29 JANUARY 1870, Page 6

LORD RUSSELL ON HIMSELF.

LORD RUSSELL ends the somewhat discursive review of his internal policy as an English statesman from the beginning of his career up to the resignation of the Ministry in 1841, where, for the present, he drops it, with a very characteristic and dignified outburst of his deep-rooted and, on the whole, well-justified pride and self-respect :—" My capacity," he says, "I always felt was very inferior to that of the men who have attained in past times the foremost place in our Parliament and in the Co:moils of our Sovereign. I have committed many errors, some of them very gross blunders. But the generous people of England are always forbearing and forgiving to those statesmen who have the good of their country at heart ; like my betters, I have been misrepresented and slandered by those who knew nothing of me, but I have been more than compensated by the confidence and the friend- ship of the best men of my own political connection, and by the regard and favourable interpretations of my motives which I have heard expressed by my generous opponents, from the days of Lord Castlereagh to those of Mr. Disraeli." It is not a little characteristic, too, of the man who speaks of him- self in this not ignoble tone of proud humility, that while he confesses in the abstract his "many errors, some- of them very gross blunders," he has not in this review of his career pointed out any one of them ; but both as regards home policy before 1841 and his foreign policy since -1859, has insisted only on those aspects of it capable of defence and apology. We do not reproach him for this, for it is human nature to prefer general confessions to confessions of particular sins, and there is no special reason why Lord Russell should do his political penitence in public ; but we- find in it something characteristic of the statesman, that his. consciousness of weakness, evidently sincere as it is, should come in rather as an artistic touch to set off the grandeur of his equally sincere self-respect, than by way of introduction, to any specific blunder. For it has been part of the strength of Lord Russell's character that he has really been 'unable to distrust himself, or even to dwell on his own mistakes.. Yet he is quite too proud to conceal from himself that he has made mistakes, or even to dissemble the greatness of the mistakes which he has made ; to do so, would be- to be in some degree ashamed of those mistakes, and shame is an emotion unknown to Lord Russell. But his imagina- tion will not dwell on them, though he freely admits them, because to ignore them would be to wish himself other than he has been, which is hardly possible to such as he is. In going back over his career he very naturally recalls most vividly those acts of self-reliance in which he was most truly himself,— how he differed from the leading Whigs in identifying himself heart and soul with the Spaniards and the Duke of Wellingtom in the strife against Napoleon ; how he bet a guinea with Lord Ponsonby in 1809 that Lord Wellington would continue to hold the lines of Torres Vedras for another year, and how, though Lord Grey thought his bet a folly, he nevertheless won it ; how, on visiting Napoleon at Elba in 1814, he wrote home. to his brother his conviction that the ex-Emperor's restless state of mind portended another effort to govern France and disturb Europe ; how, a few years later, when "discounten- anced by his betters and his elders," [with regard to Parlia- mentary reform], he "had to consider the position, the cha- racter, and the principles of the Whig party," and how this review emboldened him to make his comprehensive motion on reform in 1822, which was resisted by Mr. Canning in words. whose eloquence and whose clear forecast of those coining events which he dreaded so deeply and Lord John so warmly hoped for, gratified at once the personal and the political self- esteem of the young statesman ; how boldly he fought the last pitched battle for reform, and how the audacity of his measure- came like a thunderclap on the House of Commons and like a flash of light upon the country. The same tenacious memory of acts of successful self-reliance marks the rest of his review. He recalls with pride how, in a great debate in 1834, he pledged himself to the principle of taking any superfluous wealth from the Irish Church and applying it for the good of the whole nation, even though" the assertion of that opinion should lead him to differ and separate from those to whom he was united by political connection, and for whom he retained the deepest private affection ; "—and how electric was the effect on the House of Commons and on his own colleagues. He rehearses not without a touch of dry humour how, in the middle of the- crisis which followed Lord Grey's and Lord Althorp's resignations, when his own accession to the leadership of the House of Commons hung in the balance, "seeing that nothing more was to be done that night, I left the Cabinet and went to the opera." He refers to his famous joke as to his willing- ness to take command of the Channel Fleet, if he could only think it his duty to do so, not without a certain haughty half- seriousness. He seems almost as proud of abandoning for a long term of years the principle of appropriating the surplus revenues of the Irish Church to the Irish nation, as he is of being the first among statesmen to assert that view, and of choosing it as the battle-field with Sir Robert Peel's Ministry in 1835. In his review of his foreign policy, Lord Russell clings with equal tenacity of self:esteem to all his decisions,— on Poland as well as on Italy ; on Schleswig-Holstein as well as on North America. Of 'gross errors 'there is not a gliinpse hitherto in his review,—not, we are quite sure, because Lord Russell has been mock-modest in admitting them, but because his memory and imagination recur chiefly to his most characteristic steps, and he is almost morally unable to regard any thoroughly characteristic action of his political life as a blunder. The impression that his review makes

