---
Title: Lord John Russell, August 28, 1855 (1855)
Description: Marx's portrait of Lord John Russell for the New-York Daily Tribune: his career from the Reform Bill to the Crimean War, on Ireland, the Corn Laws and religious liberty, as one long false pretense.
Author: Karl Marx
Date: 1855-08-28
URL: https://marxismo.school/archivo/marx-engels/originales/1855%20Lord%20John%20Russell%2C%20August%2028%2C%201855
---


*Published unsigned, under the headline “Lord John Russell”, in the* New-York Daily Tribune*, No. 4479, August 28, 1855, p. 5, col. 6, and p. 6, cols. 1-4; attributed to Karl Marx by MEGA² (I/14). Marx treated the same subject in German in a series of six articles for the* Neue Oder-Zeitung *(July-August 1855), which MEGA² prints as a separate work; the date is added to the title to tell them apart. Text from the original newspaper (Library of Congress, Chronicling America). [Traducción al español](https://marxismo.school/archivo/marx-engels/1855%20Lord%20John%20Russell%2C%2028%20de%20agosto%20de%201855).*

We have recently had occasion to notice the funeral obsequies of this politically departed statesman, and to utter a few farewell words above his grave. The part which his birth, and his position as the only presentable member of the great revolutionary family and old Whig house of Bedford, enabled him to play in the drama of European affairs, and the connection of his name with some of the great progressive measures of the day, seem to us to entitle him to a somewhat more lengthened and analytic obituary.

“If I was a painter,” said old Cobbett, “there would I place the old oak, (the British Constitution,) corroded at the root, his top dead, his trunk hollow, loosened at his base, rocking with every blast, and there would I place Lord John Russell, in the person of a tom-tit, endeavoring to put all right by picking at a nest of animalculæ seated in the half-rotten bark of one of the meanest branches. There are some who even think that he is eating the buds while he pretends to clear the tree of injurious insects.” So minute were Lord John Russell’s reform efforts during his antediluvian career from 1813 to 1830; but minute as they were, they were not sincere, and he did not hesitate to retreat from them whenever they clashed with the attainment or retention of place.

Since 1807 the Whigs had pined in vain for a bite at the rich cherry of official salary and plunder, when in 1827 the formation of Canning’s cabinet, with whom they pretended to agree on the subject of commerce and of foreign policy, seemed to afford them the long-sought-for opportunity. Russell, at that time, had given notice of one of his tom-tit Parliamentary reform motions. But upon Canning’s stern declaration that he should oppose Parliamentary reform to the end of his life, up rose Lord John in great haste and withdrew his motion, declaring that “Parliamentary reform was a question on which there was a great diversity of opinion among those who advocated it, and to which the leaders of the Whigs were always unwilling to be pledged as to a party question. It was now for *the last time* that he brought forward this question. The people no longer wished for reform.”

While sitting at Canning’s back, he, who had made a merit of his noisy opposition to Castlereagh’s six gagging acts, refrained from voting on Mr. Hume’s motion for the repeal of one of those six acts which made a man liable to banishment for life for uttering in print anything which had even a “tendency” to bring either house of Parliament into contempt. Thus, at the conclusion of the first period of his Parliamentary life, we find him fully concurring with the opinion of that Whig prototype, Horace Walpole, that “popular bills are never really proposed but as an engine of party, and not as a pledge for the realization of any such extravagant ideas.” It was, then, by no means Lord J. Russell’s fault that the motion for Parliamentary reform, instead of being brought forward for the “last” time in 1827, was to make its reappearance four years later, on March 1st, 1831, in the shape of the famous bill. This bill, which he still exhibits as his great claim to the admiration of the world in general, and the gratitude of the English nation in particular, he had not even the merit of being the author of. In its principal features—the breaking up of the nomination boroughs, the addition of county members, the enfranchisement of copy holders, lease-holders, and some of the chief commercial towns—it was copied from the Reform bill which Lord Grey (the chief of the Reform-Ministry in 1831) had moved in the House of Commons as far back as the year 1797, and which he had taken good care to drop when a member of the Fox cabinet in 1806. It was the identical bill, slightly modified.

The ejection of Wellington from office, because he had declared against Reform; the French Revolution of July; the threatening political unions formed by the middling and working classes at Birmingham, Manchester, London, and elsewhere; the rural war; the “bonfires” all over the most fertile counties of England—(“Out of the fires came the Reform,” says a celebrated writer)—all these circumstances absolutely compelled the Whigs to propose some measure of Reform. It was their only means of rushing into office. They gave way grudgingly, slowly, and after vainly reiterated efforts at one time to shuffle out of the only liberal clauses of their own measure, and again to abandon it altogether, and to keep their places by a compromise with the Tories. They were prevented by the formidable attitude of the people, and the uncompromising opposition of the Tories. Hardly, however, had the Reform bill become law, and begun to work, when, to quote Mr. Bright’s words, “the people began to feel that they had been cheated.” Never, perhaps, had a mighty, and, to all appearances, successful popular movement been turned into such a mock result. Not only were the working classes altogether excluded from any political influence, but the middle classes themselves discovered that Lord Althorpe, the soul of the Reform cabinet, had not used a rhetorical figure when telling his Tory adversaries that “the Reform bill was the most aristocratic act ever offered to the nation.”

