CHAP. I.] ELDON.-LIVERPOOL. THE OPPOSITION. 15 the earth, there is a vast neutral ground between veneration and contempt. He Lord Liver pool and his in the House colleagues of Lords. The first Lord of the Treasury is the Earl of Liverpool. has been prime minister from 1812; he has held high office from the beginning of the century; he has filled subordinate offices from the age of manhood. Respect is on all hands conceded to him, the respect due to honest intentions and moderate abilities. Admiration or disgust is reserved for his colleagues. As prime minister of England, he seems to fill something like the station which a quiet and prudent king may fill in other countries. He is the head of the nation's councils, with responsible ministers. The conduct of the war was not his; he suffered others to starve the war. The peace was not his; he gave to others the uncontrolled power of prescribing the laws of victory. The stupendous financial arrangements of the war were not his ; they were expounded by a man of business in the House of Commons, The resistance to all change was not his; the great breakwater of the coming wave was his sturdy chancellor. The people, during his war-administration, had quietly surrendered itself to the belief that good business talents were the most essential to the official conduct of the affairs of nations. A long course of victory had succeeded to a long course of disaster; and, therefore, the rulers at home were the best of rulers. The great Captain who saved his country, and threw his protection over the government, offered the strongest evidence, in after - years, of how little that government had done for him. Around the premier sit the Home Secretary, Viscount Sidmouth, and the Colonial Secretary, the Earl Bathurst. They enjoy, even in a greater degree than himself, the privilege of not being envied and feared for the force of their characters or the splendor of their talents. The Opposi tion in the House of Lords. It is not quite easy to understand now what constituted the Opposition in 1816. The two peers of the greatest mark had been divided in their opinions as to the war against Napoleon on his return from Elba. It is little doubtful that they were equally divided as to the character of the peace. Earl Grey stood at the head of the party that denounced the intimate foreign alliances which this country had formed in the support of legitimacy. He would have treated with Bonaparte. Lord Grenville held that the maintenance of peace with Bonaparte was impossible, and that consequently the foreign alliances and the restoration of the Bourbons were essential parts of the war policy. Both had been driven from office ten years before, through their firm adherence to the support of the Catholic claims. The natures of each of these eminent statesmen were somewhat haughty and uncompromising. Had they remained in power after the death of Mr. Fox, they would have probably differed as to the conduct of the war. Had they succeeded to power upon the termination of the war, they would as certainly have differed as to the character of popular discontents, and the mode of appeasing them. Lord Grey was a Whig-reformer-Lord Grenville a Whig-conservative. On the benches of opposition sat also the Marquis of Lansdowne and Lord Holland. Their differences of opinion were not of a very practical character. Lord Lansdowne saw in the overthrow of Napoleon the destruction of a military tyrant, and he rejoiced accordingly; Lord Holland, a man of large benevolence, had a generous tear for a fallen foe. Turn we to the House of Commons Commons. that assembly whose House of voice, even when its defects were most fiercely canvassed, went forth throughout the world as the expres sion of a great and free nation. The leader of the ministerial Lord Castle- phalanx is Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh. To his reagh and his splendid figure and commanding face he has added the outward show of honors which have not been bestowed upon a commoner since the days of Sir Robert Walpole. He is "the noble lord in the blue ribbon." He has been Foreign Secretary since 1812. He held high office in 1802. By the colleagues. force of his character he bore down the calumnies which had attached to his connection with the government of Ireland before the Union. The triumphs of the Peninsula had obliterated the recollections of Walcheren. He comes now to parliament at the very summit of his power, having taken but little part in its debates during the mighty events of the two previous years. There is a general impression that he has a leaning towards arbitrary principles, and that his intercourse with the irresponsible rulers of the continent has not increased his aptitude for administering a representative government. He will be attacked with bitterness; he will be suspected, perhaps unjustly. But he will stand up against all attack with unflinching courage, and unyielding self-support. No consciousness of the narrowness of his intellect and the defects of his education will prevent him pouring out torrent after torrent of unformed sentences and disjointed argument. It is a singular consideration that mere hardihood and insensibility should have stood up so successfully against untiring eloquence within the walls of parliament, and determined hostility without. Lord Castlereagh even succeeded in living down popular hatred. Round this most fortunate minister of 1816 are grouped his colleagues Nicholas Vansittart, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, "the noblest work of God,” according to Pope's maxim; the Secretary of War, Lord Palmer CHAP. I.] CASTLEREAGH.- PONSONBY, ETC. 17 The Opposi tion. Mr. Pon Mr. Tierney. ston; the chief Secretary for Ireland, Mr. Peel; and, somewhat out of his place, the friend whom Canning raised to office when he ingloriously went to Lisbon in 1814- Mr. Huskisson. The accredited leader of the Opposition is George Ponsonby, formerly chancellor of Ireland. He is a prudent and temperate leader, not remarkable for great powers as a debater, but a safe guide for party men to rally round. sonby. One who did not act with him says: 1. He was the least eminent man that ever filled such a station." One who did act with him writes in his diary: 2 "He was a very honest man, had many excellent qualities, and possessed very considerable talents; but he was by no means fit for the situation which he has for ten years occupied that of leader of the party of opposition. Beside him sits George Tierney, a parliamentary veteran, who has been fighting for twenty years, chiefly in the ranks of opposition, once as a member of the Addington administration · a financier, a wit. Of ready powers as a debater, of great practical sense, of unblemished private character, he seemed fitted for higher eminence than he attained in the nation's eyes. He was a parliamentary man of business at a time when that high quality was not valued as it ought to have been; and, whether in or out of office, the best committee man, the