NEWS OF THE WEEK.
EASTER meetings have kept alive the "lamp of sacrifice" which Englishmen place before the shrine of political duties. Although nothing new was disclosed at these meetings, they throw some light on the state of parties and of public feeling. The dinner which the electors of Southwark gave to their representative is more than a tribute to a popular Member or a compliment to a Ca- binet Minister ; for it exhibits the popular 'Member in a condition unaltered by his accession to office. The very manner of his phraseology, the undisguised and unaffected delight which he showed at the compliment paid to him, are an improvement on the ordinary mannerisms of official etiquette, and may help the con- stituency to believe that with Radicalism some reality has been introduced into office. This gives an additional value to his de- clarations on the subject of essential Parliamentary Reform, of Colonial Reform, and Education.
The gathering of the Greys at Alnwick supplies the obverse. No section of the "Liberal" official class ever talked more largely of ''reform" than the Greys yet little has any one of them now living really done ; and accordingly, they meet, as disappointed statesmen without seat or office, to glorify a defeat. One of them, a landlord, indirectly reproaches the farmers with voting for landlords ; when up rises a sturdy farmer, and declares that his fellows can't help it unless they have the ballot. The man who has made least pretensions, but whose manner implies more of genuine heartiness than resides in the blood of the colder Greys, is the one who receives the suffrages of the working classes—conveyed in the ceremonial of a dinner, not in votes at the poll ; for, alas ! the Greys had not made those humble men electors. There was stern reality told in that dinner. So there was in Lord Goderich's speech at Huddersfield ; whither he comes on "purity principles," to retrieve an election stultified through the opposite principles at Hull. A rising young candi- date for Parliamentary honour discovers that, however highly con- nected, he can only advance with security, and with honour to himself, by breaking fairly away from those agencies whose very contact unavoidably entails corruption with all its discredits and its risks.
The disclosures of the wholesale perversion of Admiralty pa- tronage are another piece of stern reality, against whose rock our tender politicians have been braising their soft feet. But Mi- nisters have begun to tread firmly, when they issue their new rules for placing the practice of dockyard patronage and promotion on the plain ground of public interest. These things, however, ought not to depend so much on the transitory virtues of a special Ministry. We want a thorough reform of it all; and we under- stand Sir William Molesworth to imply that Ministers are col- lecting, out of the last election and its disclosures, the materials for their promised bill. The meeting which has about it the air of tradition least dis- turbed is the banquet at the Mansionhouse ; yet even here the same difference may be traced. It is just about a year since the Lord Mayor of that remote age entertained the medimval Ad- ministration of Lord Derby ; and the Ministerial accessories of the present banquet were then actually reversed. Last year the Chancellor of the Exchequer was absent, in repose after executing his gorgeous and dramatic picture of the Free-trade Budget; but the Premier was present, active in showing that the smiling picture of his Finance Minister, like the happy peasants at Stowe, did not truly represent the gloomy reality of British agriculture, to which he stuck with the unfaltering truthfulness for which he is famous! Now it is the virtual Premier who is absent, while the titular Premier admits the reality of the prosperity; and it is only the Chancellor of the Exchequer, his own historical picture of the season still unpainted, who hints that it is in finance that the depth of shadow will be found. So that Ministers are telling truth—at least as much as etiquette will allow—even at a Mansionhouse banquet.
