NEWS OF THE WEEK. [From the Spectator, April 3.]

New Zealander, Volume 8, Issue 660, 11 August 1852, Page 2

NEWS OF THE WEEK. [From the Spectator, April 3.]

Lord Derby, like many other clever men, is his own worst enemy. An impression had been taken up by the public that the " Rupert of debate" was an ardent, "frank, chivalrous person ; of this he seems bent upon disabusing them. When interpellated by the Duke of Newcastle a fortnight ago £/ord Derby stated that he meant to dissolve the present Parliament, and assemble its successor to enable it to express confidence or want of confidence in bis Ministry, before the autumn should have passed. He declined, indeed, to fix thepi'ecise date of the dissolution — he would not say that it was to be in April, May, or June ; but the new Parliament should meet to decide the fate of Ministers before the usual time for commencing the routine business of next year. Now that this is read by the light of Lord Derby's explanation on Tuesday last, it has an ugly appearance of premeditated evasion. The naming of the months of April, May, and June, specifically, looks like an attempt to_ insinuate that the dissolution might take place in one of them and yet to avoid an express promise ; and the original pledge that tho autumn should not pass without a meeting of Parliament, faded ultimately into an intimation that this meeting should be early enough not to interfere with the routine business of next year. At the tune, however, Lord Derby was understood to promise that a new Parliament should be elected, arid called together before the end of autumn. This interpretation was expressly put upon it by other speakers in his hearing, and acquiesced in by him. As a consequence, the Army and Navy Estimates have been voted with unprecedented despatch and abstinence from criticism, and the Mutiny Bill has passed : whereupon Lord Derby evinces a disposition to become even more vague and inexplicit on the head of dissolution than before. Lord Minto, asking a question of Lord Lyndhurst on another subject, referred casually to the general impression abroad that we might very shortly expect a dissolution of Parliament and that a very short and hurried session would follow the general election. Starting up, Lord Derby interjected a denial that anything had fallen from his lips which would lead any man to suppose that the present would be a session of unusually shoi t duration ; and then he went on to correct Lord Minto in his further error of assumption that there will be a short and hurried integral session in the autumn. If we understand this last point, there will be no prorogation of the new Parliament at Christmas, only an adjournment ,• so that the first session of the new Parliament will be unusually long instead of short, but that only because the autumnal sitting to dispose of the Free- trade question will be prefixed to it. But the first point, the denial that this session is to be of unusually short duration, was a blank astonishment to the whole House. The Duke of Newcastle, in his grave, exact manner, stated this, evidently with the general sympathy. Lord' Derby restively denied the ipsissima verba that were quoted against him ; and when in the end he submitted to have them fixed on him, he still left the general impression that he was not meaning \iow what he meant a fortnight ago. ' If you scan the precise terms there may be no verbal contradiction ; but the acts look so shifty, tricky, and disingenuous, that even Conservatives, who are English gentlemen, feel their party compromised by them. Lord Derby and his colleagues would appear to fancy they may throw off the mask of decent reserve, as the greater part of the Supplies has been voted, and waste time by making believe to transact business in a Hou& of Commons where they acknowledge they are in a minority. The Miscellaneous Estimates, however, have not yet passed ; the salaries and establishments of the Ministers themselves have not yet been voted ; and if still determined to trifle with the country by putting off the evil day of a general election and a distinct explanation of their policy, they may be punished by being made to feel uneasiness and insecurity with regard to quarter-day. The conduct of Ministers is ' contagious ; the came want of reality and earnest purpose which marks it, attaches to the whole Parliamentary proceedings of the week. There have been talks about the ballot, about the Irish Tenant-Right Bill, the conduct of Government towards political refugees, and its relations to the Continental powers ; but all desultory, as if with a consciousness that there was no real business on hand. The discussion on the introduction of the Militia Bill was in some measure an exception ; but even with respect to it the impression prevails that it is a measure beyond the competence of a ministry in a minority, and only tolerable till the winding-up of indispensable business may enable it to appeal to the country without risking an interruption of the necessary action of Government. The principal difference between the new Bill and Lord John Eussell's is that by which service in the militia is rendered voluntai-y. This is an improvement, but it might in fairness have been mentioned that it is taken from an able pamphlet on the " Economical Defence of the Country," published early in 1848 by Mr. Frederick Hill. It may also be remarked that Mr. Hill's proposal for embodying a volunteer militia having only been adopted in part, the measure, like all halfmeasures, would probably fail to realize the expected advantages.

Milton describes Death in a lazar-house as -shaking ,his dart overhead the patients but delaying to strike ; even so Lord Derby deals -with his general election. The pieliminary canvass, however, is plied with increasing energy. Its most remarkable feature is ihe migration of a certain class of li'ish Members to English constituencies. Mr. Anstey is an Englishman, and Sir William Somerville and Mr. Torrens M'Cullagh have more in common with English than with the general mass of Hibernian legislators ; all three have winged their way from their Irish seats, in search of English ones, as gulls flock inland when a storm is impending. This bodes squally election weather in the sister island, and is ominous of an intensely Irish representation in next Parliament. Au reste, the addresses of candidates are characterised by increasing boldness in the avowal of Free Trade principles, and increasing equivocation of professed Protectionists. If an Abdiel was looked for in this hour of wholesale apostacy from the Protectionist creed, it was in the person of George Frederick Young ; yet even he, in his address to the electors of Scarborough, declares his readiness to shut his eyes and open his mouth and see what providence, in the shape of Lord Derby, will send him.

