29 MAY 1852, Page 1

NEWS OF THE WEEK.

THE task of tracing, week after week, the monotonous descent of the Derby Ministry, is very tedious. Seeking to recommend them- selves .to the public by their neutral qualities—to persuade Con- servatives that they will resist progress, the party of the Move- ment that they will not retrograde—they would be condemned to inaction even if capable of it : their course is necessarily eventless. Mr. Disraeli, enacting the decornms of statesmanship, puts a curb on his flashy and eccentric eloquence ; Lord Derby attempts to bridle his vixen tongue, and becomes flat. They contribute no- thing but dull and petty blunders to contemporary history. Equally incapable with their predecessors, they have no traditional glories of a Reform Bill cora about them : everything they touch is "flat, stale, and unprofitable." The characteristic incidents of their current week are dreary

flounderings to emerge from the bog of Mapooth, into which they had thrown themselves with a silly cunning. In this egregious exploit Mr. Walpole was again the prominent actor. His Militia- franchise blunder was attributed to incapacity to understand a joke ; but, though Lord Derby, like " gentle Dulness," may love a yoke as well as ever, he knows that Maynooth and its associations are no jesting matter. Mr. Walpole's coquetting with good Mr. f3pooner was a positive fatuity • and dreary work Mr. Walpole's colleagues have had to pull themselves out of the slough of Des- pond into which he has led them. Bigots and Liberals look with equal contempt upon the subterfuges by which the damaging de- bate has been shuffled off. The early and unmotived motion for adjournment, the peremptory refusal of the Chancellor of the Ex- chequer to grant a day for renewing the debate,- and the crowning shabbiness of the "count-out," have added to the reputation even of the Derby Ministry for insincere feebleness.

Lord Derby, too, has contrived by a stroke of small cunning to

allow an awkward admission to be extorted from him. Ma- nceuvering to have the renewed Income-tax Bill read a second time in silence, he was arrested by the Duke of Newcastle, driven into a corner by Lord Granville, and compelled to confess. The Protectionist Premier admits that he has no chance of such a major- ity in the new Parliament as will entitle him to propose a duty on imported corn. He cannot do the only thing his party came into office to try. _ He abandons that question ; he does not go to the country on it; he substitutes no other in its place. He is full of vague meaningless professions ; trying to win supporters by hold- ing out hopes to all that he is disposed to befriend them, but com- mitting himself to nothing definite. He professes the hope of being able to devise means of reimbursing the agriculturists for the loss of protection, but what these are he explains not. In like manner, when Lord Harrowby proposed to give representatives to learned and scientific bodies in the House of Commons, Lord Derby expressed the wish to have a plan devised for the represent- ation of the literary and scientific classes, and of the Colonies, and for facilitating the admission of the modest merit which used to creep in through the rotten boroughs, which Lord Derby had a principal hand in destroying : but he threw cold water on every plan proposed, and suggested none of his own. He presents him- self to the country and to Parliament as a Minister in search of a policy, like Ccelebs in search of a wife. He came into office to do nothing—and he will do it, if people leave him there. It is scarcely worth while to notice the sympathetic inertia and small torpid destructiveness of Lord St. Leonardo, but for the gross breaeh of faith it involves. As was threatened, he has con- signed the Copyhold Enfranchisement Bill to the sequestered and narrow precincts of a Select Committee, where interested lords of manors will deal to it the deadly blow he lacked courage to inflict. This after his colleague in the Lower House the Home Secretary, had promised to support the measure, in return for the withdrawal

of some provisions he objected to. Its promoters have but ono remedy : since the bill cannot pass this session, nothing is to be gatned by the sacrifice of the clauses withdrawn; let them be restored, and the bill left for the mature consideration of the public and next Parliament, in the most efficient condition that can be imparted to it.