NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THOUGH the House of Commons has done a good deal of busi- ness this week, the greater interest is transferred to the House of THOUGH the House of Commons has done a good deal of busi- ness this week, the greater interest is transferred to the House of Lords, and is prospective. The Rate-in-aid Bill has passed the Commons and gone up to the Lords ; and if that small but much- contemned measure should be accepted by the Peers, no such
smiling perspective awaits the Navigation Bill, which Lord Stan- ley has announced his intention of resisting at any risk. At any risk ; even, it is averred, at the "risk " of being obliged to accept office in the event of succeeding with his resistance! Discomfort is the true word for the position of Ministers : they hold no mas- tery of "the situation" ; every dog may bark at them, and they must submit ; they cannot bear down even the Irish Members. They. have so managed matters that even when their opponents are m the wrong they are not in the right. Nay, it is almost a " principle " with the Whigs, now-a-days, that it is dangerous to be too much in the right : it looks "extreme," "abstract," and " unpractical." With respect to the Rate- in-aid Bill, perhaps they have carried their dread of perfection to an extreme ; and they have allowed perfectibility a wide berth in all their plans. A meddling feebleness more and more cha- racterizes their position, and they are not permitted to forget their discomfort for a single hour. Their measures proceed by the sufferance of the Peel Conservatives. In the abstinence of one party and the weakness of the.other, the old Tories or Protection- ists are gaining confidence and assuming the air of effective oppo- nents. Lord Stanley is to assail the Navigation Bill on Monday next, and it is announced, as if on authority, that he is prepared to take office. A Ministerial crisis is understood to be imminent, and a dissolution. The Tories are to come in with some policy Which shall fit the spirit of the times, and yet involve no abandon- ment of principles. They are to adopt Sir Robert Peel's plan of modernizing the principles of Toryism, and yet to preserve all their ,pristine characteristics—to be at once good old Tories " and modern Conservatives—Protectionists and Free-traders of the Pitt-Disraeli pattern. And the poor Whigs are obliged to suffer the indignity of political extinction at the hands of such rivals !
Ministers expose themselves to be taken to task by their suc- cessors even in matters of administration; the Tories having the opportunity of exhibiting the Whigs in the perpetration of "un- constitutional" and arbitrary conduct. For example, Mr. Her- Pies catechizes Lord John Russell, and obliges the Premier for the time being to depict himself and his colleagues as evading their responsibility to Parliament. The subject was Canada, and Lord John's replies involve some curious admissions. A few weeks back, when the Compensation question with its train of consequences was first broached in this country, Mr. Hawes was interrogated, and he distinctly stated that he knew nothing about the movement in the colony. Now Mr. Hawes's statement was intelligible only on one of three suppositions —either Ministers really did not know what was passing in the colony and was then notorious even in London ; or knowing it, they kept their subor- dinate Mr. Hawes in mortifying ignorance; or he knew it as well as they, but in pleading ignorance prevaricated. Alarmingly known the Canadian movement is now, both to the Ministers and the country ; yet tangible responsibility is still evaded by a de- vice. It appears that Sir Charles Metcalfe once complained that the publication of a despatch from himself had a mischievous effect in Jamaica ; but Parliament has a growing habit of exact- ing despatches : under cover of Sir Charles Metcalfe's objection, "despatches" are kept out of existence, and the communications with the Imperial Government pass by private letters between Lord Elgin and Lord Grey. Parliament is kept out of the council. Lord Elgin will write no "despatches" until the Compensation Bill has received either the Royal assent or the
Royal dissent,—that is, no authentic information will be laid before Parliament until all the mischief is done, and possibly past repair.
For such practices the present Ministers are not specially or solely liable, except that their weakness enhances the mischievous influ- ence. The covert licence they take is in ugly harmony with the di- rect rights of irresponsibility which they assume. The extrava- gance so grossly illustrated by the expenditure on Keyham Dock is not particularly their misdeed ; but it looks all the worse, on the one hand, for their pretending concessions to "retaichment "
while such payments go on, and on the other hand, he actual curtailments which they are making in quarters where they are less unequivocally justifiable. They cut down the number of men in the army, they neglect the costly and tediously-trained artil- lery, while they covertly sanction a never-ending ever-waxing outlay upon ill-contrived docks. They have not originated a practice common to Ministers, of slurring over explanations and estimates, so as to wheedle the Commons out of a consent for things which are made to appear leas costly than they prove; but they have carried that practice to an extreme. It is precisely like that with which railway account-manufacturers are now charged, of carrying on expenses to "next half year," and so making the outlay seem less than it really is. That has been the way with the Irish relief, for which Lord John Russell is how asking more.
Lord Brougham has preferred a sweeping bill of indictment against leading railway managers in the first degree, and against the House of Commons as accessory. His speech was distin- guished by much of that eloquence which earned his great fame—copiousness of pointed language and lively illustration ; but it was also full of new facts of moment. It appears that the Hud- sonian railways are by no means alone in irregularities : Lord Brougham mentions others by name, leading companies, in which the managers have culpably winked at the very grossest malver- sation in their officers ; insomuch that the property which the public has intrusted to the managers of such enterprises really appears to stand without the common guarantee of strict probity hitherto presumed of all "substantial" and " respectable " per- sons. A leading journal objects that Lord Brougham's warning is "too late ": even so, he has a right to recall that early warn- ing which he gave, and to point out the consequences of neglect- ing it. But it is ?tot too late. The evil which has been discovered is precisely of that kind which may lead to further mischief— panic, abandonment of property, and speculative enterprises in promoting that ruin to profit by purchasing in reckless sales : Lord Brougham prepares for a remedy, first by ascertaining the
real state of affairs. His returns will extract a full disclosure, by an exhaustive process of catechetical inquisition, similar to the stringent methods of the Court of Chancery. And as to the period that he has chosen, it is the very earliest that offered for prevent- ing the ulterior mischief: it is, in fact, just in the nick of time for keeping down the crop of secondary evils. Mr. Wortley's Marriages Bill, to authorize the union of a widower with his sister-in-law, has been debated for two evenings, of course without a particle of novelty in the arguments. It is a question pretty well settled in society ; but the House of Commons pauses upon the" Mrs. Grundy" interest. And the question labours under the serious disadvantage, that the persevering zeal of its friends has almost converted it into a " bore " of the "organized agitation" genus. Further argumentation does little for it : the "passive resistance" afforded by the breach of the statute law, coupled with the social countenance of that breach, is the elo- quent fact which should be made to speak more loudly than it has done, by making attested examples better known.
