4 APRIL 1857, Page 14

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

LORD JOHN RUSSELL'S RETURN.

THE accidents which have attended the return of Lord John Russell for the City of 'London are perhaps the germ rather than the fruit of a renewed political interest. Lord John himself ascribes his return to "the spirit of fairness," and "the spirit of independence," which have come forth to protect him against an mann attack and the constituency against an organized dictation. This may be a correct description, but the spirit was not powerful enough to draw forth the electors in very large numbers. Lord him did not poll more than 6308 votes ; the highest on the pull, Sir James Duke, only obtained 6664; Russell and Currie, the two opposing candidates, do not together make up the 11,000 votes that in more animated elections have been given to one candidate. It is probable, too, that Lord John's 6300 are of too miscellaneous a nature to indicate any political character in the vote. Many Tories are understood to have plumped for him, simply as a mode of resisting the organized Liberals ; and the Jews, true to a grateful friendship, are said to have plumped for Russell and Rothschild. The vote for Lord John Russell is suite a special occurrence, and no exact index of political conviction, still less of political action. The circumstances of the election, however, have renewed in Lard John Russell, and probably will renew throughout the country, something like the old interest in "political progress," which has been held, in abeyance for a series of years, and not only suspended by the war. "It has been the excuse of every Minister who happened to be in power," says Lord John—" it was my excuse—it has been the excuse of Lord Palmerston, and I think it a very fair and just excuse—that parties were so finely balanced in the House of Commons that it was difficult to carry, Liberal measures with a sufficient majority to secure the assent of the other House of Parliament." But this is an excuse that should have served another Minister better than Lord John. The fine balancing of parties was preceded by another kind of balance. It was the "line balancing" in the Liberal Minister before Peel, and again before Lord Aberdeen, that contributed to break down the distinction between the Liberal and the Conservative. If the Liberal Minister had taken up the work of Free-trade with the same thoroughgoing faith and determined resolution which animated Sir Robert Peel when at last he accepted the doctrine, Free-trade would have remained the property of the Liberal party : and it is not impossible that Peel, by nature a born Freetrader, might have been won over as a lieutenant for the Liberal Prime Minister, instead of being constructor and leader of the new Conservative Free-trade party, which afterwards became the "Liberal Conservative " party. It was the construction of that Liberal Conservative party that first brought about the "fine balance" of parties in the House of Commons. If Lord John Russell had introduced, in his own Administration, or in the yet earlier days of " Finality," a measure of Parliamentary Reform as thoroughgoing and as well-considered as that which he introduced in 1854 upon sufferance, and under the influence of a Minister not pledged to thoroughgoing reform, the bill might have been carried ; we might have escaped the Derby interregnum; and it would not have been necessary for Lord Aberdeen to come forward and to construct a composite Cabinet in order that "her Majesty's Government might be carried on." The formation of that composite Cabinet contributed to remove the distinctive characteristics of the several parties in Parliament ; the mode in which it was broken up contributed still further. And how was it broken up ? Lord Aberdeen and the Duke of Newcastle were driven out of it by manoeuvres for which the apparent motive was a competition between Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston for the Premiership. The move to get Lord Palmerston into the War Office should apparently have had the effect of leaving the Premiership open, and to whom should it so naturally be offered as to Lord John Russell ? If any such calculation was made, however, it was frustrated in the event : Lord Palmerston sent Lord Panmure to the War Office, and accepted the Premiership for himself. He was soon left by Lord John Russell, on grounds as yet unexplained ; by Sir James Graham, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Sidney Herbert, who really had a repugnance to the war. And thus the disruption of the composite Cabinet contributed to disorganize parties without reviving their natural organic vitality. The effect was increased by the circumstance that Lord Palmerston has always been more a departmental Minister than a political statesman—has known how to use parties for the purposes of administration rather than to serve any party in attaining political objects ; and he has now appealed to the country in a general election without a single political element in the appeal.

The "nice balancing of parties" has been carried to complete neutralization. The official head of the Liberal party seems to have thought that, after the experiences of 1852 and the serious interlude of the war, he could carry on representative government without attention to domestic questions, and the Premier for Foreign Affairs had nothing on his programme save a succession of minor pieces in kis series of entertainments abroad. The attempt to reduce the action of the constituencies to a personality has provoked a reaction; and if, as Mr. Cobden said, Lord Palmerston had "torn dowliand trampled under foot the last rag of the banner of Reform," Lord John has taken the rag out of the mud and hoisted it again. Events have come round once more in his favour. It does belong to him to -speak, as he did in his address to the London electors, of "the good old cause " ; whereas Lord Palmerston is debarred by his antecedents, his own disposition, and the circumstances of the day, from using a dialect which has not lost its popularity. The exigencies of his dependence in part upon Liberal Conservative support compel Lord Palmerston to be excessively reserved in his copy of the Liberal programme. Peace with some qualification, retrenchment with some gentleness in favour of military expenditure, he can accept, but when he comes to the important item of Reform, even in his latest and most improved address—he is compelled by his position to be less faithful to the duty of Reform than to "the duty of silence." Lord John Russell Is able to enjoy all the advantages of the duty of outspeaking. He makes an assertion which rather damages the Ministerial explanations respecting Mr. Locke King's bill. Ministers had never seen the bill, he said, and could scarcely be in a position to appreciate its "faults." On the strength of the contrast, Lord John is stimulated to invigorate the current Liberal programme. He is in hopes that the dissolution will open the way for a decisive extension of the franchise "to the enlightened, the respectable, and the honest classes of this country, which have not hitherto had the benefit of exercising the franchise" ; he hopes for a completion of the edifice of religious liberty, for the entire removal of objectionable duties which still linger in the tariff, and for such retrenchment as will enable us to dispense with high duties on tea and sugar. Should the heterogeneous House of Commons now called to London, so largely recruited by unknown men and probably by political or commercial adventurers, prove to be very pliant or very impracticable under the hands of our departmental Premier, we may in either case expect a state of feeling which would turn the attention of the people once more from purely administrative subjects to political ; would derange "the nice balance of parties" that has been Lord John's "excuse," and perhaps furnish him with one more opportunity for showing what he has really intended all along.