THE FANATICS OF WILLIS'S ROOMS.
AGOOD many Peers and other gentlemen dined together at Willis's Rooms on Wednesday, to persuade each other that the present House of Commons is a sort of Irish bull, made simultaneously by the United Kingdoms, in sympathy with each other, and the House of Lords the true representatives of the people,—so made by a sort of divinely pre-established harmony, unexampled if not miraculous, and certainly quite without precedent in the political history of our nation. In this they appeared to attain a certain moderate success ; but not one quite so complete but what the stronger heads amongst them had an uneasy feeling that there was something rotten at bottom in the convictions so strongly expressed. The Bishop of Derry (Dr. Alexander) betrayed, we think, his suspicion that there was some unreality lurking in the mutual assurances of the noble lords and right reverend prelates, that the Peers are supported by a great majority of the people of England, when he remarked, reflectively,—and shall we not say by way of laying the ghost of a fear haunting his own mind ?—that the words "Church and State" (of course, in relation to Ireland) "went up to the throne of God not in the accents which men shouted over their cups, but in the accents in which they breathed them in their prayers." Evidently the right reverend prelate would have felt easier in his mind if he hadn't seen the wine-cups (wine-cups, we have observed, is rhetorical for wine-glasses) before him, and had not observed that the words Church and State ' were being uttered then at least by not a few gentlemen in the accents which men shout over their wine-cups, and not in those in which they are accustomed to breathe their prayers. The Bishop felt that a good deal of their confidence might possibly be due to the " wine-cups," so he immediately reassured himself by saying it was not the wine-cups. Just so the timid butler, after the burglary in Oliver Twist, when he finds all his courage and the courage of his companions oozing away, intimated that it wasn't the sight of the burglar with his pistol which cowed them all, but the necessity of climbing over the gate which had cooled the wonderful heat of their pursuit. Dr. Alexander is just in the same state of mind. " It isn't the wine-cups," he soliloquizes, " it's the intense depth of our spiritual feelings which gives us such a glow as we pronounce the words Church and State.' " But how did it occur to the right reverend gentleman that it wasn't the wine-cups ? Evidently through a restless feeling that perhaps it was,—in which we are disposed to concur with him.
For no one can read the reports of the various speeches at Willis's Rooms and not see everywhere the eagerness for that factitious encouragement for which uneasy men plead with each other by every inflexion of the voice and every turn of the style. The Duke of Rutland fortifies himself in the extraordinary delusion—of the dreamy character of which he is evidently more than half-conscious—that the House of Lords represents the people and the House of Commons not, by adding for his own comfort that at least the House of Lords has a right to speak its mind openly about those very useful members of its own assembly,—the Irish Bishops,—of whom the Bill proposes to deprive it. Here his Grace evidently feels on comparatively firm ground. He is quite aware that the country has expressed as yet no opinion,—probably will never care to express an opinion,—as to the meritorious legislative character of the Irish Bishops as elements in the House of Lords. He can dilate on that without insisting on the paradox that a hereditary assembly has a secret national inspiration of which an elected assembly, and a quite recently elected assembly, cannot boast. The only defect of that invaluable argument from the preciousness of the Irish Bishops to the House of Lords, is that the Duke of Rutland evidently thinks so very much more of the preciousness of the House of Lords to the Irish Bishops. He insists on not being able to give them up, just as England or America insists on not being able to give up political refugees,—not that these countries really cling to the refugees for the strength added by such refugees to their counsels, but that this is a polite and respectful mode of lending them their aegis. The Duke of Rutland no doubt loves the Irish Bishops with a fond political love, -=for the moment. But would he find the House of Lords a blank without his Grace of Armagh, or Dublin, or the Bishop of Killaloe ? When he makes it a matter of political privilege for the Lords themselves whether they can or cannot bear to be parted from the two or three Irish who adorn their deliberations, we think even he himself could scarcely deny that he is making rather a strategic use of the right reverend Irishmen, than avowing his real object. Had the Bill been one depriving the House of Lords of the assist. ance of these worthy persons without disestablishing or dis. endowing the Irish Church, we should scarcely have had the Duke of Rutland presiding over those wine-cups,' to which the Bishop of Derry made that eloquent but, we suspect, uneasy allusion.
But the signs of weakness,—the indications that these valiant recommenders of valiant deeds are not really easy in their own minds as to the plans of which (with the assistance of wine-cups, for we observe, that even at Leamington the popular meeting convened to hear Mr. Gathorne Hardy encourage the Lords, was again a banquet) they talk so loudly, are by no means confined to the speeches of one or two of the remonstrants. Almost all these valiant persons feel compelled to refer to the elections in Dumfriesshire and Stafford as signs that the country is changing its mind, though they might just as well refer to the elections in Paris and Marseilles for that purpose. In Dumfriesshire every one knows that the Liberal triumph in November was a surprise, and that when the battle had to be fought over again with full time for the application of the landlords' screw, there was but little chance for the Liberals. That victory, at all events, had just as much reference to the Irish Church Bill as it had to the financial statement of Count Cambray Digny in Italy. As for the Stafford election, it is clear no doubt, that in a very corrupt and rather small borough, full of freemen, where the Tories had returned one of the two candidates before, they have now returned both,—but a man must be driven to desperation for signs of a reaction to regard this as one. We might as well argue that an ebbing tide had begun to flow from a ripple in a puddle on the beach which had no connection with the sea at all. Lord John Manners and Mr. Gathorne Hardy were nearer the mark when they spoke of the House of Commons as an assembly of which they are heartily ashamed, and avowed that, so far as the House of Commons is an indication of the national opinion at all, it lends not the slightest colour to the notion that the country is Conservative. It is logically far safer to take the certainly paradoxical line of asserting that the House of Lords is (by inspiration) intimately acquainted with the present temper of the country, and the House of Commons, by a sort of divine judgment, shut off from all insight into it, than to accept the elections in such places as Stafford and Dumfriesshire as omens of political feeling, when all the elections of the United Kingdom which took place six months ago are treated as entirely valueless for that purpose. We observe that the Conservatives in their despair have called in the aid of Dr. Cumming, and have allowed him to prophesy the establishment of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, though not to support his prophecy out of the Book of Revelations, as he must naturally have yearned to do. Since Mr. Newdegate was permitted to argue for an alliance with the Greek Church against the Roman, and to regret that we did not seize the opportunity to ally ourselves with Russia before the Crimean war,—surely Dr. Cumming need not have been so sedulously restrained from a style of argument evidently appropriate to the occasion. We have no doubt he could have found both the coming Battle in the Peers and the (Ecumenical Council in Rome, accurately foretold in the Book of Revelations, and their issues closely connected together, and we are quite certain that this style of argument would have been quite as profitable, and much more amusing, than that of most of the reverend gentleman's colleagues. There has not yet been a speech at these Conservative demonstrations showing the smallest degree of real confidence in the line proposed to be taken, and, indeed, this is by the nature of things impossible. If the elections of last November are already reduced to nothing as signs of the country's will, we must have Parliament dissolved at least once a month, for the sake of any trustworthy test,—and the proposal must come from the Conservative side of the House. It is funny to see the Conservatives so earnestly advocating the theory that the public opinion of the country is absolutely unstable, that within six months of a general election expressly taken on a defined topic discussed for the previous six months, they declare that carefully registered opinion worth nothing, except to be cast to the winds.
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