ART. X.-Selections from Speeches of Earl Russell, 1817 to 1841, and from Despatches, 1859 to 1865. With Introductions. 2 vols. London: 1870.

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THESE two interesting and instructive volumes consist of a very limited selection from Lord Russell's speeches, not coming down later than 1841, and from some of his diplomatic despatches during Lord Palmerston's last Administration. has prefaced both with an Introduction-the first devoted to a political retrospect of the period to which the speeches apply, and the second to a vindication of his own policy while he held the seals of the Foreign Office. The publication is not so much intended as a memorial of his public life, as to remind the public of some of the author's views on questions of interest and importance, and to keep alive recollections which he rightly thinks are of value to the nation.

The time has happily not yet come, and we hope it may be distant, for a final estimate of the character and qualities of one who has been so useful and so distinguished. But Lord Russell may be assured that the impulse which has prompted the publication of these volumes finds a ready response in the country. He, of all men, is well entitled to throw off his armour, bravely worn on many a battle-field, with thorough satisfaction and contentment. He can look back on a long political life, not only with the consciousness of stedfastness and courage in the cause of his country, but with the conviction of signal success. He has sown, and he has seen the abundant and overflowing harvest. He sowed in dreariness and gloom-he reaped in the blaze of sunshine. His countrymen are not forgetful of these things, nor ungrateful for them; and the record which now lies before us of part of these labours is a valuable contribution to the political history of this century.

It rarely happens that a statesman, reviewing from an honoured old age his past exertions, can find on so many of them the approving stamp of time. Lord Russell has not spent his days in maintaining with gallantry indefensible fortresses, until he has at last seen them swept away before the advancing army of opinion. Neither has he, like Peel, Palmerston, and Gladstone, undergone the transmuting process of gradual conviction. In all the great political dogmas of his life he is now, and has been qualis ab incepto, standing on the same ground, maintaining the same creed, confident in the same school of thought as when he began his campaigning more than fifty years ago.

He has lived, it is true, to see new workmen and new work come with the coming wants and requirements of the hour, which, indeed, is the never-failing product of the vicissitudes of time. It seldom happens that the man who was foremost when all things were difficult, is the leader when many things have become easy. But such is the compensating process in all human affairs. To every one his hour, and his field of labour. He is happy who, when his toil is done, is so amply repaid as Lord Russell is, not only in the pleasant remembrance of how fields were won, but in the prosperity, as well as in the esteem and gratitude, of his countrymen. He must be removed farther from the smoke and din of present strife, contentions, and envyings, before his services and qualities assume in public opinion their true dimensions; but he will occupy, as he deserves, no mean place on the roll of English statesmen. His very faults, which he wears as it were on his sleeve, will appear in their just proportion; and the great part which he has borne in the administration of affairs, his successes and his failures, will receive their just appreciation from posterity.

One result at least, and to our mind a timely and useful one, will be accomplished by the study of these volumes. They will tell a generation intent on the present, and sometimes forgetful and contemptuous of the past, whence flowed-from what beginnings, fed by what rivulets, struggling scantily in the summer sun-that broad flowing tide of popular power which now sweeps on in such resistless progress. They tell of the first throbs of real public opinion in this country; the first sounds of free and independent thought and speech among the people; the first genuine announcements of the true principle and end of constitutional government; the first raising of the banner of religious toleration and religious equality; the elements of that system of dealing with our neighbours which is now our recognised policy, and the foundations of our great and successful efforts in purity, efficiency, and economy in finance. It is well to remember these things, for they were as much born of Parliament as of the people in their earlier beginnings; and to that stedfast band of politicians who, amid much discouragement, kept the flame burning, and the nation in mind of its true interests, we mainly owe our present prosperity and success.

We should not be far from the mark, indeed, if we dated the rise of the Liberal party, in the form in which it was destined to be dominant, from the period at which these volumes commence. It is true that the broad and massive lines on which the party was built had been traced by the

powerful hand of Fox, but the party itself had not during his life established a firm root in the nation. Many elements had combined to retard and obscure the principles of free constitutional action of which he was the most eminent apostle. We set little store by the common-place criticisms too fashionable among Liberals of the present day, which are used to depreciate the great advocate of freedom in the last generation. Forgetting his true-hearted devotion, his clearer vision, and his strong and broad appreciation of political rights, these critics sneer at his views of political economy and his ignorance of the principles of commercial freedom. The censors are in the right so far. His speeches on the Irish propositions were based on financial views utterly unsound-as unsound as his declaration that France was the natural enemy of England. But it is unreasonable to judge of Fox by such blemishes as these, which, compared with the work which he had to do, and which he did, are entirely insignificant. His struggle was for domestic liberty at home, and for peace with foreign countries. Had he lived to see these accomplished he would not have been long in discerning what even duller intellects have discovered the fallacy of protective duties. But his vocation lay in a different direction. Duties on foreign produce were of little moment when every foreign market was closed; and it concerns his memory but little that in those days he accepted on these subjects the prevalent opinions of his class and time.

