ECCENTRIC PARTY MOVEMENTS.
WERE it not that prospects of place and patronage give something like common purpose to certain sections of the political world, it seems probable that party would go to " everlasting smash." A man might almost as well be impartial now, for any peace and safety that he finds in consorting with any party. It is all guerilla warfare, and everybody else is "the enemy." You see it in the _Fess : being Conservative cannot save the Times from the Post and Standard, the Standard from the Times and Post, or the Post from the Herald:
"Black, white, and red, in eddying clouds are tost, And in the dust they raise the combatants are lost."
If it go much further, we shall have the Standard quarrelling with the Herald, just as that quarrelsome fellow JOHN LILBURN, having no one else to quarrel with, JOHN quarrelled with LILBURN. A practical politician cannot tell who are his supporters, and states- men cannot shift so fast as those who dodge them with allurements and punishments ; so that the hand held out to grasp the offered praise is just in time to catch a rap on the knuckles. Sir ROBERT PEEL is not only abused for everything he does by somebody, but the very thing that is lauded in him at one moment is condemned out of the same lips at the next. After the State trials, you would have thought that there was to have been another Lichfield House compact ; for there was first Lord JOHN RUSSELL blarneying O'CON- NELL, and next O'CONNELL thanking the Whigs for appointing such acquitting Law Lords, and the Morning Chronicle writing special leaders echoing the briefs of O'CONNELL'S counsel. The time for the alliance ripens, and action is looked for ; when, lo! O'CONNELL is throwing Whigs to the winds, the Chronicle is writing down Re- peal and its congeners as humbug, and the Liberator is retorting in his Arcadian dialect. The Chronicle and the Times are hunting in couples, O'CONNELL being the prey ; and the sport is glorious; when, hey presto! the Chronicle takes a new turn, and is O'CON- NELL'S apologist. The present game at politics is like foot-ball, in which the fun lies less in kicking the dead leather than the shins of every body else, friend or foe. In his last act of Phil-O`Connellistn, however, the Chronicle has the merit of ingenuity, and is quite welcome to tag our composition with its own Italic type in the game of seeing how far any stricture can be made to fit anybody : the puzzle is appropriate to the player. The amusement invented by our thrice-worthy contemporary con- sists in applying our remarks on O'Coeszetses tergiversation to Sir ROBERT PEEL. A celebrated authoress, moralizing once on the hypocrisy that consults appearances, said, " Our face we wash every day, our feet never,"—unconscious of the extraordinary bio- graphical confession conveyed in the antithesis. So the Chronicle says, that we all turn, and the peculiarity of Mr. O'Cotszssees gyration lies in a kind of castanet accompaniment- " We on this side of St. George's Channel are a grave and decent people; and we hold fast to the gravities and decencies even of tergiversation. We change and chop about enough; nor is there any nation in the world of which the leading men can more unscrupulously take up a scheme to serve the pur- pose of the hour, and more recklessly throw it over when they find it does not serve them any longer. But then • il y a des formes.' We take some little time to turn round, (that is, everybody except the Times): we express our in, cipient vacillations with hesitation and ambiguity. * * Who can have changed more frequently and more completely than Sir Robert Peel, and Sir James Graham, and Mr. Gladstone? But, gracious powers! who ever heard of their snapping their fingers in the middle of an act of apostacy ? "
In illustration, bits of our remarks are copied as follows, substi- tuting " Peel" for " O'Connell," "Conservatives "for "Simple Re- pealers," divers things for "Federalism," with a few other mere verbal mutanda; the substitutions being marked in Italics- " Sir Robert Peel seems determined to try experimentally how far the Con- servatives can be fooled. One fancies at each new trick that his majority must find out the delusion at last, and be enraged; but they awake not. They are at time,, sounded to see how they remain in their duty ; and as truly as a re- peater chimes in answer to the pressure of the thumb, so does the crowd of Conservatives respond to some old party signal with ' loud cheers.'" " Peel has tried to retrieve his position by casting: protection (orfree trade, or church ascendancy, or religious equality, or party -spirit, or disregard of party, as the case may be) to the winds."
