CHAPTER XII.
THE POLITICAL SKETCHES OF HB (Continued).
Sydney Smith said of little Lord John Russell, that he was “ready Lord John Russell. to undertake anything and everything—to build St. Paul’s,—cut for the stone,—or command the Channel fleet,” and this satire of the wit was true. He tried politics and he tried literature, and few people will say that he was entirely successful at either. As a politician, for instance, his general capacity for getting himself and his party into a mess, earned from the most intellectually powerful of his political opponents the enduring title of “Lord Meddle and Muddle.” He has not been dead very long, yet what reputation has he left behind him as a dramatist—novelist—historian—biographer—editor—pamphleteer, all of which rôles he essayed at some time or other of his long and eventful career? His Nun of Arronca (1822) fetches it is true an exceedingly high price, because having been rigidly suppressed by its author it is now exceedingly rare. The best that can be said of Lord John—and that is saying a great deal—is, that he was a consistent Liberal according to his lights, and that to him belongs the honour and glory of bringing about the great measure of Reform, which, as we have seen, was, mainly through his instrumentality, accomplished in 1832.
Lord John, as might have been expected, frequently appears in the “political sketches” of HB. He cuts an amusing figure in one where Jonah (Lord Minto) is about to be thrown overboard by Lords Lansdowne, Palmerston, and Duncannon, by order of the captain (Lord Melbourne), to appease the storm raised by Lords Brougham and Lyndhurst in reference to a rumour that Lord Minto (First Lord of the Admiralty), had instructed British cruisers to stop all Sardinian vessels carrying warlike stores for Don Carlos. Lord John, while clinging to the mast behind, and viewing with terror the impending fate of his colleague, evidently solaces himself with the conviction that his own weight is too insignificant to have any material effect upon the safety of the ship. Minto owed his safety to the Duke of Wellington, who therefore figures in the sketch as the whale; for, although convinced that his lordship had been imprudent, he successfully resisted Brougham’s motion for a copy of the instructions, and thereby succeeded in lodging poor Jonah on dry land.
One of the “sketches” in which Lord John Russell figures Stamp Duty on Newspapers. reminds us of a remarkable discussion which possesses considerable interest for every reader of the cheap newspapers of to-day. The Chancellor of the Exchequer (the Right Hon. Thomas Spring Rice) in opening his budget on the 6th of May, 1836, showed a disposable surplus of £662,000 only, which he proposed (in the usual way) to apply towards the reduction of taxation. He proposed, in the first place, to consolidate the paper duties and to reduce their amount in a manner which he proceeded to explain; and after accounting for £200,000, the balance of the surplus he intended to apply to the reduction of the stamp on newspapers. The duty minus the discount was fourpence, which he proposed to reduce to a penny, and to give of course no discount. The reader must not suppose from the foregoing, however, that all the proprietors of newspapers of that day paid the duty; on the contrary, the large majority evaded it in every possible way. The measure in fact was intended as much as a protection to the revenue as anything else, for the sale of unstamped newspapers throughout the country had become so extensive that no series of prosecutions was found effectual to put them down. Every sheet, it is true, professed to bear on it the printer’s name; but the name so appended was in six cases out of eight a false one. Exchequer processes were issued; all the power of the law was set in motion; in the course of three weeks three hundred persons had been imprisoned for selling unstamped papers in the streets, but without in the slightest degree repressing the illegal sale. The Chancellor argued that the loss which the revenue would sustain in the first instance would be more than compensated by the enormous increase of duty to be obtained from the enlarged circulation; from the additional duty arising from the greater consumption of paper; and from the very large increase which might be expected from the produce of the duty on advertisements.
The opponents of the measure were of three classes: first, those who looked upon the proposal as radical and subversive; secondly, those who because a reduction is suggested in one quarter invariably consider it the correct thing to propose it in another; and lastly, the owners of the established newspapers of the day. The arguments of the first class assumed the following form: “In proportion as any political party approaches more or less towards pure democracy and the right divine of mere numbers, its interests will require that the means should be increased of disseminating among the lower classes, and as nearly gratuitously as possible, the exciting and poisonous food which is at last to end in the revolutionary fever.”[113] The second class, strange to say, rested their hopes in this instance on the singularly slippery basis of soap. Sir C. Keightley moved (on the 20th of June) that instead of diminishing the stamp duty on newspapers, the duty on hard and soft soap should be reduced. The reduction of such duty would, he argued, by aiding cleanliness, promote the health and comfort of the people, while the lowering of newspaper stamps would do nothing of the kind, but would tend rather to introduce a cheap and profligate press, “one of the greatest curses which could be inflicted on humanity.” He contended, moreover, that it was absurd to argue that the poor were debarred from reading the public prints, when in a coffee shop, for three-halfpence, they could obtain a cup of coffee and a sight of every newspaper published in London. Mr. Barclay, one of the members for Surrey, thought it impossible for any reasonable being to hesitate between the relative virtues of newspapers and soap; and as for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, he could not believe for one moment that if left to his own unaided judgment he would hesitate to give his preference to the latter. The Chancellor nevertheless avowed in the plainest terms his preference for newspapers, and his conviction of the advisability of an immediate reduction in the stamp duty; the result, after the lapse of less than forty years, has conclusively proved the wisdom of the measure which he succeeded in carrying.
