not been unfair to the noble lord; but now let us go into his Cabinet. His Cabinet is a museum of curiosities. There, Sir, are to be found some birds of rare and noble plumage, both alive and stuffed. (Great laughter.) But, unfortunately, there is a difficulty in keeping up the breed. For those Whig birds have been very barren, and they were obliged to take a cross with the famous Peelite breed. Certainly it cannot be said, either by their enemies or friends, that they have been prolific of measures since they have taken office. Even my right honourable friend (Mr. M. Gibson) -who is not connected with them by family, and somehow got into the Cabinet, but, like the fly in amber, one wonders how the devil he got there'-has not been fertile. I must say that his honourable friends the members for Rochdale (Mr. Miall) and Birmingham (Mr. Bright) are, I think, disappointed in this young man from the country.' When he married into the family we expected some liberal measures, but the right honourable gentleman has become indolent, and almost quarrelsome, under the guidance of the noble lord. Well, Sir, what is to be done? We know by the traditions of the great Whig party that they will cling to the vessel, if not like shipwrecked sailors, like those testaceous marine animals which somehow adhere to the bottom, thereby clogging the engines and impeding the progress. Sir, should a vote of this House displace that administration, what are the Liberal party to do? Well, my advice to them is that they may feel perfectly happy as to the issue of this great duel which is being fought. They are somewhat in the situation of Iago in the play, and may say like him, Whether Cassio kills Roderigo, or Roderigo kills Cassio, or each kills the other,' they must gain."

EARL GRANVILLE.
(1815.)

First Foreign Secretaryship.-Earl Granville was appointed Minister for Foreign Affairs for the first time on the death of the Earl of Clarendon in June, 1870. Entering upon his duties at the Foreign Office on the 5th of July, he was informed by the permanent Under Secretary of State (Mr. Hammond) that " in all his experience he had never known so great a lull in foreign affairs." Two days after, the Spanish Government announced its intention to propose Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern as a candidate for the crown; and in ten days, war between France and Germany had become inevitable.

Family Connections.-Earl Granville's introduction to office, as a connection of the "great Whig families" which long regarded Ministerial arrangements as their peculiar right, was thus alluded to by the writer of a sparkling series of "Political Portraits," published in 1873: "It was from the royal household that Lord Granville entered upon the career in which he has since achieved all but the highest place, with probably the succession to the highest place, in the Liberal party. For the first two years of Lord John Russell's first Administration he held the office of Master of the Buckhounds. He had been Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs for a few months before the break-up of the Melbourne Govern

ment, having previously served an apprenticeship to diplomacy as attaché in Paris during his father's embassy there; and had sat for ten years in the House of Commons before his succession to the peerage in 1846. But his political career really began with his transfer by Lord John Russell, in 1848, from the charge of her Majesty's Buckhounds to the VicePresidency of the Board of Trade. Great was the clamour which this appointment raised below the gangway. 'Is thy servant a dog?' said Manchester, indignant at being handed over to the Master of the Buckhounds. Mr. Bright, we believe, made himself the mouthpiece of its anger in the House of Commons, and spoke his mind with that frank disregard of persons which has always characterised him. The appointment was denounced as a piece of nepotism on Lord John Russell's part. Very much to his credit, Mr. Bright not long afterwards admitted that Lord Granville's conduct at the Board of Trade had justified Lord John Russell's selection, and had not justified his own assault. Lord John Russell, with pardonable perversity, was more deeply aggrieved by the retractation than by the original charge. The word nepotism, naturally odious to a Russell, rankled in his mind; and he ridiculed the idea that family affection for a descendant of his grandmother could influence his political appointments. Lord Russell's grandmother does, indeed, carry the mind back to a period of history apparently too remote to affect Ministerial combinations. For a time, however, the unfilial allusion of her grandson, and his ostentatious indifference to her posterity outside the house of Bedford, gave the old lady an historical resurrection; and Lord Russell's grandmother, as the Mother Eve of an entire Whig Cabinet, became a subject of genealogical interest. It was on this or on some similar occasion that Mr. Bernal Osborne accounted on physiological principles for the ricketiness of their legislative offspring, on the ground that all the members of the Government were nearly related to each other."

