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Leader (1850-1860), 12th May 1855, Edition 1 of 2, Page 448, -==_= <S>tttt COUtlriL ^ r U ^ UMHH '

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      avail ; and Mr . Disraeli , on the other hand , is silent because , as negotiations are stall going on , and as Lord Derby is to come in whether there is peace or war , he would prefer to take the Government with all this difficulty at an end . Lord Ellenhorough ' s motion , on Monday next , does not deal at all , necessarily , with the policy of the war , or with the diplomacy : his question turns on the maladministration of tie war ; and the answer to him will come , not from Xord Clarendon , but from Xord Panmure ; and the puzzled Tory Peers—chiefly puzzled because they find I *> rd Derby , their only possible

      chief , thinking a good deal more of De Clare than of Downing-street—will have to decide whether or not they will carry a crisis motion upon evidence which has no relation to more important matters than the gossip of the Sebastopol Committee . Mr . JL-ayard ' s resolutions also are irrespective of the diplomacy of the question : they , like Lord EUenborough , assume that the diplomacy is a delusion , that the war must go on ; and tliese gentlemen would not take the trouble to condemn the past of the war if they did not conceive tliat their declamation would procure some guarantee for better arrangements in the future .

      Iibrd Ellenborough wants to show what a prodigious War Minister he would make ; and as he is coming in , there is some public importance in his private display . But what does Mr . Layard mean ? As a member of the Sebastopol Committee , he would have done better if he had suppressed his individuality until that committee had made a collective report : — by anticipating the committee and passing sentence , in advance , upon the military system , he reverts to the position he occupied two months ago , and thus , very innocently , confirms what he was told when lie was asking for the committee—that the committee

      was of no use . This impatience of character produces a bad impression ; and the dispute he has had with IiOrd Palmerston appears to indicate that there is as much spite as principle in his public conduct . What does he gain by declining the day Lord Palmerston offered him ? He vexed Lord Palmerston , who wanted to get the double fuss of the two Houses over on Monday night ; and so far Mr . Layard raises " a laugh" at the baulked Premier . And you could see Mr . Iiayard enjoyed that on Thursday : he was as gleeful as a boy when he sat down , after

      bewildering the then sleepy Premier with his refusal to take the Monday . That is a small triumph , however : if his object is to damage Palmerston , he would have destroyed that Lord ' s prestige by showing Europe that Lords and Commons were talking no confidence on the very same night . Mr . Layard is the savant strayed into politics ; very ignorant and innocent yet ; and skittishly disinclined to be broken in : so that if the City men put him in the respectable gig they are substituting for the state coach , let them look out .

      It would not take much to break up these old Whigsj " they get more ludicrous every day ; they are only allowed to live because Lord Derby is looking after the Derby , and because the Administrative Reformers of tlie House of Commons are not eager to do Lord Derby ' s work for him . They merely get on , keeping their own hacks together , on sham rumours ; that their "War Department organisation is the all possible ; that they were indignant with Drouyn de Lhuys ' a small terms . ; that there is a tremendous summer campaign in the Crimea all but ready ; that Palmerston is urging the Emperor to raise the cry of Poland ; that there is to be a good Reform Bill next session ; that the Foreign Legion is tobe brought about after all ; that Austria is being managed ; and soon .

      But , meanwhile , it is terrible in Parliament . Take Vernon Smith ' s statesmanship on Thursday night on Sir Erskine Perry ' s wise suggestions in respect to the Indian army : —people knew so well , so instinctively , the man was not worth listening to , that not fifty members were present : and the fifty members found it a mistake to wait on that ci-1 devant Jeune fuimme while he was trying to show how well somo mindless and routiney clerk had crammed him . But take , as a better instance of the tone of this Government , Lord John on the same ' night with the now Victoria Constitution Bill . He was nudged up at midnight when his turn came to make his motion , and he made it with the listlessness with which Brothcrton would carry a turnpike bill—this

