Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 60, No. 370, August 1846Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 60, No. 370, August 1846
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
In the mean time it is some gratification to know that the Churches are to
be spared for the present. Not that Lord John Russell has any abstract
love for these institutions--for he has no objection to Romish endowment
out of the funds of the Irish Protestant Church--but then he is quite
aware that any such move on his part would lead to his instant and
ignominious expulsion from power. Earl Grey is of a different opinion; but
the construction of the present cabinet is such, that it admits of every
possible diversity of opinion, and was, in fact, so planned by the new
premier, that the lion and the lamb might lie down together, and Radical
Ward be installed in peace by the side of Conservative Lord Lincoln and of
Sidney Herbert, about a year ago the pride of the protectionists!
There is something painfully ludicrous in Lord John's exposition of the
theories of cabinet construction. It was, as he experienced last winter,
quite impossible to bring the chiefs of his party to any thing like a
common understanding. The revelations of Mr Macaulay to his correspondent
in Edinburgh, gave any thing but a flattering picture of the unity which
then pervaded the councils of Chesham Place. It is gratifying to know,
that individuals who at that time expressed so exalted an opinion of the
intellects and temper of each other, should have met and consented to act
together in a spirit of mutual forgiveness. And we are now asked to
receive from the lips of Lord John this profound political axiom, that it
is not at all necessary that members of the same cabinet should agree in
their individual opinions. We have all heard of cabinets breaking up
through their own internal dissensions. Such a disruption, in the eyes of
Lord John, was an act of egregious folly. What was to have prevented each
man from voting according to his own opinions? On urgent questions, he
admits, they should maintain some show of unanimity; but, with all respect
for such an authority, we think he is unnecessarily scrupulous. Why
quarrel or dissolve upon any single point? Let every man vote according to
his own mind--let every question be considered an open one--and we shall
answer for the stability of the ministry. In fact, Lord John Russell has
at last discovered the political _elixir vitae_. No disunion can break up
his administration, because disunion is the very principle upon which it
has been formed. He has sought support from all classes of men. He is so
far from disapproving of Conservative doctrines, that he absolutely has
solicited three members of the late government to hold office under him.
He asks no recantation of their former opinions, and binds them down to no
pledges for the future. Their associates, it is true, are to be men of
liberal opinions, some of them verging upon Chartism, and others avowed
ecclesiastical destructionists; but that need not deter them from
accepting and retaining office. We once knew a worthy Highland chief--a
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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