John Russell, 1st Earl Russell

“ Early in the following year, Lord John was raised to the peerage as Earl Russell of Kingston-Russell and Viscount Amberley and Ardsalla. ‘I cannot despatch,’ wrote Mr. Gladstone, ‘as I have just done, the Chiltern Hundreds for you, without expressing the strong feelings which even that formal act awakens. They are mixed, as well as strong; for I hope you will be repaid in repose, health, and the power of long-continuing service, for the heavy loss we suffer in the House of Commons. ”

“ He accompanied that intimation, however, with another, pointedly contrasting with the "finality" declaration of Lord John Russell. The Earl disclaimed altogether the opinion that the Reform Act of 1831 "was a perfect system, incapable of improvement." "I do not, my lords, for a moment pretend to say that the system of representation introduced in 1831 was a perfect system, or incapable of improvement. I think that there may have arisen, and will arise in the course of time, abuses requiring change, and evils demanding a remedy ”

“ For my own part, I earnestly hope that my predictions may not be fulfilled, and that my country may not be ruined by the measure which the noble earl and his colleagues have sanctioned.’ Lord John Russell, on the contrary, held then the view which he afterwards expressed: ‘It is the right of a people to represent its grievances: it is the business of a statesman to devise remedies.’ In the first quarter of the present century the people made their grievances known. ”

“ His conduct, nevertheless, afforded Lord John Russell an escape from an embarrassing situation. Becoming colonial secretary in 1846, he found himself everywhere confronted with arduous problems, which in the main he encountered with success. His administration formed an epoch. He was the first minister to proclaim that the colonies were to be governed for their own benefit and not for the mother-country’s; the first systematically to accord them self-government so far as then seemed possible; the first to introduce free trade into their relations with Great Britain and Ireland. ”

“ The rebellion in Canada was the first great incident in the new reign, and the Melbourne Cabinet met the crisis by proposals—which were moved by Lord John in the Commons, and adopted—for suspending the Canadian Constitution for the space of four years. The Earl of Durham, at the beginning of 1838, was appointed Governor-General with extraordinary powers, and he reluctantly accepted the diffi [111] cult post, trusting, as he himself said, to the confidence and support of the Government, and to the forbearance of those who differed from his political views. ”

“ Gladstone's first administration. His policy was the then accepted liberal policy. He withdrew the imperial troops from several foreign stations, especially in New Zealand and in Canada, leaving to the colonists themselves the task of providing for their own security, and his circular in reply to the proposal for a colonial conference in 1869 was discouraging to the colonies. Still, when Earl Russell moved for a commission on colonial policy (20 June 1870; see Hansard, Parl. Debates, ccii. 451) — a hostile motion — he defended himself successfully, and the motion was withdrawn. ”

“ In March of 1851 Lord John Russell had announced the resignation of the Government owing to their defeat on the franchise question; Lord Stanley was sent for by Queen Victoria, but found himself unable to form a ministry, and upon the advice of the Duke of Wellington the Queen had requested her ministers to resume office. ”

“ Government by great families was once a reality in England, and when Lord John Russell’s long career began the old tradition had not yet lost its ascendency. The ranks of privilege can at least claim to have given at more than one great crisis in the national annals leaders to the cause of progress. It is not necessary in this connection to seek examples outside the House of Bedford, since the name of Lord William Russell in the seventeenth century and that of Lord John in the nineteenth stand foremost amongst the champions of civil and religious liberty. ”

“ English policy alone has lent vitality to the war.
In the summer of 1861 Earl Russell publicly gave utterance to his celebrated sentence, that the North is fighting for empire, the South for independence. England now understands what the “independence” means. Mr. Forster, M.P. interpreted it well,—freedom of robbery, rape, murder, and lynch-law. The “empire” for which the Union fights, is simply its own country, vital to its national existence, not a distinct adjunct, such as to England is Canada, against which Earl Russell made war “for empire” in 1838. ”

“ The persons who now form the Congress of the United States were elected by the people or the States for the exact positions they hold. In any comparison between the two as to the direct derivation of their power from the people and the States, Congress has everything in its favor; Mr. Johnson, nothing. The immense power he enjoys, a power not merely greater than that of Queen Victoria, but greater than that of Earl Russell, the real British Executive, is the result not of design, but of accident. ”

“ Lord John Russell, who was spending the autumn in Scotland, was the first ‘responsible statesman’ to take decisive action, for whilst Peel, hampered by the vacillation and opposition of his colleagues, still hesitated, Russell took the world into his confidence in his historic ‘Edinburgh Letter,’ dated November 22, 1845, to his constituents in London. It was a bold and uncompromising declaration of policy, for the logic of events had at length convinced Lord John that any further delay was dangerous. ”

“ One of the first acts of the new King and Queen was the reversal of the attainder of William, Lord Russell; his execution had already been declared to be a murder by the vote of the House of Commons. Honours of different kinds were showered on the aged Earl of Bedford, the Earl of Devonshire, and many of Lady Russell’s connections and friends, while she herself was constantly referred to for advice and counsel by people whom she held in great esteem, such as Dr. ”

“ There, in old age, Lord Russell loved to wander with wife or child or friend, and there, through the loop-holes of retreat amid his books and flowers, he watched the great world, and occasionally sallied forth, so long as strength remained, to bear his part in its affairs. ”

