NEWS OF THE WEEK.
Ton Cabinet Council, announced in our last Postscript, has been held at Osborne. -The ostensible business was to settle about the meeting of Parliament and, as we surmised, the result has Been -to- unsettle everything relating thereto. Before the Council meddled with it, a day was at least nominally fixed for the matt- ing of Parliament ; now there is not even that. It is the fate of the Derby Ministry to introduce confusion-whenever they take in hand to set things straight, and whenever they undertake an ex- planation; to make matters unintelligible. They are like a haze -coming over the face of nature, through which everything "looms" indistinctly. In the ease of almost any other Ministry, nothing would have been thought or said of the indefinite prorogation of Parliament. To bring Members together at -this season is clearly out of the question, and the indefinite form of prorogation is customary. But coupled with the a.ntecedenti of Lord Derby's Cabinet, the measure is naturally looked upon as a persistence in their dodging policy. Their chief reserved all fall and explicit revelations respecting the principles of his Government, and the measures he is to promote, for the new Parliament ; but when he was pressed to fix a time for the meeting of that assembly, there was no bringing him to a point. The new Parliament was to have an opportunity of pro- nouncing on his principles and policy "before autumn should have passed over "--" before Christmas"—" before the time for com- mencing the ordinary session of 1853." He complained of having what he said on this subject misrepresented ; and at every new ex- planation of what he had meant to say, or of what he wished he had said, he took an additional day of grace. It was Lord Derby's unwillingness in March to fix the time when he would be ready and willing to undergo the judgment of the new Parliament, and his reticence as to his measures and principles, that make men at- tach so much importance in August to his postponing the meeting of Parliament sine die.
Well, Parliament must meet at some time—now-it is supposed, about the third week in November; and in the interval Ministers will not be idle. Mr. Disraeli has yets to elaborate his great financial mystification ; the Foreign and Colonial Secretaries have to put a good face on theif egregious blunder about the American fisheries; and one and all of them have to try how many of the 180 unknown gentlemen new to public life, who have contrived to creep into the House of Commons, are of malleable metal.
