in the beginning of 1852, that during the five preceding years, when his lordship was Premier, his Foreign

Secretary treated him with such profound contempt, held him in such utter disregard, that he was in the habit of conducting the important correspondence of his department without submitting it in any way to the revision of his superior. Palmerston acted just as if there was no chief of the Cabinet; and Lord John, acknowledging his own incompetence, acquiesced in being snubbed, until a letter from her Majesty summoned him to a discharge of his duty as Premier. His profound blundering, and mingled meanness and bluster during the Crimean War, are too recent to be forgotten. The grand feature of the Coalition Cabinet was the ingenuity with which the talent of its members was neutralised by each being put in the wrong place. Accordingly, while Palmerston was made Home Secretary, and had to content himself with suggesting to schoolmasters that boys should be taught a plainer style of handwriting, with lecturing the Presbytery of Edinburgh on the uselessness of fasts to stop the cholera-and startling the orthodoxy and paternity of England by the assertion that "all children are born good,"-Lord John was with equal grotesqueness made Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and, as such, conducted the famous "secret correspondence" with the Russian Government, by which the Czar was tempted to make his onslaught upon Turkey. After war was declared, and the spirit of the country had waxed warm, Lord John also grew very bold; and, for the mere sake of a moment's popularity, shamefully and disastrously revealed the secrets of the Government in regard to the campaign, by announcing in Parliament that Sebastopol was to be attacked, nearly three months before it was possible for the Allied armies to set foot in the Crimea! Equally characteristic was the close of his connection with that Cabinet, deserting his colleagues in the hour of danger a desertion which drew from the uncompromising Roebuck the memorable denunciation, in which he likened the noble lord to a "timid fisherman, who, foreseeing the coming storm, ran his boat ashore, and then fled howling inland." A few

months after, however, saw him again as confident as ever-en route to Vienna, there to bring Russia diplomatically to her knees, and the wily Austrians to plain speaking. We have no wish to revive in detail his lordship's blundering on that important mission. Suffice it to say, that the British statesman who, not a year before, had foolishly and vaingloriously revealed the secrets of Government by declaring that no peace would be made until the "standing menace" (Sebastopol) was destroyed, was so confounded and cajoled by the foreign diplomatists that he agreed to terms of peace which left the "standing menace" untouched, and which had to be peremptorily repudiated by the Government of which he was the accredited agent. This is not the man for the times. Alternately boastful and timid, and blundering always, in foreign politics, Lord John Russell would prove the very worst of possible premiers in a crisis like the present. Even as regards the defence of our own shores, can it be forgotten that when the aspect of France was deemed menacing in the spring of 1852, Lord John showed his capacity by proposing the formation of a militia, no regiment of which was to be movable beyond the limits of its own county! No wonder that the House of Commons, under such provocation, thereupon threw out his Bill and kicked out his Ministry.

Lord Palmerston is a statesman of a very different order. He has always proved as true and useful to his colleagues as Lord John has been unsafe and mischievous. He has none of the braggart boastfulness, and little of that restless overweening ambition of office which characterise his rival. And he is also as much in his element in foreign and military politics as Lord John is the reverse. His advanced age must now deprive him of much of that energy which was his by nature, and is a great drawback to his value, seeing that the crisis upon which Europe has entered is evidently only the beginning of the end-not the cataract itself, but only the rapids leading to it. The Radicals so cor

dially hate Lord Palmerston that he has little chance of again being Premier; but were he in any way intrusted at present with the direction of our foreign policy, the country could not fail to regard his administration with extreme suspicion. It suits the French Emperor to profess great friendliness for this country, in order that he may induce us to do as he wants, while he is carrying on the war in Italy. While "reviving the traditional policy of France," Napoleon has sought most anxiously to disarm the suspicions of this country, and to enlist the sympathy of our general public, by pretending that the sole object of his war with Austria is to obtain liberty for the Italians! This is the grand object of the first half of his pamphlet entitled "Napoleon III. and Italy," as well as of his public addresses, and doubtless his diplomatic communications with our Government contain still more fervent protestations to the same effect. He appeals, too, very daringly, to the somewhat over-active interference of the British Government in Italian affairs, not only as a justification of his own ambitious policy in that peninsula, but even as a reason why our Government should now openly lend its support to him in the contest. This imperial hypocrisy and presumption are certainly very daring; but there is one British statesman to whom it comes home with something like the force of an argumentum ad hominem. It is upon Lord Palmerston's meddling policy in Italy in 1847 that the Imperial pamphleteer rests his demand for the sympathy of this country in his present schemes; and it was Lord Palmerston likewise who was cajoled by the Mephistopheles of the Tuileries into sending the British fleet in company with the French to make a blundering and bootless demonstration against the Government of Naples. We know the lengths to which Lord Palmerston carried his deference to the French Emperor on the Conspiracy Bill, in December 1857; and we know that his lordship has since then been in close relationship with Napoleon III. Towards the end of last year-long after Cavour had paid

his memorable visit at Plombières, Lord Palmerston was invited to Compiègne, and was for some time a guest of the Emperor's. Several of the Paris correspondents of the London journals, with their usual taste for gossip and speculation, expressed surmises as to some plot being on foot -some constitutional coup-d'étatby which Lord Derby was to be displaced and Lord Palmerston restored to the head of the British Government. Naturally enough, such gossip received little attention on this side the Channel. No one grudged the noble Viscount a visit to the Court of the ruler whom he had so much befriended. But subsequent events have invested the incident in a new light. We now know, with most perfect assurance, that at the very time Lord Palmerston visited the French Court, the Emperor of the French was busy with his plans for this intervention in Italy, which he is now carrying out by force of arms. Several months before, Napoleon had come to an understanding with Count Cavour; he had also been visited by the Grand-Duke Constantine of Russia (who has been touring throughout the Mediterranean, visiting the courts of Sardinia and Greece, and inspecting Malta and other fortified posts of ours in that sea); and, seeing his plans so rapidly maturing, it was but natural that the French Emperor should desire to have a friendly opportunity of "talking over" a leading British statesman to his views. Doubtless he had already experienced that Lords Derby and Malmesbury were not at all disposed to smile upon so very suspicious a project. Of course we do not believe that Napoleon really made Lord Palmerston aware of all that was to follow. That was not the Emperor's game, and his power of reticence and dissimulation is too perfect to let him reveal a single thought more than suited his project. His object in procuring the visit of Lord Palmerston was to imbue him with the notion that the policy he was about to inaugurate was entirely in the interests of peace

that he (the Emperor) had no desire for war, and that he had no intention of doing anything to pro