clearest calculator, was held as a very subordinate person in affairs of legislation. He redeemed, however, the character of the opposition in regard to this quality, in which they were held, unjustly enough, to be singularly deficient; and he almost succeeded in persuading his hearers and the public, that genius and industry may be united. The nation seemed then to have confidence in its administration, because it regarded its chiefs and subordinates as essentially men of business. Mr. Tierney was to claim this confidence as the man of business of the opposition. He had declaimers enough about him to make the attribute not too infectious. Mr. Tierney was the man of financial detail. There was one who then chiefly dedicated himself to the neglected walk of political economy. Francis Horner had Francis won a high reputation by the unremitting assertion of Horner. large principles which indolence and prejudice had shrunk from examining. More than any man he had gone to the root of financial difficulties. His opinions were to be adopted when he lived not to expound them others were to carry them into practice. It is something to be an earnest thinker in an age of debaters. His are labors that have more endurance than mere party eminence. In the same ranks are a few other laborers "for all time." On the bench of honor sits one whose lofty port and composed 1 Lord Dudley's Letters, p. 171. 2 Romilly's Life, iii. p. 307. VOL. II. 2 Sir S. Romilly. features show him to be a man of no common aspirations. His habitual expression is earnest, solemn, almost severe. He has a great mission to fulfil, far above party politics and temporary contentions. Yet he is a partisan, but not in the ordinary sense of the word. He is sometimes bitter, prejudiced, perhaps vindictive; yet no one more deeply feels than himself that this is not the temper for the attainment of great social improvements. His hopes are not sanguine. He sees little of amelioration in the present aspect of affairs; he fancies that evil principles are in the ascendant. He has nearly reached his sixtieth year; he has been in parliament only ten years. But during that short period he has left an impression upon that assembly never to be obliterated. That lawyer, the acknowledged head of his own class, who in the House of Commons has won the highest reputation for sincerity of purpose, for vast ability, for the eloquence of a statesman as distinguished from that of an advocate, never rises without commanding the respect of a body not favorable to the claims of orators by profession. His forensic duties are too vast, his devotion to them too absorbing, the whole character of his mind too staid - perhaps too little imaginative and pliant to make him the leader of his own scattered party. But as the founder of the noblest of our improvements, the reform of our hateful and inoperative penal laws, he will do what the most accomplished and versatile debater would have left undone. He will persevere, as he has persevered, amidst neglect, calumny, the frowns of power, the indifference of the people. The testament which he bequeathes will become sacred and triumphant. That man is Sir Samuel Romilly. The place which Whitbread filled is vacant. A sudden, mysterious, and most melancholy death had silenced that fearless tongue, which, as it was the last to denounce the war of 1815, would have been the first to tear in pieces the treaties which that war had consummated. The miserable and oppressed listened to him as their friend and deliverer. His political enemies acknowledged his inflexible honesty. His love of justice made him generous even to those whom he habitually opposed. He had been for several years the true leader of the opposition, and he had led them with right English courage. Others might win by stratagem; he was for the direct onslaught. He perished the day after Paris capitulated. Two nights before, he had spoken in the House of Commons. His health had been long broken. He was desponding without a cause. Insanity came, and then the end. A French writer has had the vulgar audacity to say that Whitbread destroyed himself because he could not bear the triumph of his country at Waterloo. The same writer affirms that Canning betrayed to Fouché the plans of Castlereagh for CHAP. I.] HENRY BROUGHAM. -THE ABOLITIONISTS. 19 the expedition to Walcheren. Both falsehoods may sleep together. No two men more dearly loved their country, whatever they might think of its policy. The place of Whitbread is vacant. He that comes to earn the succession to the same real leadership is not an unknown man he is the Henry Henry Brougham who, having appeared at the bar of the Brougham. House of Commons, in 1808, as counsel for the great body of merchants and manufacturers against the orders in council, carried the repeal of those impolitic orders in 1812, after seven weeks of the most laborious and incessant exertion, almost unexampled in the records of parliament. For three years, the place which he had won by a combination of industry and talent almost unprecedented had been surrendered to other tribunes of the people. The moment in which he reappears is somewhat unfavorable to the highest exertions of his powers, for he has no worthy opponent. George Canning is not in his place in parliament. He, who had sighed for peace, as Pitt sighed in the gloomy days of Austerlitz and Jena, was out of office during the triumphs of Leipsic and Vittoria. The peace of 1814 was accomplished without his aid. He had bowed before the humbler talents of his rival colleague, whom military success abroad had raised up into a disproportioned eminence at home. Time has shown how Canning was hated and feared by a large number of those who professed a common allegiance with himself to the principles of the son of Chatham. The hate and the fear applied as much to his principles as to his talents. The government of 1814 had secured his allegiance, and drawn the sting of his dreaded adherence to Liberal policies. They disarmed him; they had wellnigh degraded him. They opened the session of 1816 in the confidence that they could do without him. They wondered what use he could be of, and why Lord Liverpool could have thought of making any terms with him.” 1 On the 10th June, Canning took his place in the House of Commons as President of the Board of Control. The ten years which followed look like the last days of parliamentary eloquence. What is left us may work as well; but at any rate it is something different. But The cross-benches of neutrality in the House of Commons are not over-full. The party of Canning has been scattered. there sit a knot of men who hold the scales in one of the greatest questions perhaps the most interesting question that was ever agitated within the walls of parliament. It is the party of the abolitionists of the slave-trade. Victory abroad is to them defeat, if it bring not the consummation of their hopes in the acts of foreign governments. At the peace of 1814, France 1 Lord Dudley's Letters, p. 137. |