EARL CAIRNS.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5523, 9 December 1878, Page 3

EARL CAIRNS.

(Prom the Spectator.) Baron Cairns has been made an Earl, and The Times, with the singular want of tact which sometimes marks its management, thinks it necessary to justify the promotion. The Lord Chancellor, it says, defended the constitutional right of the Sovereign to introduce Sepoys into Europe, and as that policy was successful, it is right that its advocate should be honored. Believing that Lord Cairns, who is Lord Chancellor as well as a Cabinet Minister, did not give his exhaustive opinion on that matter iu hope of au Earl’s coronet for fee, we can only wonder what kind of language The Times, it it thinks this explanation complimentary, would consider insulting to a great Judge. There is no need whatever of any defence for Lord Cairns’s elevation. In every corporate body in the kingdom of any importance we shall find some confidential attorney whom the Chairman trusts, who is asked by the Board for definite advice, and who gives it, as years go on, over an ever increasing range of “po.nts.” He is usually an able man, he studies and masters details, he gradually accumulates experience, and possessing a clear but narrow mind, and perfect freedom from fear of anything but the law, he gives an opinion which often is and always seems to be hard and strong, and is accepted by all bat his most powerful colleagues as a final guide. His influence soon increases, and if he is wise enough to agree when possible with the chairman, and—which is more difficult—to abstain from “putting down” the secretary—who seems to him pert—he eften concentrates in himself the real power of the Board, and we may add, often exercises it well. Much of the business of life is best done by men who are clear-sighted within a narrow range, and believe in their own sight. Taere aro lawyers in London who smile to themselves when they hear of tho proceedings of very great bodies, which have, in fact, registered decisions arrived at by themselves, and maintained with the dullseeming but really astute obstinacy which men of the profession are apt to acquire. They know it is beat for them to sit back out of tho glare, but they know also that they rule. Corporations so guided seldom grudge the guide his pickings, more especially if they have perceived that he has once prevented, or got them out of, awkward scrapes. Lord Cairns occupies just that position iu the present administration. Nobody would say that ho was a statesman, or an administrator, or a man of breadth or depth, in any way; but he is a most able lawyer, and his clear, narrow intellect, his clutch rather than grasp of a subject, his readiness to find arguments for a predetermined decision, and his courage, make him invaluable to a Cabinet with which, so far as it is Conservative and antiHigh Church, ho honestly and entirely sympathises. Ho has, too, another power, in a rather marked degree, which is most acceptable to an English Tory Government, Tories do not vote in consequence of arguments, but in accordance with certain stubborn prejudices —many of them most useful prejudices—and tendencies ; but they wish to bo ablo to defend their action by arguments good enough to use. They despise intellect and reason alike, but they do not like to be always intellectually defeated, or to he pronounced unreasonable. They do not like to say when they want soldiers that they care nothing about law, it only they can find bayonets, though that is their inner feeling, but wish for a plausible argument, which sounds reasonable and comes to precisely the same thing. Lord Cairns supplies this want in perfection. Wo cannot remember a speech

of his which ever convinced an opponent—though this is not true of his judgments—but he has made many which have enabled Tory Peers who did not want convincing, to vote comfortably and go to sleep thinking they were not so stupid after all. There was that great legal intellect all on their side, and what did Liberal argument matter then 1 We do not grudge Lord Cairns his promotion one whit. He is an upright man in his way, the, way being a suppressed Evangelicalism of the Orange or persecuting type ; who does his duty by his client, the Cabinet, most faithfully and well—-sometimes, perhaps, when he thinks his client not quite innocent—and he deserves his reward. If he likes precedence in society when out of office, there is no objection whatever to his having precedence, and, as distinguished from a Barony, an Earldom gives him nothing else, except, perhaps, the prestige among Tories of being one of the men whom Lord Beaconsfielcl is pleased, rather tardily, to honor. His elevation is one more proof that in England the career of politics is still the one which leads most rapidly and certainly to distinction ; and as distinction is clearly desired, or men so clear-headed would not seek it, that is, on tho whole, probably a great gain. It is necessary that tho strong should be attracted to tho career of politics in some way, and in England the career is in many ways a disagreeable one. The hustings’ work is simply detestable. The House of Commons's work, though more endurable, is and exhausting, and to men of first-rate ability, but not of first-rate capacity for convincing speech, almost intolerably tedious. It seems such a waste of brain to have to wait years till a large meeting of squires and milliouaries can be made to understand the alphabet. The daily labor demanded of tho politician is excessive, and when superadded to departmental work, soon finds out every weak place in the frame ; while the daily criticism,' at least to men less tough-skinned than Lord Cairns, must be like pelting of hail upon the face, or of Brighton dust upon the eyes. Even when the aspirant has succeeded,, there is very little to be had of, the pleasantest form of power,—the power of doing things by volition, nothing but a right of worrying or convincing a small committee into letting him take his own way without too much resistance.

Lord Beaconsfield onoe described the political position of a Cabinet Minister as slavery mocked with the name of power, and though he has been no slave, but rather the slavedriver, his description is, for most men, true. Patronage, formerly a great attraction, has been taken away, or fettered by such restrictions that it is valueless as a reward; and of money there is no overplus, for though, no doubt, the legal members of a Ministry may make and save large incomes, they cannot eai’n by any exertion half what a successful speculator cr a considerable merchant will make in a year. The single material attraction of the career is distinction, and it is weir it should be granted, when fairly earned, ungrudgingly. As yet it is so granted. We -know of no country other than England, and no career except politics, in which the second son of a middleclass Irishman, with unpopular opinions, and no wealth, can by political service force himself to the front rank of society, and so seat his descendants there that his name, as long as it lasts, is distinctly visible in the land. No speculator, or merchant, or professional man can earn the position Mr. Cairns has in twentythree years acquired, nor can anything short of genius of the highest order equally aid him to stamp his name permanently into a nation’s history. In most European countries, social rank dies with the, statesman who has earned it, distinction being regulated by birth; and in America it is scarcely now attainable through politics, and does not even temporarily descend. The Adamses, it is true, are marked men, and suffer for it; but the Grants will be lost in ten years'in the mass of American citizens. As the passion for distinction is, next to the desire for power, the most frequent characteristic of the strong, it is well that it should be gratified, and that we should obtain from our aristocratic system this benefit, in addition to the other one which it helps to secure, —the freedom of all politicians from the temptation to corruption. Lord Cairns in the United States might have been a harder Mr. Chandler, and the difference in his favor is due, in part, to the system which receives expression when he is made an Earl.