upon us is of a career substantially wise and sagacious, remarkably self-confident and boldly conceived, but marked by a certain baldness as well as boldness of conception, a certain inability to feel the glaring want of finish, the anomaly, often the abrupt lopsidedness, of a policy which in its details was, no doubt, determined by the exigencies of changeful times. There are enormous incoherencies which Lord Russell never even felt sufficiently to try to overcome. This is especially notable in relation to the foreign policy. With respect to each separate item of foreign policy Lord Russell gives a sufficiently shrewd apology. But he is quite unaware how bizarre the net effect is,—how odd it seems to find him counting on help from France in one quarter of the world immediately after he had been doing his best to snub France in another quarter, or how mis- chievous and unreal his intervention' on behalf of Poland seems to us, when accompanied by the confession that no serious step was ever intended by either England or Austria. Bold but bald statesmanship,—generally sound at home, often sound abroad, but wanting in comprehensiveness and coher- ence,—is the main impression left on us by his review. And there is a curious reflection of the same quality of mind in his style. Crispness of style,—that crispness which comes equally of sense and of pride, which is at once pithy from the former quality and curt from the latter,—Lord John has always had, and has always been quick to perceive and admire in others. This was the soul of the immortal letter to the Dean of Hereford acknowledging the announcement of his intention to violate the law.' Throughout these reminis- cences you can see how Lord John admired the same quality in others. He quotes Sir Samuel Romilly's reply to one of the Crown lawyers who pointed out a mistake of his in asserting that a particular penal law, which he (Sir S. Romilly) wanted to repeal, dated only from Henry VIII., when it really dated as far back as Edward I.,—" What care I," retorted Romilly, "whether it was made by one set of barbarians or another ? "- he quotes Chatham's congratulations when the borough of Shoreham, which used to be bought by the Indian magnates, was merged in the Rape of Bramber, that Shoreham "had been taken away from Bengal and restored to the county of Sussex." He recounts that when a speech of O'Connell's, taunting Lord Althorp with a pledge he had not been able to redeem, led to Lord Althorp's resignation, he (Lord Althorp) whispered to Lord John, who was sitting by him, "The pig's killed l"—and he goes into a small disserta- tion on the favour which porcine similes have found in the eyes of British Kings and statesmen, ending with the remark, "So vulgar and idiomatic are the phrases of English monarchs and ministers." What Lord John evidently admires most in style is a pungent homeliness,—the homeliness expressing the self-esteem and self-confidence of the men who are entirely above the fear of being thought vulgar, and the pungency expressing the sharp decisiveness of their judgments.

But this love of Lord Russell's for pungency and pith,— qualities of the highest value for the purposes of effective Parliamentary debate,—is closely connected with a certain in- tellectual weakness which we notice directly we look at his political disquisitions as a whole, a weakness akin to that which we have observed with relation to his foreign policy, namely, a want of intellectual largeness and comprehensiveness, an inability to see how one point bears on another, in short, a frequent preference for telling littleness, such as would raise a cheer in a debate, to wise and statesmanlike wholeness of view. We may be excused for taking an illustration of this from Lord Russell's very small and misleading criticism on our own general view of the Irish land question. In the only dull part of his introduction,'—a very tedious digression on the Irish policy of the future,—Lord Russell twice criticizes the Spectator in somewhat sneering and absurdly incorrect terms, —precisely in the manner in which he might have raised a cheer at the expense of Mr. J. S. Mill, had he been answering him in Parliament. Lord Russell quotes the Daily News to prove that fixity of tenure in Ireland would "diminish pro- gress and stereotype desolation," and, he adds with almost inconceivable misunderstanding of what we have written, "The Spectator seems to have no objection to desolation, and says that the more wealth Ireland has accumulated the more loudly and bitterly she has protested against our rule.' But surely it is not the business of Parliament to stereotype deso- lation, to stop the accumulation of wealth, and to foster the agrarian murders which, instead of being stopped, would be promoted by such legislation." And in another place Lord ' Russell says, "The course proposed by the Spectator would produce, instead of fertility, desolation ; instead of hatred, con-

tempt. Here would be a fine result of statesmanship applied to Ireland." Now, this misunderstanding of our argument is marvellous. Our position has been simply this,—that to force on Ireland an agricultural system which, though it might be absolutely the best for any country where it finds popular feeling and natural circumstances suitable for that system, is utterly alien to Irish feeling and Irish circumstances, on merely economi- cal grounds, is not good statesmanship ; and may end, as it has ended in Ireland, in accumulating considerable wealth, which is devoted, not to the production of more wealth, but to the purpose of rendering all property insecure by fomenting politi- cal conspiracy and paying for foreign intervention. As for hav- ing no objection to the stereotyping of desolation,' that is Lord Russell's own fancy, which we take leave to say, though it might have been a happy and telling imputation in debate, is a little beneath him in serious disquisition. We are ready to maintain, indeed, that a system in the abstract lm economically perfect may be better, on political grounds, for a given nation, than one more economically perfect ; but then it is fi.r that nation better not only politically, but economically, because nothing causes so much desolation,' nothing really wastes and depreciates pro- perty so much, as repeated insurrection and the constant fear of it. That, of course, has always been our position, and not that which Lord Russell, by an artifice that would not be objectionable in debate, attributes to us. It is the defect of Lord Russell's intellect,—an intellect of unusual shrewdness and lucidity,—that it delights too much in happy hits which do not involve any wide view of a question,—that it is the intel- lect of an apt debater. You see this perpetually in individual despatches, and still more in the general tenor of his foreign policy.

But, on the whole, Lord Russell's introduction to his speeches and despatches will add very justly to the esteem with which he is regarded in England. It is the work of a. proud, upright, candid, shrewd mind, a little arrogant, a little narrow, especially on topics with which it is not very familiar, a little careless of the personal feelings of others ; but typically national, and for a mind so national and so Whig in all its traditions, very noble. Lord Russell's influence on English politics has been enormous, and will be felt for all time to come. Few statesmen in our history have exerted an influence showing so vast a preponderance of good.