WALPOLIANA.
MR. SECRETARY WALPOLE is a gentleman who concentrates in him- self a union of attributes apparently incompatible. Although he has made more mistakes than any Minister within a given time, he is not the less trusted : he has made such serious official mistakes as to be obliged to recant in the face of the laughing Commons, and yet his official colleagues look to him for keeping Mr. Disraeli in order as Ministerial " leader " of that Rouse; he makes more mistakes of argument than any Member in the assembly except Colonel Sibthorp, and yet politicians do retain a belief in his intel- ligence; he has made more mistakes as to matters of fact than any public man except Louis Napoleon, and yet honest people continue to credit his love of truth. At Midhurst, the other day, he carried this ingenious departure from fact to a singular extent.
For instance, he thought it expedient to enter into a statistical comparison of years before and after 1846, the year of Corn-law repeal,—comparing the amount of poor-rate for a period of three years before and after that act, and showing an increase of nearly a million in the latter triennium, as the effect of Corn-law repeal. There is not a member of a mechanics institute that cannot set him right. In the latter triennium came the potato famine, with all its local horrors and expenses. There was the railway panic, and its ruin. And although the repeal of the Corn-laws stood upon the statute-book, it was practically in abeyance, since the price of corn would of itself have put the old sliding-scale out of use. We believe that Mr. Walpole, intent on one object, really did not see these facts, though they were as obvious as the Nelson pillar at Charing Cross ; but it only shows how a bias may render the language of a truth-telling gentleman as mach like falsification as it could possibly be without the animus mentiendi. Mr. Walpole, who took a joke of Lord Derby's as the basis for his celebrated Militia-suffrage, now, on the strength of Mr. Dis- raeli's financial epics, vaticinates a readjustment of "burdens on land " ; which, with an Oriental poetry of his own, he calculates at 15,000,0001. instead of the original 12,000,000/. To make this pass, he uses the word "land" as synonymous with "real pro- perty," and thus endeavours to pass off the burdens borne by owners of town house property, warehouses, factories, railways,
as sustained by the poor landlords in the country : he mysti- fies the men of Midhurst by confounding the landlord of the soil and the landlord of a lodginghouse ; by speaking of the "land" as if you could 'equally drive the plough in a Suffolk field and in Bir- ley's factory-yard or the North-western railway station at Euston Square, and by counting up the burdens of the great North-western incorporation and Mr. Birley as part of the disbursements by the poor rural landlord ! Still there is an unconquerable faith, that Mr. Walpole does not intend this for the " thimblerigging " at which his chief used to be indignant in days long gone by.
Again, he contrasts "the principle" of "the fair policy of 1842" with that of the " onesided policy of 1846"; while the prin- ciple was the same—that of removing obstructive burdens front articles of great consumption. Nay, the author of those measures had always avowed, long before 1842, that in principle the Corn- law could not be sustained. The Globe, which is among the jour- nals tearing Mr. Walpole's little mistakes to pieces, draws a dis- Unction between Sir Robert Peel's principle, which was uniform, and the " pledge " which he was accused of making and breaking, not to repeal the Corn-law; whereas the fact is that he had ex- pressly and absolutely refused to make such a pledge. He had not entered office, as Lord Derby did, to sustain Protection, but to make the best bargain possible in yielding Protection, if that should be inevitable : and we believe that, in establishing the practice of readjusting taxation so as gradually to free the articles of most general consumption, whether for direct use or for use as materials, he did obtain the best possible bargain for all classes. So the labouring classes feel, in country as well as town ; responding to the touching appeal which he made to posterity, so soon that the response would have come in his lifetime if he had not been pre- maturely removed. The principle of 1842 was identical with that of 1846—it was free trade applied as speedily as fiscal oircum- stances would permit ; and when Mr. Walpole attempts a contrast, he implies an assertion against history and reason, which every schoolboy can contradict. He speaks of the policy of 1842 as supported by the Conserva- tives, that of 1846 as opposed by them; on which the well-known quotation from Disraeli's George Bentinck, about "the stout heart of Mr. Buck" and "the pleasant presence of Walter Long," and the others of the 113 who opposed the measures of 1842, is flung at him from all sides.
People will persevere in believing that Mr. Walpole is neither a fool nor a false-speaker; so much is there in manner. He has too often evinced an ingenuous desire for the spirit of truth, to be damned for mistakes, however palpable, flagrant, and multiplied. He has shown himself in opposition a promising student of states- manship. In office he has shown himself still no more than a stu- dent; and that which would provoke personal indignation at some men, who have less effectually won the general regard, in his case only provokes a feeling that it was unfair that a student so little advanced, even in the accidence of statesmanship or in the most recent history of his country, should be placed in so responsible a post as that of Secretary of State and viceroy over the Ministerial leader of the Commons.
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