Lord John Russell

by Stuart J. Reid

‘It was, I think, in 1866, and in the house of Dean Milman, that I had the privilege of being introduced to Lord Russell. He at once received me with a warmth and kindness I can never forget, and from this time till near the end of his life I saw him very frequently. His Ministerial career had just terminated, but I could trace no failure in his powers, and, whatever difference of opinion there might be about his public career, no one, I believe, who ever came in contact with him failed to recognise his singular charm in private life. His conversation differed from that of some of the more illustrious of his contemporaries. It was not a copious and brilliant stream of words, dazzling, astonishing, or overpowering. It had no tendency to monologue, and it was not remarkable for any striking originalities either of language, metaphor, or thought. Few men steered more clear of paradox, and the charm of his talk lay mainly in his admirable terseness and clearness of expression, in the skill with which, by a few happy words, he could tell a story, or etch out a character, or condense an argument or statement. Beyond all men I have ever known, he had the gift of seizing rapidly in every question the central argument, the essential fact or distinction; and of all his mental characteristics, quickness and soundness of judgment seemed to me the most conspicuous. I have never met with anyone with whom it was so possible to discuss with profit many great questions in a short time. No one, too, could know him intimately without being impressed with his high sense of honour, with his transparent purity of motive, with the fundamental kindliness of his disposition, with the remarkable modesty of his estimate of his own past. He was eminently tolerant of difference of opinion, and he had in private life an imperturbable sweetness of temper that set those about him completely at their ease, and helped much to make them talk their best. Few men had more anecdotes, and no one told them better—tersely, accurately, with a quiet, subdued humour, with a lightness of touch which I should not have expected from his writings. In addition to the experiences of a long and eventful life, his mind was stored with the anecdotes of the brilliant Whig society of Holland House, of which he was one of the last repositories. It is much to be regretted that he did not write down his “Recollections” till a period of life when his once admirable memory was manifestly failing. He was himself sadly conscious of the failure. “I used never to confuse my facts,” he once said to me; “I now find that I am beginning to do so.”

‘He has mentioned in his “Recollections” as one of the great felicities of his life that he retained the friendship of his leading opponents, and his private conversation fully supported this view. Of Sir Robert Peel he always spoke with a special respect, and it was, I think, a matter of peculiar pleasure to him that in his old age his family was closely connected by marriage with that of his illustrious rival. His friendship with Lord Derby, which began when they were colleagues, was unbroken by many contests. He spoke of him, however, as a man of brilliant talent, who had not the judgment or the character suited for the first place; and he maintained that he had done much better both under Lord Grey and under Sir Robert Peel than as Prime Minister. Between Lord Russell and Disraeli there was, I believe, on both sides much kindly feeling, though no two men could be less like, and though there was much in Disraeli’s ways of looking at things that must have been peculiarly trying to the Whig mind. Lord Russell told me that he once described him in Parliament by quoting the lines of Dryden:—

‘He was not one on picking work to dwell.
He fagotted his notions as they fell;
And if they rhymed and rattled, all was well.’

HIS EARLY CHIEFS

‘Of his early chiefs, he used to speak with most reverence of Lord Grey. Lord Melbourne, he said, greatly injured his Government by the manner in which he treated deputations. He never could resist the temptation of bantering and snubbing them. Two men who flourished in his youth surpassed, Lord Russell thought, in eloquence any of the later generation. They were Canning and Plunket, and as an orator the greater of these was Plunket. Among the statesmen of a former generation, he had an especial admiration for Walpole, and was accustomed to maintain that he was a much greater statesman than Pitt. His judgment, indeed, of Pitt always seemed to me much warped by that adoration of Fox which in the early years of the century was almost an article of religion in Whig circles. Lord Russell had also the true Whig reverence for William III., and, I am afraid, he was by no means satisfied with some pages I wrote about that sovereign.

‘Speaking of Lord Palmerston, I once said to him that I was struck with the small net result in legislation which he accomplished considering the many years he was in power. “But during all these years,” Lord Russell replied, “he kept the honour of England very high; and I think that a great thing. ”

‘The Imperialist sentiment was one of the deepest in his nature, and few things exasperated him more than the school which was advocating the surrender of India and the Colonies. “When I was young,” he once said to me, “it was thought the work of a wise statesman that he had turned a small kingdom into a great empire. In my old age it seems to be thought the object of a statesman to turn a great empire into a small kingdom.” He thought we had made a grave mistake, when conceding self-government to the Colonies, in not reserving the waste lands and free trade with the Mother Country; and he considered that the right of veto on legislation, which had been reserved, ought to have been always exercised (as he said it was under Lord Grey) when duties were imposed on English goods. In Irish politics he greatly blamed Canning, who agreed with the Whigs about Catholic Emancipation, though he differed from them about Reform. The former question, he said, was then by far the more pressing, and if Canning had insisted on making it a first-class ministerial question he would have carried it in conjunction with the Whigs. “My pride in Irish measures,” he once wrote to me, “is in the Poor Law, which I designed, framed, and twice carried.” Like Peel, he strongly maintained that the priests ought to have been paid. He would gladly have seen the principle of religious equality in Ireland carried to its furthest consequences, and local government considerably extended; but he told me that any statesman who proposed to repeal the Union ought to be impeached, and in his “Recollections,” and in one of his published letters to the present Lord Carlingford, he has expressed in the strongest terms his inflexible hostility to Home Rule.

POLITICAL APPREHENSIONS

‘Though the steadiest of Whigs, Lord Russell was by no means an uncompromising democrat. The great misfortune, he said, of America was that the influence of Jefferson had eclipsed that of Washington. One of her chief advantages was that the Western States furnished a wide and harmless field for restless energy and ambition. In England he was very anxious that progress should move on the lines of the past, and he was under the impression that statesmen of the present generation studied English history less than their predecessors. He was one of the earliest advocates of the Minority Vote, and he certainly looked with very considerable apprehension to the effects of the Democratic Reform Bill of 1867. He said to me that he feared there was too much truth in the saying of one of his friends that “the concessions of the Whigs were once concessions to intelligence, but now concessions to ignorance.”

‘When the Education Act was carried, he was strongly in favour of the introduction of the Bible, accompanied by purely undenominational teaching. This was, I think, one of his last important declarations on public policy. I recollect a scathing article in the “Saturday Review,” demonstrating the absurdity of supposing that such teaching was possible. But the people of England took a different view. The great majority of the School Boards adopted the system which Lord Russell recommended, and it prevailed with almost perfect harmony for more than twenty years.