OpiniOnti of tbe Prrid. THE ONE GREAT TOPIC—IAMB illtoUGHAWS PUBLIC
CHARACTER AND CoNDUCT. STA NDA ItI)—If Lord Brougham were not so extremely versatile a politician. we could have much pleasure in referring to his speech at Inverness. At all events, the speech contains au important truth, and an encouraging promise, if the latter is to be relied upon. his Lordship says that the Refrained Parlia- ment has done too much instead of it g tun little; and engages for it that it will do less in the next session than it has done in the last. Why will not Lord Brougham always speak the same language? why give his personal enemies— for personal enemies he has, tl gli we believe few men less deserve such—the opportunity of saying there are two Lord Broughams? Fur ourselves, though diametrically opposed to nearly all the noble and learned Lord's essential opinions, in polities and religion, we never can hear him charger' with an offence so nearly connected with moral wrong, as political duplicity, without great pain. When we aeensed him, whether justly or unjustly time will tell, of seeking to succeed Lord (hey, we were not ignorant that the apparent advantage of success would be attended with pecuniary loss—a loss which, we fear, the noble and learned Lord's Circumstances, impaired as they have been by a too generous confidence and a boundless liberality, email ill afford. But this indifference to pecuniary loss, where intibition seemed to point the way, did not appear to us at all in- consistent with Lord Brougham's character. Whether he ever pursued the object, or did nut, it is now, we believe, plain, that Prime 111inister Lord Brougham can never be. What poarible motive then can a man who certainly despises pelf, and can now have no ulterior object of ambition—what possible motive can such a man as Lord Brougham so circumstanced, find for seeming to play the sordid double part of a niece fixture to place ? What can he see in office for which it is worth bartering the good opinion of all those men whom he must respect—the candid and fair-judging ; political opponents, as well as political friends? As retired Chancellor, he would be a richer man than as actual Chancellor, even were his retirement the necessary consequence, which it is not, of his acting a single and intelligible part. We confess that, with all allowance for the waywardness which rapid suc- cess naturally suggests in an energetic temperament, Lonl Brougham's conduct is still a middle that we cannot solve. Ile has talents to he a great Man a very
great man ; he has, we believe, too, amiable dispositions to give these talents full
play ; and if he would content I self with one line of thinking—a right direc- tion—let him then be contented with being a very great man—it is all that humanity can aspire to. Nobody was ever, yet, two very great men.
Li V K POOL. ALBION—When the outcry against his Lordship was not only not raised by the Tory journalists, but by the Liberal journalists, for conduct which the former must have secretly approved and applauded, seeing that it tended to revive the drooping can=e of Toryism, motives of political hostility cannot lie supposed to actuate all, thou4lt they may actuate sonic of the Liberal writers who have ventured to censure aria condemn the Chancellor. The Times, the Tory journals excepted, is the only Liberal paper which has con- donned his Lordship's conduct for the prominent part he acted in reference to the Poor-laws' Amendment fill. All the other Liberal journals, ire believe, not only approved of the Poor-law projeet, but praised the noble bad for his powerful and successful support of the bill, and his eloquent and argumentative defence of its main provisions, in its passage through the House of lands. They grounded their charges against the Chancellor on his speeches in the House of Lords during the last fortnight of the session. We will mention the most prominent of those charges. First, the Liberal journals condemned his Lordship's conduct on the Warwick Bill. They did not, as his thick-and-thin supporters pretend, condemn so much his vote for the rejection of that WI, though they could not approve of it, as they condemned the doctrine which he broached, shortly after the bill was thrown out, that, as it was not illegal for Peers to intet fere in the election of Members of the Mouse of Commons, their interference was not unconstitutional. A doctrine which, while it sets at naught a standing order of the House of Commons, to which custom has almost given the force of law, is clearly onconstitutional, because, if adopted in prac- tice, it would destroy the freedom of election, and subvert the independence of Parliament. Yet to such a doctrine Lord Brougham gave the sanction of his name and the weight of