46

Making a Clean Breast.-Lord Granville on one occasion humorously alluded to his family connections in the House of Lords. Defending, in 1855, the constitution of Lord Palmerston's Ministry, in which he was Lord President of the Council, Lord Granville said: 'My lords, I had better make a clean breast of it at once; and I am obliged to admit that some of those who went before me had such quivers full of daughters who did not die old maids, that I have relations on this side of the house, relations upon the cross-benches, relations upon the opposite side of the house, and I actually had the unparalleled misfortune to have no fewer than three in the Protectionist Administration of my noble friend opposite" (the Earl of Derby).

Declining the Premiership.-On the resignation of the Earl of Derby in 1859, Earl Granville was sent for by the Queen to form a Cabinet. That this should have been the case, in the lifetime both of Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston, who had in turn occupied the principal offices of the State and held the reins of government, was the subject of much comment; but the matter was thus explained in a communication" which the Times published on the 13th of June in that year:-"Her Majesty, after listening to all the objections which Lord

Granville had to offer, commanded him to attempt to form an administration which should at once be strong in ability and parliamentary influence, and should at the same time comprehend within itself a full and fair representation of all the sections into which the Liberal party has notoriously been divided. Feeling, probably, that it might be urged as an objection to this course that Lord Granville, who has never yet held the office of Prime Minister, would thus be placed in a position paramount to that occupied by Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell, each of whom had served her long and faithfully in many high offices of state, and had each filled the office of First Minister of the Crown, her Majesty was pleased to observe that she had in the first instance turned her thoughts towards Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell. Her Majesty felt, however, that to make so marked a distinction as is implied in the choice of one or other of two statesmen so full of years and honours, and possessing so just a claim on the consideration of the Queen, would be a very invidious and unwelcome task. Her Majesty also observed that Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston appeared to represent different sections of the Liberal party; Lord Palmerston the more Conservative, and Lord John Russell the more popular section. Impressed with these difficulties, her Majesty cast her eyes on Lord Granville, the acknowledged leader of the Liberal party in the House of Lords, in whom both Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston had been in the habit of placing confidence, and who might have greater facilities for uniting the whole Liberal party under one administration than could be enjoyed by either of the sectional leaders." The publication of this statement gave rise to remark in the House of Lords, to which Earl Granville replied that he had asked and obtained from her Majesty permission to state to his political friends the result of what had occurred, but it was never intended that it should be communicated to any newspaper. At the same time, he could not see that any injury had resulted from the publication, seeing that her Majesty appeared therein, as ever, desirous of walking in the spirit of the Constitution.-Lord Palmerston became Premier for the second time on this occasion. In 1880 Lord Granville was again invited to form a Ministry, but declined in favour of Mr. Gladstone.

THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY.
(1830.)

His Ministerial Career.-The Marquis of Salisbury, before his call to the House of Lords on the death of his father in 1867, was well known in the House of Commons as Lord Robert Cecil, and afterwards as Lord Cranborne. He resigned the office of Secretary for India in 1867, when the Earl of Derby's Cabinet determined on a large measure of parliamentary reform; General Peel and the Earl of Carnarvon also retiring from the Government at the same time. He returned to the Indian Secretaryship in 1874, under Mr. Disraeli's leadership, and became Foreign Secretary on the resignation of the Earl of Derby in 1878. The Marquis of Salisbury attended the conference at Constantinople in 1876

as special ambassador, and was associated with Lord Beaconsfield in the representation of England at the Congress of Berlin in 1878.