Newspaper proprietorship was then a monopoly; and the argument Curious Arguments of the Newspaper Proprietors. by which the rich proprietor, the representative of the third class of opponents, sought to maintain his monopoly cannot fail to amuse the newspaper reader of to-day. The monopoliser who, to maintain the character of his paper and to supply the public with the best and earliest information, incurred the expense of procuring parliamentary reports, obtaining foreign intelligence, anticipating the arrival of the post by expresses, and by having correspondents in every quarter of the world where matters of interest were going forward, said, that should the measure pass, he must thenceforth either be content to lower the tone of the public press by not giving the same amount of accurate intelligence, or must carry on the contest with those who went to no expense at all. “The result would be not only the ruin of the property of the newspaper proprietors and the destruction of their property, but it would be something much more fatal to the general interests of the country, for the editors of the present respectable papers would not be able to compete with these predatory publications, and would be compelled to forego that extent of information which was then so accurately given. We should have the newspaper press”—mark this, ye omnivorous readers of to-day, who commence with The Times, adjourn to the Telegraph, peruse the pages of the Morning Post, wander through the columns of the Daily News, and finish off with the express edition of the Globe or Evening Standard, reserving your Saturday Review, your Truth, and your Vanity Fair for Sunday solatium—“we should have the newspaper press simply reduced to this state: that no longer would there be a regular and correct supply of information to the public respecting the debates of Parliament or other important matters, but there would be only such an amount and such a description of information as could be furnished upon the inaccurate data of a man who would not go to any expense in the use of the means at present employed.” These were the views of the newspaper proprietors of 1836, as expounded by that respectable but distinctly Tory authority, “The Annual Register.”[114]
The measure of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, of which we have attempted the foregoing explanation, appears to have suggested to John Doyle his sketch of The Rival Newsmongers, in which the leading men of all parties are represented in the act of endeavouring to force the sale of their own journals. The scene is supposed to be enacted in front of the Elephant and Castle, where we find the “Union Coach” waiting to take up passengers,—the three who occupy the roof being a Scotchman, indicated by his bonnet and plaid, Paddy by his shocking bad hat, while in the portly, jolly-looking party next him we have no difficulty whatever in recognising honest John Bull. The three are listening to the appeals of O’Connell, close to whom is Mr. Roebuck, and behind him again Mr. Hume. Sir Roger Gresley addresses himself to the insides, and the person holding up his paper to the special notice of John Bull is the Marquis of Londonderry. The driver of the coach is Lord Melbourne, and the ostler little Lord John Russell.
The public man who perhaps of all others earned and deserved Lord Brougham. his place in the pictorial satires of the nineteenth century was emphatically Brougham. The verdict of posterity on this restless but unquestionably brilliant man of genius must of necessity be a somewhat disappointing one; he aimed at being nothing less than an Admirable Crichton, and such a character in the nineteenth century, when every public man must be more or less talented, more or less brilliant, would be an impossibility even to a genius. A rival lawyer and political opponent, Sir Charles Wetherell is reported to have said of him that he knew a little of everything but law; and although this statement was spiteful and untrue, there is no doubt of the truth of Mr. Greville’s remarks, that his duty as Chancellor was confined to appeals which must come before him, lunacy and other matters over which he had sole jurisdiction, and that “nobody ever thought of bringing an original cause into his court.”[115] We think we may even go farther than this, and say that no lawyer of the present day would dream of relying on Lord Brougham’s decisions. O’Connell said of him, “I pay very little attention to anything Lord Brougham says. He makes a greater number of foolish speeches than any other man of the present generation. There may be more nonsense in some one speech of another person, but in the number, the multitude of foolish speeches, Lord Brougham has it hollow. I would start him ten to one—ay, fifty to one—in talking nonsense against any prattler now living.”