Russell and the Opposition.
Those who believe that the attacks made by the Earl of Derby, in the House of Lords, and Mr. Disracil, in the House of Commons, upon the foreign policy of the present British Ministry, indicate any change of that policy with regard to the war raging in this country are doomed, we fear, to be disappointed. The English people always process a vast deal of sympathy for nations struggling against oppression; but it is of a nature so delicate and abstract that it never leeds to anything more important than the inspiration of a poem or the manifesto of a popular meeting, or possibly to a speech or two in both Houses of Parliament. There is something pleasant in the refined and sentimental grief which the higher classes especially of England are wont to feel and express for Poland clanking in her chains, or Hungary trodden under feet by a tyrant, or the Confederate States bleeding and fighting the barbarians, who are fast converting them into a desert. A delicious, rosewater sort of melancholy steals over the mind of persons accustomed to every luxury and never having had a single want ungratified, upon such distant contemplation of the of others. But as for doing anything to help the sufferers, in the main of their rights, that need not be expected Russell is, beyond doubt, the most insignificant Minister that England has ever had since the house of Hanover has been in possession of the crown. He has done more to humiliate her than all the servants of the crown since the days of the Stuarts, not even excepting Lord Bute. He has just informed the House of Lords that Minister Adams thinks proper to withhold on his own responsibility, a note of a most offensive character which has been written by Seward; yet it is very evident from the manner in which he acted with regard to the Tuscaloosa, that as soon as it is presented he will succumb, is he did with regard to Poland and Denmark, whom he led into a scrape, and then abandoned from fear of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Seward knows that or he would never have sent such a note. He has tried Russell in every possible way, and he has found him ready to submit to everything. The very fact that he has ventured to write such a note as that in question affords proof enough to condemn Russell. And how could he form any other than a mean estimate of his character, when he has found him so ready to succumb whenever assailed? He has recruited his army with 75,000 men from Ireland within the last two years, in violation of all law, human and divine, and he has not received even a rebuke. He has made Russell promise a law to prevent the Confederates from building a ship in British waters, and converted himself into a catch-pole at his suggestion.There seems to be no humiliation to which the latter will not submit, provided only he may, by submission, keep on good terms with the Yankee Government. And yet we shall see that he will carry his measures in spite of all opposition. Ireland will continue to furnish recruits at the rate of 40,000 a year, unless the Pope have influence enough to prevent it. Not a change will Russell or the Ministry suggest in the emigration law, and at the same time he will not fail to obtain a law from Parliament to prevent the building of Confederate ships in British waters. The Opposition will seize the opportunity to attack the Ministry. They will speechify and protest The thing will come to a vote. The Ministry will be sustained, the London Times will seize that opportunity to edify the nation upon the subject of neutrality, and there it will all end.
Those who believe that the event will be different must be marvelously inaccessible to the teachings of experience. Within the last eighty years there have been repeated instances of the perseverance of the crown a particular line of policy, especially of this so-called policy of neutrality, in opposition to the almost unanimous wishes of the nation. The whole nation was indignant at the first division of Poland in 1774, and although it was clearly foreseen that it must give Russia a preponderance in Europe, which must ultimately prove fatal to England's cherished hobby of the balance of power, and although eloquent members of both Houses remonstrated with all the energy of justly excited alarm, England contented herself with calmly looking on and hugging her darling phantom of neutrality more closely to her bosom. She was busy, Just then, in devising means to reduce her American colonies to slavery, and had no leisure to think of any less interesting subject. In 1794, when the second partition took place, she was so busy in warring upon the French Republic, to reduce the people of France to their ancient bondage, that she did not even make a "representation." The most that was ever done in England was done by the poet Campbell, who said some very pretty things in his "Pleasures of " about " Whiskered Pandours and fierce shrieking," and Kosclusko falling, &c., wondering that Providence did not raise a Red Sea round about Warsaw and drown Suvaroff and his Cossacs, as he did Pharaoh of yore. But not a word about any help from England. Even so it was when Nicholas a second time conquered Poland, and sent thousands of her children to Siberia Not a word of help from Old England, of whose generosity so much has been said — by Englishmen, Yet in all three of these cases the sentiment of the English people was unanimous, or very nearly so. So it was with regard to the French revolution. At least nine-tenths of the Kingdom sympathized with the French, and yet in eighteen months after it broke out Pitt had them even at war with France. So it was with regard to Hungary, which was trampled under foot by Russia in utter defiance of the nonintervention doctrine and of the united voices of four-fifths of the English people. The truth is, the voice of the people, even since the Parliamentary Reform, goes a very little way with its rulers. At least, they must believe so who tell us that the English people are so vehemently in our favor — a statement which we shall believe when we see better proof of it.