      Victoria Bill being a measure that is exciting something like civil war in the greatest of English colonies . Mr . Lowe was there , happily released from the Whigs , to expose them ; and he told the House what the bill was , and startled them , as England is since startled , in showing the monstrous blunder the new Colonial Secretary was about to accomplish . Lord John's vexed reply to the sudden explosion was painfully silly : he began to lecture Mr . I * owe as to the state of matters in the colony , and to put him right as to facts , —for , though Lord , John had been at Vienna so long , and Mr . Lowe is notoriously the Australian authority in Parliament , these Parliamentary nobles have a trick of assuming superior knowledge . Mr . G . Butt told Lord John the reply was

      no answer whatever , but it was too late to pursue the exposure : so Lord John got his bill in—and himself into a scrape , which will destroy his departmental reputation for this session , and supply new proof to our Colonial fellow-subjects of the exquisiteness of the system under which we are all governed . Sir George Grey ' s answer to Mr . Disraeli , on Monday , likewise exemplifies the notion these squires and lords have of Government , and the further noexplanation with which Lord Palmerston , having hobbled into the House , followed up Sir George Grey ' s negatives , that the papers had not been produced , because the polyglot clerk had taken to his bed , suggests the insolent insouciance with which the Downing-street caste views the British efforts to get news of Great Britain .

      The Premier ' s adroitness , not foreseeing that he was to be foiled , in attempting to affix Mr . Layard to a day , was matched by the possible cunning which he last night developed in creating an opportunity of forestalling the Lords' debate next Monday by an explanation as to the changes determined on in the War-offices . But the cunning was too palpable . That unhappy Major Reed , so ostentatiously an unintellectual likeness to Mr . Bright , was too obviously got up , if not put up , to provoke the candour and lead to the explanations ,- and Mr . Disraeli ' s sneer that Lord Palmerston had drawn up the Major ' s motion , and disguised his hand by the bad grammar , tickled the conscious House in a way to indicate that the hero of the Honourable Artillery Company

      was dreadfully found out . The conspiracy—and even Mr . Fitzstephen French was suspected because he abused Major Reed for an assumption of too leading a position—suggested a morale which displeased every one , Ministerialists included : and observing the fact that Lord Palmerston was very coldly listened to , while announcing his Administrative Reform , and that Mr . Disraeli was loudly hear-hear'd in pointing out that the reform did not go far enough , it is a safe assumption that the Palmerston Government , having been precipitated into making its bid for popularity , is all the worse for the effort . On the other hand , Mr . Disraeli spoke so keenly in his old style , of ruthless banter and malicious inuendo , that for the first time these two years one began again to believe in him as a Parliamentary personage .

      Parliament , meanwhile , drifts . On Opera nights it stays away ; on Tuesday making no House ; and on Thursday taking advantage of II Trovatore to avoid Young India , which was rampant on the motion of the shrewd and sagacious , but not very vigorous or very effective , Sir Erskine Perry : —Young India including some of the cleverest young men in the House , —Goderich , Danby Seymour , Otway , —but also some decided bores , such as the overwhelmingly eloquent J . Philliinore , and all of them with too great a tendency to set-orations and to quote Mr . Burke . But when the House must be in the House , having no other place to go to , it either cants or twaddles . Last week the cant was about

      Maynooth—sustained , slightly , in the explanations last night , as to the Pope ' s editorship of the Commission ' s report ; this week the Wednesday twaddle was on Deceased Wives' Sisters—on Back Parlour legislation . Talking in the centre of a city which contains fifty thousand " unfortunates , " honourable gentleman after honourable gentleman implored Parliament not to pass a measure which would make the homo of Mary Anne , the sister , uncomfortublc to Jane , the wife ; and the purity of the domestic life of the country was enormously talked of , with considerable abuse of the Mormons , Mr . Heywood , who held the bill , being somewhat sneered at as leading us all to polygamy , to which Mr . Roundell Palmer , followed by Mr . Gladstone , objects with a fervour not

      complimentary to the box . As Mr . Cobden said of the debate , so crammed with casuistry , so theological , so feeble-minded , it reminded him of the Byzantines , who were rhetorically engaged while the Turk was' mounting their walls ; and it was , indeed , melancholy to see Mr . Gladstone bo sinking the statesman in reminiscences of that stylo of argument which ho obtained when , in his youth , he was being educated for a bishopric . But though the House of Commons is wrong to trouble itself with these matters , or rather to give so much time to them , the country has reason to bo proud of the high intellectual powers developed in such debates by the House . Mr . Pulmor's speech was an essay delightful to listen to from that perfect speaker and most elaborately

