THE PROTECTIONIST LEADER IN THE LORDS. SOME wise people have
taken up the notion that Lord Stanley is to head a formidable opposition to the Ministerial measure in the House of Peers. What there is in or about Lord Stanley that could induce their Lordships to follow instinctively in his wake— to choose him for leader as an earnest of success—were a puzzle for CEdipus. The Peers as a body are men who have attained the staid reflecting period of life; men they are of fair average talent
or perhaps rather above the average ; they have in general been carefully educated, and have mixed with the world. What qualities does Lord Stanley possess to recommend him to the con- fidence of such a body?
A man who, with all the advantages that rank and fortune and powerful political connexions can give, has been upwards of twenty years in public life, ought by this time to have done something, if he has anything in him : what has Lord Stanley done 1 It is not enough that he should have at times made one in a victorious phalanx : all such bodies reckon in their ranks a proportion of supernumeraries or walking gentlemen who only go to swell their number—ciphers that count only in combination with other figures. Lord Stanley has shared in the triumphs of more than one Parliamentary majority ; but what victories has he achieved by his own head, or hand?
. Whenever Lord Stanley has been put forward as the champion —whenever he has had to rely upon his own resources—he has been beaten. Henry Hunt beat him at Preston in 1831—and, by the by, Lord Stanley was then and there beaten on the Corn-law question. O'Connell and the more Liberal section of Lord Stanley's own party beat him on his policy for Ireland. The New Zea- land Company beat him in the Colonial Office, and beat him out of it. Lord Stanley is the very hero of defeat—the "Earl Tyne- man" of modern political warfare. There is no one question which he has made especially his own—no policy, no interest that be has taken under his immediate charge—that has not gone to the dogs. Under his protection, Protection itself would have no chance.
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