31 JULY 1841, Page 1

NEWS OF THE WEEK.

TnaEE manifestoes are now before the public,—Lord Jonx Res- sELL's address to the London electors, which was issued last week ; Sir ROBERT PEEL'S counter-manifesto, delivered orally at a dinner- party of his own to some Tamworth electors; and Mr. O'Cox- WELL'S declaration of the rights and grievances of the people of Ireland.

Sir ROBERT PEEL'S declaration is a more unpretending and also a less tangible affair than his rival's. It is almost limited to negation : with his customary frankness, Sir ROBERT confines

himself to saying that he shall say Benothing. will not prescribe, he says, for the ills of the nation, while he is excluded from admi- nistering the remedies—he does not add, though some of his fol- lowers might, while another pr/actitioner touches the fee. lie did not-say much at this dinner about what he expatiated upon in the House of Commons, the want of official information for form- ing a-judgment upon the national affairs: he now stood upon the matter of choice and etiquette—not as one who could not pro- nounce an opinion, but as one who would not compromise his posi- tion by doing so, I will "not unsought be won ' is the moral Of this part of Sir ROBERT'S speech. Another section of his address was direeted to demolishing the effect of Lord JOHN'S manifesto ; and the retrospective or Ministerial part of that manifesto can scarcely stand the test of the expectant Premier's light ridicule : Lord JOHN'S enumeration of victories is met by a sort of depreca- tion of ungenerous triumph over the vanquished, and then by an appeal from the individual victories to the wholesale defeat of the late election. A third portion of the Tamworth speech is adroitly enough addressed to Royal eyes: taking for his text an im- pertinent " on dit," that he had boasted that he would make the Queen a Tory in six weeks, Sir ROBERT insinuatingly repudiates every sort of presumption on his part ; he does not assume that he is to be Minister ; he is shocked at the insolence of attempting to pronounce what may be the personal feelings of Royalty; he shares the indignation which the Queen must feel if such contemptible impertinences come before her. Sir ROBERT would have his Royal Mistress understand, that, if he is forced upon her acceptance by the general course of events which coerces him as well as others, he is still the genteelest and most considerate of coinpulsory servants, incapable of vulgar triumph or obtrusive confidence. The gist of his insinuations directed to that high quarter is, that Satan is not so black as he has been painted. Sir ROBERT'S speech—a Parliamentary "statement" delivered from the head of his own table at a convivial meeting—elaborately easy, saying nothing and hinting much—is well calculated, not to pro- duce the conviction, but to convey the impression, that, while he will be a more vigorous Minister than any which we have had for ten years, and able to put Lord JOHN'S victories" to the blush, he will by no means be a harsh counsellor or a disagreeable man at Court, or anywhere else. There is one point In Lord JOHN'S manifesto which Sir ROBERT leaves untouched—the future tactics of the Whig Opposition : he does not laugh at that. Whigs out of office are not perhaps quite so laughable as Whigs in ; nor Tories quite so free to laugh in as they were out, especially when they go in to deal with a deficiency and a declining revenue. Sir ROBERT PEEL'S manifesto leaves matters just where they stood before : it only intimates that it has not been necessary to modify the new " Conservative" policy—whatever that may be—in order to enable the incoming Ministers to compete with Lord JOHN RUSSELL'S showy Opposition programme.

The Liberator's declaration is a very different sort of composi- tion from Lord JOHN'S quasi-royal speech or Sir ROBERT'S convi- vial statecraft : it looks as though the aspiring patriot had in his eye the Petition of Rights or the American Declaration of Inde- pendence, but could not for the life of him struggle out of the beaten "Hereditary-bondsmen" track : it is an old Corn-Exchange letter laboured into a state paper. To give credit to the first para- graph, the author set out with an earnest desire to deliver a round

unvarnished tale of "facts" ; and the first cff tha facts enumerated is English hostility to Ireland ! and, as usual, Lord MORI'ETH is dragged in as kin‘,'s evidence, to prove, by his vote on the motion to extend the Irish franchise, the hostility in which he is an ac- complice. If Mr. O'CoNNEr.r, deals with past facts so freely, it is no wonder that future facts claim a still greater licence : and accord- ingly, the most extravagant assumptions of the reign of horror which the Tories will restore are put forward, in so many words, as the express and declared intention " of the Peel-Stanley party." Mr. O'CONNELL may mean the assertion, that that party intend to appoint partisan judges, as a sort of rhetorical figure ; but the figure is so disguised that the words read like the grave statement of a proclaimed fact. Now all this bombast would be very harmless in England; but Mr. O'CONNELL'S influence in Ireland received some very dangerous illustration in the tearful, phrensied ve- hemence of the people in Carlow; and it is a just appre- hension, that his desire to increase Sir ROBERT PEEL'S "diffi- culty with Ireland" may be only too successful. His present con- duct seems to be the beginning of a systematic attempt of that kind. It remains to be seen whether the Whigs will countenance their half-disavowed ally in this his last and most desperate ex- pedient for fulfilling their behest to "keep out the Tories" at all cost ; or whether they will repair some omissions by a deathbed repentance and a well-timed admonition to their indiscreet friend. And if the Whigs do not remember their duty, will the independ- ent English Liberals, if there are such, remember theirs?