Still, justly or unjustly, there hung around him in the eyes of the community an atmosphere of partisanship which was never thoroughly dispelled. The dislike of him by the Sovereign fostered the feeling; and the Coalition and the Regency debates gave some colour to the popular impression. Even his action on the French Revolution, although not only thoroughly honest, but, as the event showed, only too prescient, was misunderstood and misconstrued. Possibly, by a course less resolutely hostile to the Administration in that period of danger, he might have been able to temper somewhat of the panic of the times, and certainly would have retained more of his own personal influence in the country.

Self-seeking no man could call him; for had he yielded to the prevalent opinions, no antipathy on the part of the King could have excluded him from power. Much of the prejudice against him was the fruit of his war against prerogative, for which the nation was not ripe. Something too was due to the school in which he was trained-to the coarser precedents of Walpole, Bute, and Holland. Still, the ranks of his followers

dwindled away during his life, although there arose avengers from his ashes.

It must also be confessed, looking back as we now do with the advantage of the light of experience, that even from our point of view more allowance should be made for the Tory Ministers than was the fashion in the heat of the battle. They were bad times no doubt; days when the most elementary axioms of civil liberty were forgotten. But in self-defence silent leges inter arma-the gravity of the peril was great; and, while we paid a heavier ransom for our safety than even the debt the struggle hung around us, it remains a question whether, under any circumstances or any Government, we could have kept terms with the Republic or the Empire of France.

Lord Russell's introductory narrative, which is very interesting and very characteristic, takes up the political history of this country, with reflections somewhat similar, in the middle of the Peninsular war. By that time the great ones had gone: Fox and Pitt lay side by side in Westminster Abbey; the affairs of this country had drifted into the hands of feebler although not undistinguished men; and the Whig party, with Lord Grey and Lord Grenville at its head, held stedfastlyprobably too tenaciously-by the traditions of their chief. One can hardly wonder indeed that those who had witnessed in 1805 that alarming combination which isolated this country and placed her in more real danger than she had been in since the Spanish Armada, should have recalled with bitterness the long course of blundering policy and the prophecies of calamity which Fox had uttered in 1793. As little can we feel surprise that the fresh and acute intellect of the future Whig Premier, on his youthful survey of the political landscape, should have hailed with enthusiasm the first dawn of coming triumph from the lines of Torres Vedras, and rather resented and condemned the cold censoriousness of his leaders. Lord Russell, it seems, paid a visit to the lines in 1810, and laid a bet of a guinea with Lord Ponsonby that Wellington would be in possession of them that day twelvemonth. He gained his guinea; but the incident is worth recording as showing the manly and independent eye with which he was able to view the position of his country in days when it was treason to Brookes' to believe in anything born of the Government. The Whig leaders had been too slow to see what the sagacity of Francis Horner points out in a letter quoted in this Introduction, that the war undertaken originally against the liberties of France had become one in defence of the liberties of England.

We were interested by the glimpse of a warlike spirit afforded us in the few reminiscences which our author gives us of his two visits to Wellington at his head-quarters-one at Torres Vedras in 1810, and the other in 1813 in the Pyrenees -breathing exactly the sentiments one would expect to find in a high-mettled youth, and singularly characteristic of his riper years; for Lord Russell has throughout loved strife; the sound of the trumpet cheered and stirred him-a temperament to which not a few both of his successes and failures are due.

When Lord John Russell entered Parliament in 1813, having been elected for Tavistock, as he tells us, just a month before he came of age, the great European struggle was rapidly nearing its climax. The dawn of victory which he had seen at Torres Vedras had been succeeded by the slow but ever-increasing triumphs of the British army in Spain. Leipsic, and Elba, the Hundred Days, and Waterloo followed in rapid succession; the Bourbons were restored, and the Holy Alliance for the time supreme. Lord Russell speaks with wise generosity and pride of the successes of Wellington; and we have read with pleasure and interest his summary of the political situation at that juncture. At the distance of fifty-five years the most jealous of politicians can afford to be just. But it is to Lord Russell's credit that, devoted as he was and has been through life to the traditions of his party, he entered on what was destined to be so long and distinguished a Parliamentary career in so large and candid a spirit.

But peace came-peace which found Napoleon at St. Helena, the Jacobin spirit smothered, if not quenched, and not a sound or rumour of war to shake our equanimity or disturb our repose. Yet it was a desolate and dreary time. The nation, recovering from its fever, found convalescence more tedious and painful than delirium. The national spirit had responded very faithfully when our shores were threatened, and the Ministers had more than a merely parliamentary majority behind them in the struggle. But the trumpet once hung in the hall, the reaction came, and the sense of the penalties we had to pay for the gigantic game in which we had been engaged. War prices vanished, and, with them, the factitious value to which land had risen. The interest of the enormous debt pressed on the sinews of commerce and labour. Peace did not bring prosperity. Trade, forced during the war into artificial channels, regained but slowly its natural current. Financial and commercial disasters threw operatives out of work, and distress and starvation nurtured political discontent. The people had submitted to have their political privileges in