On meeting parliament, an adjournment until February was approved by all parties.
The government was not popular: few of the positions were occupied by those whom the country regarded as the men for the place. The premier had, as foreign minister, neglected the honour of England more than Lord Malmesbury had done. He had been outwitted by Louis Philippe, and had been the sycophant of Russia and Austria. He was, to use his own phraseology, “regarded as a sort of Austro-Russian.” His sympathy with Puseyism made him unpopular with large and influential sections of the religious public. Indeed the Aberdeen cabinet was regarded as, on the whole, more Puseyite than any which England had seen since the rise of the party in the established church. The Duke of Newcastle, to whom the administration of colonial affairs was entrusted, was of the Puseyite school, and his appointment, when known in the colonies, gave great dissatisfaction. The chancellor of the exchequer was more a champion of ecclesiastical exclusiveness than any member of the Derby cabinet, and Mr. Sidney Herbert rivalled Mr. Gladstone in this respect. The Lord Chancellor was also of this politico-ecclesiastical party, and was regarded as a crotchetty man, of little intellectual strength. As an equity lawyer, he had won reputation; as a judge there had been more appeals from his decisions than from all the other judges of the bench.
The appointment of Lord John Russell to the foreign-office, while Lord Palmerston was placed in the home-office, was regarded as an absurd inversion of their appropriate positions, and the arrangement was considered as an unwarrantable concession by Lord Aberdeen to the vanity of the ex-premier. Events justified the suspicions and dislikes of the public, except in the instance of Lord Palmerston, who proved himself to be the most efficient home-minister the country ever possessed.
The Irish appointments were very unpopular amongst the Protestants in Ireland, and among those in England who gave themselves any concern about Irish appointments. The Irish ministry of Lord Derby was greatly superior to that of Lord Aberdeen, in talent, moral standing, and influence in the country where their functions were to be sustained.
With the adjournment of the house closed the parliamentary history of 1852.
IRELAND.
The distracted state of Ireland was, as usual, a source of uneasiness to the empire. There was, indeed, no insurrectionary movement, but the spirit of agrarian outrage continued, and numerous murders were perpetrated of a most savage nature—the country people conniving at the crimes, and secreting the criminals. These evils were, to a great extent, provoked by the unjust state of the law between landlord and tenant. Efforts were made in parliament to mitigate the injustice and oppression to which the tenantry in Ireland were subjected; but the landed interest in England upheld that in Ireland in resisting all melioration.
Religious intolerance continued to agitate every other malady of Ireland. Indeed this was the fons et origo mali, for it deprived honest men and patriots of opportunity to combine for their country’s freedom and prosperity. During the elections caused by Lord Derby’s dissolution of parliament, the priests incited the populace, in some places, to acts of disturbance and violence. At Six Miles Bridge the soldiery were attacked while protecting voters in the free exercise of their franchise. Proceedings were taken against a Roman Catholic priest for the part which it was alleged he took in those disturbances. Public opinion considered him to have been the cause of the outbreak, but the tory government, anxious for party purposes to conciliate the Roman Catholics, did not dare to prosecute him.
The Young Ireland agitation was not extinguished, and it received some new inspiration of hope from the escape of Thomas Meagher, from Australia. That adventurous young man made his way from his penal abode at the antipodes to America, where he became a citizen. He was a true patriot, and an ardent friend of liberty; he had no sympathy with the pro-slavery and red republican opinions of his former coadjutor, Mitchell, nor with the raving and malignant bigotry of Charles Gavan Duffy. In the United States he was an object of universal respect, his amiability and eloquence winning, in private and public, “golden opinions from all sorts of men.”