"As he generally is when he has some less patent purpose to effect, he was very vague and circumlocutory, mixing up that subject with attacks on &c.
"Amidst all this, flowed a stream of defence against the imputations that he ever meant to concede anything, (or that he ever did not mean to concede everything,' as the case may be); and be wound up by telling the country gentlemen, and West Indians, (or the Free-traders, or the Orangemen and High Churchmen, or the Irish Catholics, or the expectant Tory barristers, as the case may be,) that monopolies cannot be maintained, (or that agriculture must be protected, or that no difference should be made between Catholic and Protestant, or that the revenue of the Established Church of Ireland must not be touched, or that judicial promotions must be made on the sole consideration of fitness, or that party consideration must influence judicial appointments,' as the case may be.")
Our sportive parodist asks us if this description, so applied, is
not better than the original ? It is not for us to say. It seems to us remarkably good, because, for newspaper-writing, uncommonly like the truth: but we cannot be expected to pronounce how much of the excellence lies in the original, how much in our emendator's share of the composition. The idea of applying it to Sir ROBERT PEEL did certainly not strike us last week, or we might have altered it to that construction : but, sooth to say, we must confess that we do not write "articles" and then look about to see whom to fling them at, as artists are wont to make a design and then see what,subject it can be said to illustrate. The Chronicle is evidently bend out humble skill in artistical craft; which makes us doubt the correct- ness of certain misgivings, that the description is rather better suited to O'CONNELL than PEEL. PEEL, it is true, has changed ; but he has not changed faster or further than the public itself; which he mirrors pretty well—not the " public " of newspaper. writers, but the public of the shops and the Registration Courts. His ambition, we take it, is to be, hardly the leader, still less the tyrant, but the head servant of the British nation : all men have their hobbies, and some are more mischievous than that. He watches closely to see which way his master the "pensive public " winks ; and he is ready with an obedient start to do the bidding before others, if he thinks that the public really and truly wishes what people say. Now O'CONNELL not only snaps his fingers— which is undoubtedly heinous—but he tries to bamboozle his pub- lic; and he does it, too, with tongue in cheek, as impudent school- boys make game of the schoolmaster. PEEL cares little for abstrac- tions, and seldom meddles with principles, except to justify some tangible thing to be done immediately : O'CONNELL has amused Ireland with the impossible abstraction Repeal for years—with verbal figments, such as " Precursors," "Volunteers "—or even with apocryphal traditions and symbolical velvet caps—with toys and shadows of toys. Here is another discrepancy— the Conservatives have their eyes wide open ; they are not deluded, but they cannot help themselves: they deplore PEEL'S Liberalism, but cannot stop him, because they cannot do without him. The Simple Repealers are by no means so clear-sighted : they chuckle over O'CosaseLs's vagaries with all the doting admiration of an old grandmother when a spoiled boy is setting a trap to trip her up : they push forward the fatal machine, heedless of the most
judicious Laocoon that can interpose advice-
" Sacra canunt, funemque manu contingere gaudent." But what does this attack on PEEL mean ? Of all men, be ought to be most welcome to the Chronicle. No man has done more to advance principles occasionally advocated by the leading Whig journal. The reasons for a Whig support of PEEL might be echoed, with a difference, from the Tory attacks upon him. The very Chronicle which we quote has an extract from the Dublin Evening Mail, which says that the system of making appointments irre- spectively of party is to be carried out on an extensive scale, and then assaults the Premier thus-- " It is notorious that his policy has broken up the party—the strongest and most compact with which a Prime Minister of England ever commenced a Par- liamentary career ; and that his course of acting has left him, even in the en- joyment of apparent power, without a personal friend in the wide world, lie fancies, and so states it, that he is carrying out unegrande pensee—that he is establishing ' new combinations,' extinguishing party in the state, and creating a patriotic unity of principle, by which the Government shall he carried OR without difference of opinion. But he will fail, signally and fatally fail, in realizing a project in which no man everyet succeeded—namely, that of found- ing an Utopia."
Does this vex the Whigs, by spoiling their game ?
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