      and ingeniously strong on . that side . Mr . Lowe's reply to it , less well spoken , was not less masterly for its resources of quick logic , its vigorous illustrations , and the perfect style . Mr . Gladstone defended his friend ' with what Mr . Cobden called splendid fallacies : refining upon Mr . Palmer's . ' ingenuity , minutely searching out the weak places in Mr . Lowe's argument , threading in his own original views , and gratifying the House every now and then with some burst of mystically ecclesiastical eloquence ; on the whole , delivering in half an hour of rapid and vehement energy a speech that would have been more appropriate in the Jerusalem Chamber , but still such a speech as no other man in the country could contribute to such a controversy . Mr . Cobden did not sink below the ln ^ h standard of the debate ; in simple , but still elegant and forcible language he demolished Mr . Gladstone in twenty minutes , and sat down amid great cheering—what he is not used to there . Saturday Morning . " A Stranger . "

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      SHOT-PROOF FLOATING BATTERIES . ( To the Editor of the Leader . ) Sib , —I cannot longer resist what I conceive to have become an imperative duty , in requesting a place in your columns for some explanations in reference , if not in express reply , to the inquiry which has engaged the attention of the legislature , as to who is the designer of the new floating batteries . Lord Panmure was " unable to say who was the projector of them . " It was my destiny for some years , terminating ; in the month of May , 1828 , when the decease of the late Sir William Congreve took pluce , to fill the situation of his private secretary . Sir William , under medical advice , had quitted England for the south of France in June , 7 827 , his death occurring at Toulouse . During the interval , I was necessarily in correspondence with him from London , among other duties confided to me being the placing in the hands of the printer the matter for a new edition of Sir W . Congreve's work on Naval Ordnance , the supplemental portion of which , transmitted to me from France , comprised among the rest a new section of the Treatise , with detailed explanations of a design for the construction of " shot-proof floating batteries , " accompanied by the requisite drawings for the

      engraver . It will be evident that my explanations refer to , as I believe , Sir W . Congreve ' s original suggestion and matured plan for this description of floating battery , any close comparison of which with those now constructed I am unable to make . I well remember , however , that his idea was that the siues of hi * proposed floating batteries should be rendered indestructible by a covering of iron , the thickness oi which he exactly calculated , and recommended should be in the form of / M ? iefcand stiles , to ensure , probably , the greatest resistance with the least weight . letter to mention that

      I am chiefly desirous in this , being at the period in question , in pursuance of my duties , in occasional communication with the late Admiral Sir George Cockburn , a personal fnen 1 of Sir W . C . ongreve , he expressed a wish to sec the plans , which were accordingly transmitted to the Admiralty , but never were returned to my hands , bir W . Congreve ' s decease speedily following , the enlarged and amended copy for the intended new edition of the work on naval ordnance passed into the hands of a near relation of the author , but whether it has been published or not I am not aware . Having , by your kind permission , iii justice to tnc fame of the late Sir W . Congreve , made public the circumstance of my communication to the Adimrauy of his suggestion and designs for these battencs--now more than twenty-five years since—1 beg l 0 subscribe myself , Sir vour obliged and obedient servant , ROUEUT DBA . KK . 6 , Iltttcham-terrncc , Old Kent-rood , May 9 , J ;__

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      fllT TniS DEPARTMENT , AS AIL OPINIONS , HOWEVER EXTBKlli ; , ARE ALLOWED AN EXPUKSSION . THE EDIIOE NECK 3 SAIHLY IIOU > S Ulii-SEI . F RESPONSIBLE FOlt NOSE . ]

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      There is no learned man but ¦ will confess he rath much profited by reading controversies , his se :. ses awakened , and his judgment sharpened .. If , then , it be profitable for him to read , v .-h y should it not , a ; least , betoltraole for his adversary to write . —Milton

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      Cukmornk . —The coining season here appears likely to bring in its course abundunco of the annual festivities which the proprietor of thcao gardens ia now the letter able to undertake on account of having obtained tho extensive adjoining Ashburnham grounds . Amoiigat tno moat important engagements entered into may be inoationcd tho South London Florlcultural Meetings , and tin . Licensed Victuallers' School Dinner . For celebrating important events , tho Minarets of tho Temple of Mahomet , now near completion , will bo admirably « t > ni » t «« i , as their illuminations will bo scon for many » nuo , i round ,

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  • Citation
    • Leader (1850-1860), May 12, 1855, page 448, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2090/page/16/