NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE flowing hospitality of the Mansionhouse at the great annual banquet, on the day when the Prince of Wales was born carnally and London's Lord Mayor officially, gave occasion to an inter- change of amenities between the new Sovereign of the City, the Whig-Radical Member for Southwark, and the Conservative Prime Minister. It was part of the Lord Mayor's duty to propose the health of Sir ROBERT PEEL and her Majesty's Ministers ; but he performed the duty in no merely formal manner : in the most em- phatic terms he bore testimony to the objects, the intentions, and the fitness for office, of his political opponent. It does not appear that Mr. HUMPHERY, the Opposition Member, at all weakened his own position by allowing the Minister his full merit : on the con- trary, it leaves him freer to judge of the measures propounded by the other, and it imparts greater weight to his opinion on those measures. Such declarations have yet more beneficial influences: when judiciously made, without begging an undue and blind con- fidence for the legislation of statesmen, they clear away merely invidious party obstructions to so much of good measures as Ministers may bring forward ; they are a premium to the attempt at such measures; they strengthen the general reliance which it is so desirable that every Executive Government should possess : in a word, they help to make a Government as beneficial as it can be made to the country it, serves, and relieve the honest opponent from all embarrassments and equivocal suspicions in acting as a check on that Government in its weaknesses. In Mr. HUMPHERY'S general criticism on the man, and in Dr. BOWRING'S announcement, the other day. at Manchester, that he should in future support most those Ministers who best develop the " pacific principle" of en- lightened commerce in their policy, we see arising a temper no less creditable than it is likely to be useful in the soberer members of the"Opposition, and one which seems the slow growth of the recess and its reflections.- That the-"opposite temper—the bigotry of Liberalism—is still alive, we may learn in the speech of Mr. THOMAS DUNCOMBE at the Trial by Jury dinner on Saturday. Mr. COBDEN'S sudden abandenment, last week, of his profession calmly to view Sir ROBERT PEEL'S conduct on its merits—because, forsooth, he did not call Parliament together before Christmas, which no person of ordinary information expected him to do, and enter upon an inquiry which must be the most tedious, dubious, and fruitless course, to all imme- diate purposes, which he could adopt—is a more flagrant instance of that inveterate bigotry which taints some earnest, honest, and clever politicians, and makes them think it good per se to oppose any government. Such persons do not perceive that they thus waste much of their own credit and strength. When Mr. COBDEN, for instance, became what his friends call eloquent about Sir ROBERT PEEL'S leaving-the people to the miseries of another winter, he either
exhibited a lamentable dulness as to the possibilities of things, in
assuming that it lies with Sir ROBERT simply to will some blessed instant relief,—a solemn parody of the country-gentleman's " two
Ps, Providence and Peel,"—or he indulged in vulgar cant, affecting
to consider an impossibility possible, in order to throw discredit on the statesman who did not do the impossibility. So Mr. DUN- COMBE, who raved about Ministers' resort to the "terrifying sys-
tem," and their undermining trial by jury, during the late trials in the North, exposed himself to the imputation of talking sheer non- sense : never was insurrection suppressed with less display of " ter-
ror," never were state-prosecutions conducted with more decorum. Lord ABINGER'S escapade belonged to the individual, not to the Government ; and everybody knows it. Mr. DUNCOMBE should have learned by this time, that even the man who has genuine earnestness of purpose, and does on occasion talk substantial good sense, with tact and courage, in the House of Commons, cannot afford to utter nonsense publicly even at a tavern-dinner.