The Governor-General of India, somewhat against the grain, has sanctioned earnest military operations against the Burmese. This war on the Eastern frontier of British India, it is confidently predicted, will be a short and a little one : but it is easier to set a house on fire than to prevent the conflagration from spreading to a whole street. The Western frontier appears to be tranquil, but the state of affairs revealed by Lord Ellenborough's statement respecting Ali Maorad betrayed a hollowness beneath the settled exterior, la Central

India, the tone adopted towards the Nizam has awakened uneasy forebodings among the native princes; the agitation respecting the "Black Acts," as they are called, has excited the .jealousies of the natives and the non-covenanted Europeans throughout India; and the accounts which from time to time reach tins country of the demoralization both of the military and civil service are alarmino-. Traders complain of obstructions to the growth of productive industry under the pre-sents-stem of Indian Government; and statesmen criticise its cumbrous machinery of three administrations—in Leadenhail-street, in Cannon Row, and in Calcutta or Simla— to do the work of one. . Meanwhile, the period at which the incorporating act of the East India Company falls to be renewed is almost close at hand, and the prospect of a satisfactory preliminary inquiry grows fainter •and fainter. Mr. Herries is to move, some day soon, for a Parliamentary Committee : but who dreams that a Committee can do anything this year ? And next year Parliament will have to legislate. Mr. Anstey proposes that a Royal Commission should be sent to India. # That anything can be gained by new inquiries in India at this late hour is most questionable; and th-3 Commissioners will either be old Indians, whose prepossessions would make them see nothing but corToborations of the opinions they already entertain, ■or men new to India, who would be bewildered by the entirely new world in which they found themselves. But though there is no inducement to •send Commissioners to India, a Royal Commission io collect information in England, and perhaps to prepare a projet de to for the future government of our Indian dominions, might form an efficient substitute for a now impossible Parliamentary Committee. Indeed there are many now m this •country, (for example, Sir Henry Llhs or Mr. Holt Mackenzie among the servants or ex-ser-vants Of the Company, or Mr. Sullivan among its opponents), out of Parliament, better qualified for ■Indian legislation than any person in it.

The farcical has come to preponderate so decidedly in the proceedings of the French President, that it is impossible) to criticise them with that gravity which their dangerous consequences deserve. It is difficult to imagine how, among a people so acute to perceive the ridiculous, and so prompt to express their sense of it, the grave hypocrisy of the President's opening address to his Legislative Body did not provoke a burst of laughter. Not one of Tartuffe's most unctious orations is more palpably hollow or unreal. To be sure, the galleries as well as the arena were filled with actors; but the farce was broad enough in all conscience to have moved the risible muscles even -of actors. The theatrical displays of the " Prince President' 1 and his liveried legislators, with their em • broidery and feathers, cannot be taken as any indication of what is really doing or impending in France. They are the juggler's grimace to distract attention from his tricks of sleight-of-hand ; they have no connexion with the thoughts and emotions which are struggling in French society and the extinction of real " Porliamentary Government," and the silencing of the Press, together •with the espionage of the Post Office and the Police, render it impossible to detect what is at work behind or beneath them. " The Empire," or a Red Republic— paralysis of the nation's political action, or anarchy — anything is on the cards.

Sir Henry Ward has already dissolved his new Parliament. This is no more than we foretold some time ago, and that Sir Henry must have foreseen if he was not utterly blind. After revolting the minds of the most reactionary admirers of despotism by the atrocities which he allowed to be perpetrated in Cephalonia by thoughtless and unfeeling boy officers, he flattered j himself that he could cajole the disaffected by liberal professions. He was warned that the Opposition leaders were not supported by any such public opinion as exists in England ; that the islanders arc not organised into parties with definite objects. He was warned that the leaders with whom he patched up an alliance possessed no influence even with the small minority of lonians who entertain political opinions ; that in their personal chavactei's they are unreliable, and disaffected to English rule. The sanguine Governor flattered himself that an educated Englishman must needs be more than a match for ignorant Greeks, and that he could turn to account the tactics of English Parliamentai'y electioneering, in a country where neither the machinei'y nor the sentiment of Parliamentary Government exists. His self-complacent vanity rejected all advice : he has played off his petty stratagems and been outwitted by the men he thought he could lead by the nose. He is as far as ever from having organised an efficient working government ; and all the crooked devices by which he expected to attain that end are exposed to the light of day, and consequently unavailable. Anarchy reigns in the lonian Islands. This is in itself sufficiently discreditable and likely to be productive of embarrassment and expense to England. But the inevitable complication of the affairs of the lonians with those of their countrymen in the kingdom of Greece renders it more perilous. In the actual social condition of the lonian Islands, Parliamentary Government seems impracticable — certainly if they are to be governed as an English dependency. But so long as a Parliamentary Government exists in Greece, it is impossible that the educated classes in the Islands can patiently submit to any other. This is the necessary consequence of the attempt to perpetuate a separation of these islands from the rest of Greece, and subject them to a foreign "protectorate." England was persuaded to undertake the task of perpetuating this anomalous state of affairs, in order to prevent an explosion of jealousy between Russia and Austria, and the final suppression of Russian intrigue in Greece •and Turkey England is at this moment incurring obloquy and expense to promote the sinister and clandestine ambitious manoeuvres of Russia in the Levant. If England retain the whole of the lonian Islands, she must rule them despotically, and. therefore afford a colour to the subversion of national independence and Parliamentary Government in Greece.: if England abandon the whole of the islands, she will leave Russia mistress of the Levant, and sole arbiter of the fate of Turkey, Greece, and Italy : if England retain Corfu only expecting to make it for the Adriatic what Gibraltar and Malta are for the rest of the Mediterranean, she must be prepared to garrison not the I citadel alone but the whole island. There is nothing but a choice of difficulties, and the treaties by which the islands were placed under the protectorate ot England give full power to the despotic Continental Sovereigns to prevent her from adopting that which may seem least disadvantageous.