“ He declared that ‘there was no man in England whom he respected more in his public capacity, loved more in his private capacity, or from whom he had received more remarkable proofs of his honour and love of literature than Lord John Russell.’ The compliment took Lord Russell by surprise ”

“ And even if the terms of the treaty which put an end to that war had been a little differently arranged, England might have triumphed in the war that she carried on against our ancestors. Both the war itself, and the manner of concluding it, were necessary to the creation of that American empire which, according to Earl Russell, we are fighting to maintain,—as unquestionably we are, though not in the ignoble sense in which the noble Earl meant that his words should be taken and understood. ”

“ Lord John Russell's career, during the last seven years, has ruined him in the public estimation. He has not attempted to govern by principle, but by expediency. He has never risen to the proud elevation of a British statesman—he has simply shown himself to be an unscrupulous party leader. Whether in office or out of it, his measures have uniformly been based upon considerations of Whig supremacy—not upon those [499] higher views of public policy which a Premier of Great Britain should entertain. ”

“ From youth to age Lord John not merely possessed the pen of a ready writer, but employed it freely in history, biography, criticism, belles-lettres, and verse. His first book was published when George III. was King, and his last appeared when almost forty years of Queen Victoria’s reign had elapsed. The Liverpool Administration was in power when his biography of his famous ancestor, William, Lord Russell, appeared, and that of Mr. ”

“ The President trusts that you are sparing no efforts to convince Earl Russell that the time has come when that concession can be revoked with safety to Great Britain and advantage to the great material interests of that country. ”

“ No great power can afford to patronize official treasons in foreign governments. If the English government has no interest in republicanism, if it has become indifferent to freedom and slavery, it has interest in fidelity to official oaths. Earl Russell had a right, by International Law, without offending its minutest punctilio, to offer to Mr. ”

“ He saw, beyond most of his contemporaries, the coming magnitude of the Empire, and he did his best to shape on broad lines and to far-reaching issues the policy of England towards her children beyond the seas. Lord John recognised in no churlish or half-hearted spirit the claims of the Colonies, nor did he stand dismayed by the vision of Empire. ‘There was a time when we might have stood alone,’ are his words. ‘That time has passed. We conquered and peopled Canada, we took possession of the whole of Australia, Van Dieman’s Land, and New Zealand. We have annexed India to the Crown. ”

“ He was the elder son of Arthur Russell (1785–1845) and Margaret, daughter of Matthew Mullin and widow of John Hamill, a merchant of Belfast. The Russells were of an old stock long settled in the county of Down. The family had clung to the ancient faith, and, like others, had suffered from the persecutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Arthur Russell died in 1845, and the care of his young family devolved upon their clever mother and their paternal uncle, Dr. Charles William Russell [q. v.] ”

“ For a vital lesson in politics, Earl Russell’s construction of neutrality mattered little to the student, who asked only Russell’s intent, and cared only to know whether his construction had any other object than to deceive the Minister.
In the grave one can afford to be lavish of charity, and possibly Earl Russell may have been honestly glad to reassure his personal friend Mr. Adams; but to one who is still in the world even if not of it, doubts are as plenty as days. Earl Russell totally deceived the private secretary, whatever he may have done to the Minister. ”

“ For nearly four years after his retirement from office Lord John held an independent political position, and there is evidence enough that he enjoyed to the full [272] this respite from the cares of responsibility. He gave up his house in town, and the quidnuncs thought that they had seen the last of him as a Minister of the Crown, whilst the merchants and the stockbrokers of the City were supposed to scout his name, and to be ready to lift up their heel against him at the next election. ”

“ Lord Russell replied, “he kept the honour of England very high; and I think that a great thing. [338] ”
‘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.” ”

“ Forty-three other so-called Liberals in the House of Commons were apparently of the same way of thinking, for the Russell Administration was defeated by forty-four ‘Liberal’ votes. This in itself shows that Lord John, up to the hour in which he was driven from power, was far in advance of one section of his followers. The great towns, and more particularly Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds, promptly took up the challenge; and in those three centres alone half a million of people assembled [333] to make energetic protest against the contemptuous dismissal of their claims. ”

“ Still more important was the fact that Lord John Russell, who had distinguished himself already as the most devoted promoter of constitutional reform, was a man peculiarly qualified by intellect and by his skill in exposition to pilot such a measure through the House of Commons. ”

“ Lord John Russell presents his humble duty to your Majesty. He cannot forbear from vindicating himself from the charge of forming or being party to an arrangement "intended to meet personal wants under peculiar and accidental circumstances, leaving the Queen the embarrassing alternative only, either to forego the exercise of her own prerogative, or to damage by her own act the formation or stability of the new Government—both of paramount importance to the welfare of the Country." ”

“ The spirit which pervaded the foreign policy of Lord John Russell is shown in a letter from him to Queen Victoria dated December 29, 1851:38
Page 119.
The grand rule of doing to others as we wish that they should do unto us is more applicable than any system of political science. The honour of England does not consist in defending every English officer or English subject, right or wrong, but in taking care that she does not infringe the rules of justice, and that they are not infringed against her. ”

“ Lord John Russell is deeply sensible of the embarrassment caused by the present state of public affairs. He will be ready, therefore, to do all in his power, as a member of parliament, to promote the settlement of that question which, in present circumstances, is the source of so much danger, especially to the welfare and peace of Ireland. Lord John Russell would have formed his ministry on the basis of a complete free trade in corn, to be established at once, without gradation or delay. ”