LORD WESTBURY.
LORD WESTBURY'S fall was absolutely necessary to vin- dicate the public morality of this country, but it is a necessity already regretted, though by no means repented. His very well-judged and even graceful statement in the House of Lords on Wednesday will increase that regret. It is undoubt- edly true that in him we have lost a Lord Chancellor such as for legal capacity, professional industry, and broad conceptions of law reform, the country has not had for very many Parlia- ments. As he told the House the othernight, he leaves the appel- late jurisdiction of the House of Lords in a thoroughly satisfac- tory state, only one j udgment remaining undelivered and that in a case in which the argument closed only a few days ago. In the Court of Chancery there would not, he hoped, remain at the end of this sitting a single appeal unheard or judgment undelivered, and this though Lord Westbury took a great deal more labour on his own shoulders than most of his predecessors. Unquestion- ably we have sacrificed a great lawyer to the vindication of our political morality, and no doubt the end was worth the cost of the sacrifice. But the sacrifice was costly. In the Judicial Committee of Privy Council, in the Court of Chancery, and im the House of Lords, if not also in the Cabinet, the loss will be severely felt. Bankruptcy law reform will be sud- denly impeded; the improvements in the register of titles to land in England and Ireland are already made, but will doubtless need extension, and find no one in power to take Chem up as did Lord Westbury ; and the great work of con- solidating the statute law will lose its mainspring in his fall. All these sacrifices must be incurred by the country because Lord Westbury's great intellect was not aided by a conscience. Sir Roundell Palmer could not have been more unfortunate than in his appeal to "the conscience of the House" to ab- solve Lord Westbury. He was the centre of low intrigues and the vulgar clamour of greedy and interested men, and he knew it not,—or if he knew it, did not believe that it was possible to improve the situation. Ile rewarded officials for cheating the country, and put in their places—in one case at least—men whom he must have suspected from their ante- cedents of being quite as likely to cheat the country as their predecessors. In short, while he was improving the process of the law, he was giving, or acquiescing in giving, a thoroughly bad tone to its administration and administrators. And therefore the conscience of the country, and "the conscience of the House," in spite of the Attorney-General, demanded his fall. Nor will it be the least part of the lesson his fall carries with it, that the country deliberately accepts inferior powers and poorer services rather than pay for brilliant abilities by any sacrifice of public integrity.
Has Lord Westbury's great intellect suffered through this complete absence from it of anything like moral feeling and 'control? It is obvious of course that his intellectual influ- ience has suffered by it, not only recently, but throughout his Chancellorship. Had the beautiful judgment pronounced lathe appeal from the Court of Arches on Essays and Reviews been delivered by a man of any moral weight and character,—had it contained in itself, as, of course, coming from Lord West- bury it could not contain, any incidental touch showing that the Judge who gave it valued that comprehension a our Church in favour of which he was deciding no less for the sake of truth itself, than because it was the most fair and natural interpretation of the law,—we believe the judg- ment would have been far more widely accepted, instead of being bitterly repudiated not only by Conservatives but by many liberal Churchmen. It was the assumed cynical basis of the judgment, thei ndifference to all truth in which it was believed to originate, that raised half the outcry against it, far more than the judgment itself. The clergy thought of him as saying, like the self-centred soul in Tennyson's Palace of Art, "I sit as God, holding no form of creed, And contemplating all."
And to such a judge of course they demurred. There can be no question at all but that Lord Westbury has lost infinitely in intellectual influence by the absence of all moral influence. But influence is one thing and pure intellect another ; for as it requires a medium—atmosphere, water, what you please—to conduct sound, which cannot pass through a vacuum, so it requires something beyond intellect to give to intellect real aocial influence. What little social influence Lord West- bury's great intellect has is perhaps due to a certain good nature not inconsistent with a great taste for trampling intellectually on weaker men. It has been clear throughout the recent transactions that the Lord Chancellor does habitu- ally shrink from giving pain wherever he does not forget the ,pain which he is giving in the pleasure of a crushing Intel- lectual triumph. And by such good nature no doubt Lord Westbury has gained a certain small circle of disinterested ad- mirers, and even a certain degree of influence for his great intel- lectual power, which, however, no man of equal power ever had to so small an extent. But the absence of intellectual influ- ence does not necessarily imply injury to the intellect itself.
