4 OCTOBER 1856, Page 8

The tenantry on Lord Panmure's Highland estates were enabled this

week to hold a convivial meeting in honour of their new landlord, which they had resolved on soon after his succession. On the evening of Thurs- day, two hundred farmers met Lord Panmure at dinner in the gardens of the old castle of Edzell ; and from its kitchen, wherein fire had not burned for two hundred years the tables were supplied. The chairman was a farmer, Mr. David Robertson of Westside ; and he and all the speakers were warm in their praise of "their noble proprietor, the Lord-Lieutenant of the county and Secretary of State for War.' In reply, Lord Panmure said that their testimony was more gratifying than any of the public honours that had fallen upon him for kindly affection where well- merited, long survives us. He cordially joined in the wish of the chair- man, that the time might not be far distant when he should take up his home permanently in the home of his ancestors. He briefly traced his varied political career, which began in 1835, when he accepted office as Lord John Russell's Under-Secretary at the Home Office. Under such a master, gentlemen, it was my good fortune to leapi nothing but lessons of constitutional liberty; and to the lessons then learnt, and the friendship then formed with that noble Lord, I trace my subsequent success in political life ; and for any little credit I may have earned, I look to him as the principal author of it—the person to whom I am in- debted for it. I rejoice that this public opportunity occurs to me for making this heartfelt tribute to my noble friend, because at this moment it is the fashion to look upon him with something like a cold eye, and turn upon him something like a cold shoulder : but I believe the public good sense will soon see the injustice done him, and that the noble Lord's name will yet be connected with the public liberties and public duties of his country," Another personal allusion was to the Duke of Newcastle. "My gallant friend Major Mackay has laid too much stress upon the benefit which has resulted from any administration of mine. I have on many occasions dis- claimed any special credit for restoring the Army from the state into which it had fallen to the state in which it left the Crimea. I have said often and I repeat it now, when I succeeded to the administration of the affairs of the barometer was steadily on the rise, and many of the plans which had been laid and the steps which had been taken by my friend and predecessor I had only to work out as he had left them, and little to add in order to bring them to a fortunate maturity. (Loud cheers.) I believe, if the

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Duke of Newcastle had remained n office—if that clamour (for I must call it clamour) which drove him from the reins of the office in which I succeeded him had not occurred—he would have succeeded as well as I have done in bringing the Army round from the state into which it had unfortunately fallen to the state of discipline and of im- provement in every way in which it left the shores of the Crimea. But some steps were taken by me which I think did a great deal, not to bring the Army especially from its low estate, but to prevent the consequence of that low estate upon the return of the ensuing summer ; and I think that no greater benefit has accrued to the Army than resulted from the labours of the Sanitary Commissioners, consisting of Dr. Sutherland and others, who were sent out by me to the shores of the Crimea, who by their skill and forecast removed all offensive matter from the camp, and prevented that which every one was prophesying with horror, namely, the rage of contagion and disease when the hot weather set in."

Referring to politics, he expressed a hope that constitutional liberty would advance, and increase the political power of the people. "I have always been one Of those who have never been afraid of trusting the people with political power : I have always thought that the more confidence you put in a man or in a body of men, the more you will find them responding to that confidence, and using well the power with which you intrust them." (Cheers.)

Another point made by Lord Panmure had reference to a subject to which his friend Mr. William Baxter, Member for the Montrose Boroughs, had alluded in some of his recent public orations—the English Police Act. "The reason why I am tender upon that subject—perhaps Mr. Baxter does not know it—is because that happens to be a child of my own. (Laughter.) If anybody is in fault for having brought that measure forward—a measure full of all the vices of centralization '—I am afraid I must plead guilty to that fact, because in 1839 and 1840, when I was Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, I passed that measure through the House of Commons. It was then brought forward as a measure optional upon the counties for which it was passed, in order to induce those counties to look to their own interests in the way of the restriction of crime, instead of doing that which was the universal practice of those times to do—making the British Army the Police of the county, a purpose for which the British Army never was intended. In the year 1839 and 1840 we took the first steps to better such a state of things,. and that Police Bill enabled every county to institute a police for itself. It was only permissive ; but, so far from considering it an unconstitutional measure, rather more than one-half of all England and Wales voluntarily adopted that which Mr. Baxter has condemned. And this year, upon the principle that where the half of England had undertaken to ,destroy all the vicious vermin in the different counties—upon the principle that those ver- min all fled to the place where there was no police set up at all, those parts of England which had adopted the Police Act loudly and very properly de- inanded that the measure should be compulsory over all England, instead of being merely voluntary. Nothing could be more reasonable than that : but in what commits the centralization '—for that is the point upon which my friend Mr. Baxter is so very loud ? He says he voted against it because of its 'centralizing' qualities. Now, the only 'centralization' that ex- ists in that act is this—that if the police in a county is kept up in an efficient state, and reported to be such by Government In- spectors, one-fourth of the expenses of that police are to be paid fronfthe Treasury; and in order to ascertain that the payment of that one-fourth is merited, surely it is right that the Government, acting for the rate-payers of this country, should be assured in the first instance that they are paying for a good article, and not for a bad one. Now, that is the only centrali- zation that exists in that act ; and I have the satisfaction to tell my friend Mr. Baxter, that if he had the opportunity of voting against that measure as applied to England this year, I suspect most strongly he will have the op- portunity of voting against it as applied to Scotland next year. I am sorry to have troubled you with this subject here ; but I have made these remarks in no hostile spirit to Mr. William Baxter, but merely to show that a mea- sure of a Government may be traduced upon ground.; which really do not exist."