The Theory of Government.-A. "Policy of Legerdemain." -Lord Cranborne, on his retirement from the Earl of Derby's Government in 1867 on account of its policy with respect to Reform, severely attacked the ministerial bill, and on its final passage made the following remarks: "I have heard it said that this bill is a Conservative triumph. If it be a Conservative triumph to have adopted the principles of your most determined adversary, the honourable member for Birmingham [Mr. Bright]; if it be a Conservative triumph to have introduced a bill guarded with precautions and securities, and to have abandoned every one of those precautions and securities at the bidding of your opponents, then in the whole course of your annals I will venture to say the Conservative party has won no triumph so signal. After all, our theory of government is not that a certain number of statesmen should place themselves in office and do whatever the House of Commons bids them. Our theory of government is that on each side of the House there should be men supporting definite opinions, and that what they have supported in opposition they should adhere to in office, and that everyone should know, from the fact of their being in office, that those particular opinions will be supported. If you reverse that, and declare that, no matter what a man has supported in opposition, the moment he gets into office it shall be open to him to reverse and repudiate it all, you practically destroy the whole basis on which our form of government rests, and you make the House of Commons a mere scrambling-place for office. You practically banish all honourable men from the political arena, and you will find in the long run that the time will come when your statesmen will be nothing but political adventurers, and that professions of opinion will be looked upon only as so many political manœuvres for the purpose of attaining office. .. I entreat honourable gentlemen opposite not to believe that my feelings on this subject are dictated simply by my hostility to this measure, though I object to it most strongly, as the House is aware. But even if I took a contrary view, if I deemed it to be most advantageous, I should still deeply regret that the position of the executive should have been so degraded as it has been in the present session. I should deeply regret to find that the House of Commons has applauded a policy of legerdemain. And I should above all things regret that this great gift to the people-if gift you think it should have been purchased by a political betrayal which has no parallel in our parliamentary annals, which strikes at the root of all that mutual confidence which is the very soul of our party government, and on which only the strength and freedom of our representative institutions can be sustained."

Ministerial Heroism.-At a Conservative banquet at Hertford in October, 1873, the Marquis of Salisbury attacked Mr. Gladstone's Administration in his most characteristic style, as "a Ministry of heroic He said: "Far be it from me to accuse them of heroism. They keep their heroism to the Home Office; they don't let it transgress the threshold of the Foreign Office. They offer to us a remarkable

measures.

instance of Christian meekness and humility; but I am afraid it is that kind of Christian meekness which turns the left cheek to Russia and America, and demands the uttermost farthing of Ashantee. This, however, is to be said for their heroism, that as regards these islands there is no doubt it has been heroism approaching to sternness towards every interest that happened to belong to the minority defeated at the poll."

"A Great Master."-The House of Commons having amended the Public Worship Regulation Bill, as passed by the House of Lords in 1874, Lord Salisbury spoke of the "bluster" of the lower Assembly, and alluded to the majority there as a "bugbear." This caused Mr. Disraeli (then Prime Minister) to make the following remarks in the House of Commons respecting the language of the Indian Secretary: "As to Lord Salisbury's language, let us not for a moment be diverted from the course which we think, as wise and grave men, we ought to follow, by any allusions to the spirit of any speech which may have been made in the course of the debates in the other House of Parliament. My noble friend was long a member of this House, and is well known to many of the members even of this Parliament. He is not a man who measures his phrases. He is one who is a great master of gibes and flouts and jeers; but I don't suppose there is anyone who is prejudiced against a member of Parliament on account of such qualifications. My noble friend knows the House of Commons well, and he is not perhaps superior to the consideration that by making a speech of that kind, and taunting respectable men like ourselves as being a 'blustering majority,' he probably might stimu late the amour propre of some individuals to take the course which he wants, and to defeat the bill. Now, I hope we shall not fall into that trap. I hope we shall show my noble friend that we remember some of his manoeuvres when he was a simple member of this House, and that we are not to be taunted into taking a very indiscreet step, a step ruinous to all our own wishes and expectations, merely to show that we resent the contemptuous phrases of one of my colleagues."

Free Discussion.-In 1868, the Marquis of Salisbury, responding to the toast of the House of Lords at a banquet given by the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, said, "Although the Upper House was not yet one of the subjects of the day, he expected it would become one, and he looked forward to that contingency without apprehension. Everybody was the better for being looked after, and he would abide by the principle that any institution which could not hold its own ground on the free and fair discussion of its merits should cease to exist."

EARL CAIRNS.

(1819.)

An Exceptional Compliment.-Hugh McCalmont Cairns was returned to the House of Commons for Belfast in 1852, and continued to represent that borough until 1866. In 1858 he was appointed SolicitorGeneral under Lord Derby's second Administration. His eloquence was