Though absolutely insulated, and carrying no authority with it at all beyond that of the mere reasons it puts forward, it might still be a great and lucid intellect without sign of weak- ness. And such, as far as we can judge it, Lard Westbury's appears to be,—breaking down only where it needs the help of moral feeling to enter into other men's minds, and interpret the meaning of their otherwise unintelligible contro- versies and desires. He is stated once to have said that for the exercise of patronage he was quite unfit,—that he had almost lived within the four walls of a court of law, and was quite at sea when he found himself suddenly transferred to a great workl teeming with rivalries, secret motives, and intrigues which he did not feel competent to gauge. And there was, we imagine, some truth in the statement. Not of curse that Lord Westbury's innocence rendered him unequal to the task, but that the sort of intellect he has is utterly unfit for discriminating motives and defeating intrigues. It is not itself sufficiently imbued either with moral feeling, or with that respect for the world's opinion which takes the place of conscience, to light easily upon the traces of a sinister motive. You must either have a conscience or a feeling of deference for social opinion to judge men's purposes quickly and clearly. Lord Westbury has too little of either. He has devoted all the resources of his great understanding to a side of law where human nature and its motives are the last things which demand attention,—in short, to bring- ing a very long series of customary principles to bear on more or less complicated cases. And he has been suc- cessful in his profession to an extent which makes it al- most needless as a matter of self-interest to consider the feelings of other men. The result has been an arrogant intellect of unusual power of process, but by no means ready in deciphering character and motive,—one of great power of statement, of considerable speculative power, but of no political and moral piwer. Many great lawyers have shown themselves indifferent to political principle; perhaps the habit of advocacy and of analyzing evidence has led to indifference of this kind. But no man of anything like the same power ever seemed so far removed from the play of political and social interests as Lord Westbury. Throughout his career in the House of Commons, and again in the Peers, his only real interest has been on questions of law and law reform. Even party struggles were not of interest to him, and when he became a Liberal, after having been a Conserva- tive, probably one name represented precisely the same state of utter indifference to the questions usually supposed to be at issue, as the other. Lawyers are seldom keen politicians, but they almost always enter eagerly for the time into party struggles. Lord- Westbury has never been one of this kind.
His intellect was a scientific instrument which he kept aloof from the ecenes in which he employed it, and probably the only great semi-political struggle in which he ever fought keenly was on a law reform,—the Divorce Act, which he fought hand to hand with Mr. Gladstone in 1857. His intellect has always been in some sense a cynical one, not only in its recklessness of attitude towards its victims, but in its comparatively little interest in the battle-fields of human affairs. It has always been solitary and critical, and therefore excluded from half the intellectual world,—that half which can only be entered on a level with others, and by virtue of sympathy with them.
He has more speculative than practical power as a thinker. His mind stands as really outside the moral and political world of 'England as Mr. Disraeli's, but then it is a mind of much more solid intellectual strength though equally solitary and free,from the limiting influence of moral convictions. He is, we imagine, much more awake to purely speculative interests than most politicians. It is said, for instance, that he takes the profoundest interest in the Darwinian scientific specula- tions, to which he is much opposed, remarking, 'It is impossible to conceive that all these creatures come from the same act of creation ; the true difficulty is to believe that they come from the same Creator,'—just one of the old Gnostic difficulties. The "riddle of the painful earth,"—perhaps not painful to him, but still a riddle—often flashes "through him as he sits alone," "Yet not the less held he his cynic mirth And intellectual throne."
His fall is the fall from a place of influence, hazardously held for a few years, of a great mind which we shall long miss, and at least intellectually regret.
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