THE MORAL OF THE RHODOPE INCIDENT.
go THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR:I SIR,—The ludicrous position in which the present advisers of the Crown have placed themselves, in consequence of Sir Stafford Northeote's announcement that he intended to propose a grant in aid of the sufferers in the Rhodope District, forms a striking com- mentary on the contention of those who maintain that her Majesty's Ministers have up to this time kept strictly within the lines of the Constitution, even in spending the money of England or of India, and then requesting the permission of Parliament to spend it, because they have always received the ultimate sanction of the House of Commons for whatever they have chosen to do. If they bad acted in the case of the suffering in the Rhodope District as they acted in the matter of bringing over Indian troops to Malta, and still more recently, in the case of the Afghan war, the result would doubtless have been very different. The Government and their supporters would have been able to plead that a promise had been given, or, as might have been the ease, the money actually spent, so that any real or effectual opposition would have been altogether impossible. No doubt the intended proposal to grant a sum of money in aid of the Rhodope refugees was an extraordinary and unprecedented proposal, and afforded fresh testimony, if fresh testimony were needed, of the thorough-going partiality of a Ministry that never, in its most philanthropic moments, dreamt of proposing a vote in aid of the suffering Bulgarians in the neighbouring lands. But after making all the admissions of this sort that it is right to make, it remains indisputably true, that the failure of the Government in this in- stance, their temporary and apparent success in the other in- stances to which I have referred, show forth most clearly that even under the rule of Lord Beaconsfield's "mechanical majority," very different results follow from proceeding, on the one hand, in a strictly constitutional manner, and adopting, on the other, a course of conduct that is not only unconstitutional, but illegal at the same time.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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