The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 70, August, 1863. Various
high honor of a seat in the House of Lords is superadded, it is not difficult to understand that the titled recipient of such a revenue will find that his opinions command the greatest consideration. The organization of the present Cabinet of England is a fresh and conclusive illustration of this principle. It is not too much to say, that at this moment the home and foreign administration of the government is substantially in the hands of the House of Lords. Indeed, the aristocratic element of English society is as powerful to-day as it has been at any time during the past century. To fortify this statement by competent authority, we make an extract from a leader in the London "Times," on the occasion of the elevation of Lord John Russell to the peerage. "But however welcome to the House of Lords may be the accession of Lord John Russell, the House of Commons, we apprehend, will contemplate it with very little satisfaction. While the House of Lords does but one-twentieth part of the business of the House of Commons, it boasts a lion's share of the present administration. Three out of our five Secretaries of State, the Lord-Chancellor, the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Lord-President of the Council, the Postmaster-General, the Lord Privy Seal, all hold seats in the Upper House, while the Home-Secretary, and the Secretary for India, the First Lord of the Treasury, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the President of the Board of Trade, the President of the Poor-Law Board, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and the Secretary for Ireland hold seats in the House of Commons. Lord John Russell goes to give more to that which had already too much. At the present moment, the two ministers whose united departments distribute between twenty and thirty millions of the national revenue sit in the House which does not represent the people. In voting the army and navy estimates, the House of Commons received this year from the Under-Secretaries that information which they ought to have from the best and most authentic, sources. To these is now added the all-important department of Foreign Affairs; so that, if things remain as they are, the representatives of the people must be content to feed on second-hand information.... Most of us can remember a time when it was a favorite topic with popular agitators to expatiate on the number of lords which a government contained, as if every peer of Parliament wielded an influence necessarily hostile to the liberties of the country. We look down in the present age with contempt on such vulgar prejudices; but we seem to be running into the contrary extreme, when we allow almost all the important offices of our government to be monopolized by a chamber where there is small scope for rhetorical ability, and the short sittings and unbusiness-like habits of which make it very unsuited for the enforcement of ministerial responsibility. The statesmen who have charge of large departments of expenditure, like the army and navy, and of the highest interests of the nation, ought to be in the House of Commons, is necessarily superior to a member of the House of the House of Lords, but it is to the House of Commons that these high functionaries are principally accountable, and because, if they forfeit the confidence of the House of Commons, the House of Lords can avail them but little. The matter is of much importance and much difficulty. We can only hope that the opportunity of redressing this manifest imperfection in the structure of the present government will not be lost, and that the House of Commons may recover those political privileges which it has hitherto been its pride to enjoy."
This distribution of power in the English Cabinet furnishes a sufficient solution of the present attitude of the English Government towards this country. The ruling classes of England can have no sincere sympathy with the North, because its institutions and instincts are democratic. They give countenance to the South, because at heart and in practice it is essentially an aristocracy. To remove the dangerous example of a successful and powerful republic, where every man has equal rights, civil and religious, and where a privileged order in Church and State is impossible, has become in the minds of England's governing classes an imperious necessity. Compared with the importance of securing this result, all other considerations weigh as nothing. Brothers by blood, language, and religion, as they have been accustomed to call us while we were united and formidable, we are now, since civil war has weakened us and great national questions have distracted our councils, treated as aliens, if not as enemies. On the other hand, the South, whose leaders have ever been first to take hostile ground against England, and whose "peculiar institution" has drawn upon us the eloquent and unsparing denunciations of English philanthropists, is just now in high favor with the "mother-country." Not only has the ill-disguised dislike of the Tories ripened into open animosity, not only are we the target for the shallow scorn of the Chestertons, (even a donkey may dare to kick a dying lion,) but we have lost the once strongly pronounced friendship of such ardent anti-slavery men as Lord Brougham and the Earl of Shaftesbury. Why is this? Does not the explanation lie in a nutshell? We were becoming too strong. We were disturbing the balance of power. We were demonstrating too plainly the inherent activity and irresistible energy of a purely democratic form of government. Therefore Carthago delenda est. "But yet the pity of it, Iago!" Mark how a Christian nation deals with a Christian ally. Our destruction is to be accomplished, not by open warfare, but by the delusive and dastardly pretence of neutrality. There is to be no diplomatic recognition of an independent Southern Confederacy, but a formidable navy is to be furnished to our enemies, and their armies are to be abundantly supplied with the munitions of war. But how? By the English Government? Oh, no! This would be in violation of solemn treaties. Earl Russell says, "We have long maintained relations of peace and amity" with the United States. England cannot officially recognize or aid the South without placing herself in a hostile attitude towards this country. Yet meanwhile English capitalists can publicly subscribe to the loan which our enemies solicit, and from English ship-yards a fleet of iron-clad war-vessels can be sent to lay waste our commerce and break our blockade of Southern ports. What the end will be no one may venture to foretell; but it needs no prophet to predict that many years will not obliterate from the minds of the American people the present policy of the English Cabinet, controlled as it is by the genius of English aristocracy.
THEODORE WINTHROP'S WRITINGS
"The first time I saw Theodore Winthrop," said one to me a few days ago, "he came into my office with a common friend. They were talking as they entered, and Winthrop said, 'Yes, the fellows who came over in the Mayflower can't afford to do that!'
"'There,' thought I to myself, 'there's another of the Mayflower men! I wish to my soul that ship had sunk on her voyage out!' But when I came to know him, I quickly learned that with him origin was not a matter of vain pride, but a fact inciting him to all nobleness of thought and life, and spurring him on to emulate the qualities of his ancestor."
That is to say, he was not a prig, or a snob, but a gentleman. And if he remembered that he "came over in the Mayflower," it was because he felt that that circumstance bound him to higher enterprises, to better work, than other men's. And he believed in his heart, as he wrote in the opening chapter of "John Brent," that "deeds of the heroic and chivalric times do not utterly disdain our day. There are men," he continues, "as ready to gallop for love and strike for love now as in the age of Amadis." Ay, and for a nobler love than the love of woman—for love of country, and of liberty—he was ready to strike, and to die.
Ready to do, when the time came; but also—what required a greater soul—ready to wait in cheerful content till the fitting time should come. Think of these volumes lying in his desk at home, and he, their author, going about his daily tasks and pleasures, as hearty and as unrepining as though no whisper of ambition had ever come to his soul,—as though he had no slightest desire for the pleasant fame which a successful book gives to a young man. Think of it, O race of scribblers, to whom a month in the printer's hands seems a monstrous delay, and who bore publishers with half-finished manuscripts, as impatient hens begin, untimely, to cackle before the egg is laid.
That a young man, not thirty-three when he died, should have written these volumes, so full of life, so full of strange adventure, of wide reading, telling of such large and thorough knowledge of books and men and Nature, is a remarkable fact in itself. That he should have let the manuscripts lie in his desk has probably surprised the world more. But, much as he wrote, Winthrop, perhaps, always felt that his true life was not that of the author, but of the actor. He has often told me that it was a pleasure to write,—probably such a pleasure as it is to an old tar to spin his yarns. His mind was active, stored with the accumulated facts of a varied experience. How keen an observer of Nature he was, those who have read "John Brent" or the "Canoe and Saddle" need not be told; how appreciative an observer of every-day life, was shown in that brilliant story which appeared in these pages some