THE WITHDRAWAL OF THE FUGITIVE-SLAVE CIRCULAR.
THE first Cabinet Council of the Vacation has cancelled the big blunder of the Vacation,—not too soon for the credit of the Government, to one of whose chief members it was due. The mistake is now, therefore, one of pure history, but it is one which may well stand as a monument of the perverse and bizarre misfortunes which dog the steps of even the slowest and most painstaking of statesmen, and cast slurs on the repute of the most laboriously-national and English of Governments. If the Government be anything at all, it is par excellence a Government which, as Mr. Disraeli maintains, is of "the English school." If any boast has been made in its name, it is the boast that the honour of England would be sedulously kept free from stain, and that the Navy of England would be re-estab- lished in the full strength of its ancient pre-eminence. If one sarcasm more than any other against the doings of the last Government has been a favourite on the lips of the present Administration, it is the sarcasm that the new Ministers are not disposed to 'meddle and muddle ;' that they are not so fidgetty as to prefer the chance of doing wrong to the fear of doing nothing ; that they do not wish to keep up their repu- tation for activity by superfluous blunders, and for earnest- ness by elaborate mistakes. Again, if the country gentlemen have expressed one kind of pride oftener than any other in their recent success, it is the pride that England is now governed more by safe, traditional instincts, and less by wire- drawn logic, than it was under Mr. Gladstone. Finally, if one Minister above all other members of the Cabinet has been held up to public esteem as the guarantee of the sobriety and of the sterling common-sense of the Administration, that Minister has certainly been the Minister who is mainly responsible for this extraordinary blunder, and who incurs the humiliation, so far as that goes, of its withdrawal.
Thus the episode of the "Fugitive-Slave Circular" has done almost as much to disturb confidence in the good-sense of the Government as the failure of Messrs. Collie did to disturb con- fidence in the soundness of Bills of Exchange. Conservatives have always piqued themselves upon holding the English Flag higher than the Liberals. Mr. Disraeli at Manchester, (was it not?) identified Liberalism with Cosmopolitanism, and soon after took elaborate credit, at a dinner of the Royal Academy, for having formed a Cabinet which would, at all events, adequately repre- sent "the English school." The favourite charge against Mr. Gladstone was that he thought nothing of English prestige, and against Mr. Childers and Mr. Goschen that they did not foster the English Navy as they ought. Yet here were Conser- vatives who proposed to make the Commanders of English ships disregard the English law, and govern their conduct by foreign law even on the decks of their own vessels, and in relation to mat- ters on which England has felt the highest national pride for many oenerations back in holdini firmly to her own view. And here is the very First Lord, who wept so redundantly over the miserable condition of the Navy as it was first delivered over to him, exalting the horn of the Service by making himself a party to proposals for purchasing the good-will of slave-keeping nations, at the price of instructions addressed to English Commanders to do as they are bid in these matters, and not as their own law directs. Surely no English painter ever succeeded so well in producing a picture which would completely take in a connoisseur by appearing to belong to a debased Italian school, as this Government has succeeded in producing a Circular which would seem to have been written in the age of English decadence and of colourless Cosmopolitan indifference. Again, if the Cabinet has piqued itself on anything, it is on not doing fussy things for the sake of the appear- ance of energy. It has constantly taken credit to itself for being able to act on Lord Melbourne's great precept, 'Can't you let it alone ?' The "range of exhausted volcanoes" were, we were told, to be a serious warning to Mr. Disraeli. He, at least, would choose colleagues who would prefer to do nothing, rather than to do mischief. There was to be less blundering, because there was to be no plundering. Interests were not to be worried, personal prejudices were not to be needlessly affronted. The morbid excitability of the last Cabinet was to be easefully eschewed ;—whatever was to be the function of the new Govern- ment, it would not, at least, be superfluous innovation. The greatest possible emphasis has been laid on this ever since the Government was formed. And yet the first great fiasco has been one of the most needless bits of fussy innovation of which recent political history has any record. Who con- cocted this Fugitive - Slave Circular nobody out of the Foreign Office knows. But whoever concocted it, it was as officious and superfluous as it was blundering. If the only purport of it was—as we have been told—to warn Com- manders not to encourage the slaves of slave-owning countries to flock to her Majesty's ships in the hope of obtaining their freedom, nothing would have been easier than to remind them that it would be very inconvenient to have our ships refused the entry into foreign ports, and that that would be the inevitable result of any such practice as a deliberate encourage- ment and protection of fugitive slaves. Whether such a re- minder was needed, we have no means of knowing. But why any one should have supposed that in order to restrain English Commanders from relaxing, on their own re- sponsibility, the laws of countries where slavery is es- tablished, it was necessary to transform them into the alders and abettors of that system, unless some rest- less and pertinacious demon in his brain bade him do any- thing rather than nothing, it is hard to conceive. But how, of all men, Lord Derby should have fallen into the fault of doing too much without the ghost of an excuse for it, it is indeed hard to conjecture. If one leading principle more than another has appeared to govern him, it has been the wisdom of minimising active official interference. Be sure you are right, be- fore you act at all ; be sure to make what you decide to do seem as little as possible, when you have done it,' would have seemed to us about the best account that could have been given of Lord Derby's counsel to statesmen. Yet here is a piece of work which might well have been omitted altogether, and which if it needed to be done at all, might well have been so done as to seem of no importance, yet which has been done superfluously and with an officious elaboration of disquisition that was as ostentatious as it was erroneous. If Lord Derby really considered and sanctioned this Circular, a more serious inroad on his reputation as a man of caution and sense can hardly be imagined.
What, too, can be a more remarkable comment on that solid and sagacious "instinct," on which the Conservatives pride themselves as a guide so much surer than the vain light of Liberal "reason," than the blunder which has just been with- drawn ? Here is an error the very vestige of which should have excited dislike and suspicion in minds of any sound polititical instinct, passed over by two departments, both of them presided over by country gentlemen, both members of the Cabinet, both of them of the very stuff in which it is often asserted that political instinct is found to be the surest and best. Both of these squires,—one of them a great Peer saturated with all the traditions of both Liberal and of Conservative foreign policy,—must have had forced on their notice what looked (and was) a sort of assent to the principle of a fugitive-slave law ; and even if they did not carefully consider it, they passed it, we must assume, without experiencing that warning shock which leads to deliberation, and counsel, and then to the repudiation of such errors. Certainly, sturdy Conservitive prejudices and instincts never yet established so clearly their inadequacy to keep statesmen out of the most un-English of all pitfalls.
The obnoxious Circular is now withdrawn, and not merely suspended ; but will it be replaced, and if so, by what ? If it be not replaced, as very likely it never will, that will be the most convincing of all evidences that it was not really wanted, and that the blunder was not only what all blunders are, a work of supererogation, but a work of supererogation for which there was no excuse. If, however, it is replaced by fresh instructions, we trust that these instructions will be plain and unequivocal,—that they will tell British Commanders that though they may refuse to receive escaped slaves at their own discretion, and may even ask them to quit their vessels, if the entertainment of these slaves is a matter of serious difficulty and inconvenience, disciplinary or diplomatic, to them, they may never, under any circumstances whatever, hand them over to their pursuers, and may never treat a slave who is once on a British ship, either private or public, outside the territorial waters of a slave State, as if the English law could ever again recognise in him any of the obligations or attributes of a slave. Instructions founded on such principles would be the only fair and adequate anzencle for the grave and humiliating mistake which has been committed.
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