his authority. Secondly, the Liberal journals con- demned the petty lawyer-like spirit in which his Lordship struck out the clause in the Poor-laws Amendment Bill, the object of which was to give the Dis- senting Minister a legal right to enter workhouses to instruct and console pau- pers who might require his spiritual services; as well as the petulant manner in which, when the !louse of Commons restored the clatve, Ike expressed his auger at the pertinacity of the Lower House in persisting in a clause to which -he was hostile, because it contained a mere technical error, which a dash of his pen would have corrected ! Conduct like this the Liberal journals condemned, keause,how ever characteristic of the petty fogging lawyer, it was unworthy of time enlightened and the liberal legislator, and positively discreditable to the man who all his life had professed to stand forward as the champion of the rights of the Dissenters. Thirdly, the Liberal journals condemned the Chancellor's closing speech in the I louse of Lords, wherein he praised the Lords at the expense of the Commons. describing the Commons as, almost necessarily, from the competition of Members and their desire to please their constituents, unfit for the business of legislation, and describing the Lords as " the great improvers of wasurcs,"..._ the blundering measures of the Representatives of the People ! This the Liberal journals coneidered his Lordship's crowning fault. He not only insulted the House of Commons, but eulogized the 'louse of Lords, in a style which, if sin- one, showed that his opinion of that assembly had undergone a sudden and almost miraculous change. Some of his own friends, struck with the singularity, if not with the in. ono stency of hit. conduct, are compelled to rest his defence on the ground that he was acting the put either of a quiz or an hypocrite. If the Chricellor's pr.ii.e was a piece of quizzing, it was beneath him; if of hypocrisy, it was disgraceful to him. On either supposition, his conduct was censurable; and censured, pretty freely, it has been by the Liberal press. These are among the charges which the Liberal press has brought against Lord Brougham. On these its indictment against his Lordship is founded. His partisans admit, that they present a primafireie case of suspicion against him : they admit also, that cer- tain passages in his Lordship's recent political life were both impolitic and in- discreet. So far they awl the portion of the press of which we are speaking are agreed. But though agreed as to the Lets, the parties differ as to the inferences
to be drawn fr those facts. The friends of the Chancellor euutend, that notwithstanding the impolicy of certain acts and the indiscretion of certain speeches—notwithstanditig, in short, certain aberrations, he is still as stanch
a Reformer as ever he was; and they call for continued confidence in hit Lord. ship's integrity and patriotism. His opponents, as contradistinguished from his enemies (for enemies, in the worst sense of the word, personal as well as politi- I the noble Lord evidently has),—his opponents hope, that the assertions of his friends may be true, though recent eveuts have compelled them, however reluctantly, to suspect both his patriotism and his integrity. They do not, we trust, " hope against hope." They are as sensible as the most ardent of Lord Brougham's admirers can possibly be, of his important services in the cause of Education and of Reform. For those services they are unfeignedly grateful, and lose no opportunity of showing their gratitude. They fear, however, that his Lordship, if he have the will, which they believe he has, possesses not sufficient temper, nor firmness, nor determination to push forward the reforms which he as well as they consider necessary. They suspect that, though he never can, without committing an act of political suicide, desert his principles and his party, he will not peril his official existence on one bold act, and force the stubborn. mess of the 'Tory Lords to yield to his fixed determination of purpose. They suspect, in short, that he will pursue a mean, temporizing policy in reference to the House of Lords; that be will allow that assembly to reject or to mutilate the measures of reform which may be sent up to it from the House of Commons; and that, instead of standing by the People, he will truckle to the Lords. 'this is what the People fear: their fears have been excited by certain acts and speeches of his Lordship; acts and speeches which his professed admirers characterize as impolitic and indiscreet, and the impressions caused by which can be obliterated nom the public mile] only by acts and speeches of a diametri- cally opposite kind.
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