THE PREMIER AND THE GOLD-DIGGERS.
MHE Prime Minister's interview with the loyal Gold-diggers of California on Thursday was one of the most appropriate and picturesque incidents of his singular career. And he him- self evidently felt it so. The speeches of the speakers, the address, composed by a Californian lady and inscribed on illuminated vellum, and the answer of the Prime Minister, all glittered with golden dreams and golden costs, and that sense of adventure to which gold incites, and the charm of which it so much enhances. The Californian gentlemen were grateful to Lord Beaconsfield for proving to the world that England was not in the position of a used-up "claim," that this country is not yet "played out." The casket itself had a miniature view of Larnaca, the capital of Cyprus, on it,—though, according to Lord Beaconsfield's reply, it should have been Famagosta, —and the illuminated address referred to Cyprus as another gem which "sparkles in the diadem of our Empress-Queen." Lord Beaconsfield, in return, dwelt with something like enthusiasm on the characteristic enterprise of the Californians. "They had found time," he said, "to stop short in their extraordinary labours, amid their golden rivers and their crags glistening with treasure," to bestow a thought on him. No doubt they had, and it would have been almost unnatural if they had not done so. Has not Lord Beaconsfield always shown the keenest sympathy with all risky pursuits of glittering ends ? Has not his public life, from the publica- tion of "Vivian Grey "to the elevation of our English monarch into an "Empress-Queen," and the "acquisition of Cyprus," been one long story of political gold-digging,—its dangers, its surprises, its disappointments, and its "finds ?" Has he not himself continually had a desperate fight for a political -" claim" with political rivals ? Has he not frequently brooded mournfully over his "rocker," without finding a grain of gold-dust in the vessel ? Has he not found his nuggets, and lost his nuggets, and recovered his lost nuggets by his political enterprise and pluck ? Who should sympathise with the adventurers of Eldorado, if not Lord Beaconsfield? And how frankly and heartily he does sympathise with them ! "Gentlemen," he says, "the his- tory of Cyprus is a romantic history ; but in all its records there is no incident so romantic as that of a body of English- men working in the real Eldorado which they had discovered, —pursuing labours of so fascinating and absorbing a char- acter as those which are pursued by my fellow-countrymen in California, and who yet, amid all the excitement of their un- paralleled life, can still stop and reflect on the fortunes of the much loved land which they have quitted, and who, in an address contained in a golden casket, offered to me by the youth of California, have shown how deeply they feel for those who are trying to uphold the country to which they are so much attached." Lord Beaconsfield has seldom, we take it, been more really gratified than by this sign that he has touched the imagination of men whose minds were already fired by the quest for gold. He recurs to that point again and again, as the characteristic honour of this singular presentation. But even in Eldorado you must sympa- thise with those who pursue kindred ends in the same spirit. And Mr. Disraeli, though he chose ambition rather than the desire of wealth for the guiding principle of his career, has run what he himself calls "the fiery course of the creative passions," in very much the same spirit as a bold adventurer among the gold-streaked mountains. It is very natural and right that the Anglo-Californian youth should admire and emulate the showy pluck, the buoyant invincibility, the specu- lative audacity, the sanguine temper, in which he has pursued and won a prize, even more brilliant than that which the same qualities devoted to the search for gold generally suffice to secure.
In reply to the English Californians, Lord Beaconsfield said that his merit,—" perhaps his only merit,"—as a statesman had been, that he had always wished to maintain the greatness of his and their common country." Well, there are different ways of maintaining greatness,—and no doubt, in some sense, this has been Lord Beaconsfield's aim. There is Vivian Grey's idea of greatness, and Edmund Burke's idea of greatness. Lord Beaconsfield, doubtless, has always endeavoured to maintain the greatness of his country, but rather in the former sense than in the latter. He has endeavoured to make it ostentatiously powerful, when it was sacrificing true power in order to make the show of power, just as he has raised the grand historic Queen of England into a Brummagem "Empress-Queen," and enlarged the prerogative of the Throne at the expense of the Constitu- tion. He has paraded our fleet and summoned our mercen- aries from India, that he might earn the hatred of the rising nations of the East of Europe, while winning the dubious gratitude of a ruined despot, who has had to pay us in territory as well as in words. He has alienated Greece and alarmed France and Italy, while he has petted Austria. He has shaken confidence in our good-faith in India, in order to filch a frontier from Afghanistan. Worst of all, he profoundly irritated Russia by the very policy by which he increased Russian influence in the Balkans, and diminished the prospect of fostering an independent Bulgarian patriotism, which would have been the best barrier against Russia. Like most dealers in display, he has his reward. London ladies and London " roughs " applaud him, and Californian speculators adore him. But the time is not far off when the bright bubble will burst, and we shall see how much less strong England is,—in the strength of durable international sympathies and of national self-restraint. The Gaudy Adminis- tration will disappear, and leave little behind it but national impoverishment here, and the serious estrangement of all our natural allies, not only in Europe, but in Asia.
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