The new county representation still largely preponderated over that of the towns. The franchise of the tenants at-will occupying at an annual value of £50, rendered the counties, still more efficiently than before, the tools of the aristocracy. The substitution of the £10 householders for the payers of scot and lot, actually disfranchised a great number of former town voters. The new arrangements were, on the whole, calculated not for increasing middle class influence, but for the exclusion of Tory and the promotion of Whig patronage. By a series of the most extraordinary tricks, frauds, and juggles, the inequality of the electoral districts was maintained, the monstrous disproportion between representation and constituency reconstructed. If some fifty-six rotten boroughs each with a handfull of inhabitants, were extinguished, whole counties and populous towns were transformed into rotten boroughs. Lord John Russell himself confesses, in his letter to the electors of Stroud, on the principles of the Reform Act, that “the £10 franchise was fettered by regulation, and the annual registration was made a source of vexation and expense.” Intimidation and patronage, where they could not be perpetuated, were replaced by bribery, which, from the passage of the Reform bill, became the main prop of the British Constitution. Such was the Reform of which Lord John was the mouthpiece, but not the author. The only clauses since proved to be due to his invention are that which compels all freeholders, except parsons, to have had a year of possession, and the other clause preserving Tavistock, the family rotten borough of the Russells. Russell was but a subordinate member of the Reform Ministry without a vote in the cabinet, viz: Paymaster of the Forces, from November, 1830, to November, 1834. He was, perhaps, the most insignificant man among them. But from his being the son of the mighty Duke of Bedford he was singled out for the honor of introducing the bill into the House of Commons.

Beside the Reform-bill discussion, Lord John distinguished himself by the acrimony and virulence with which he opposed all inquiry into the pension-list. Some years later, when all the prominent members of the original Reform cabinet, having been removed to the Lords, died out, or separated from the Whigs, Lord John not only entered upon their inheritance, but soon passed in the eyes of the country as the natural father of the bill of which he had been but the godfather by courtesy. On bringing in the Reform bill, he said: “There can be no doubt that the *ballot* has much to recommend it; the arguments which I have heard advanced in its favor are as ingenious as any that I ever heard on any subject.” As to Short Parliaments, “that was a question of the utmost importance, which he left to be brought before the House by some other member at a future time, in order not to embarrass the great subject with details.” On the 7th June, 1833, he pretended to have “refrained from bringing forward those two measures in order to avoid a collision with the Lords, although opinions deeply seated in his heart. He was convinced of their being most essential to the happiness, prosperity and welfare of this country.”

Whether in consequence of this deeply-seated conviction or not, he proved during his whole ministerial career the constant and relentless adversary of the ballot and short parliaments. But when these declarations were made they served as expedients, in the first place, to allay the suspicious democrats in the House of Commons, and in the second, to frighten the refractory aristocrats in the House of Lords. But as soon as he had got possession of the new Court of Queen Victoria and fancied himself an immortal placeholder, out he came with his declaration of November, 1837, wherein he justified the “extreme” length to which the “Reform bill had gone” on the plea of barring the possibility of ever going further. He stated coolly that “the object of the Reform bill was to increase the predominance of the *landed* interest, and it was intended as a *permanent settlement* of a great constitutional question.” From this finality statement he earned the *soubriquet* of Finality-John. But this finality was as false a pretense as his reform itself. It is true, he resisted Hume’s motion for Parliamentary Reform in 1848. With the combined forces of Whigs, Tories, and Peelites, he again defeated Hume on a similar motion in 1849, Emboldened by his conservative army of reserve, he then most haughtily spoke to the purport that “in framing and proposing the Reform bill, what we wished was to adapt the representation of this House to the other powers of the State, and keep it in harmony with the Constitution. Mr. Bright and those who agree with him are so exceedingly narrow-minded, they have intellect and understanding bound up in such a narrow round, that it is quite impossible to get them to understand the great principles on which our ancestors founded the Constitution of the country, and which we, their successors, humbly admire and endeavor to follow. The existing system, though somewhat anomalous, worked well: the better for the anomalies.”

However, being defeated in 1851 in his opposition to Locke King’s bill for extending the county franchise to £10 occupiers, and even forced to resign for some days, Lord John suddenly made up his large mind on the necessity of a new Reform bill. He did not state what his measure was to be, but he gave a promissory note payable at the next session of Parliament. How this move was judged of by his own confederates may be seen from *The Westminster Review*: “The pretense of the present Ministry to office had become a byword of scorn and reproach; and at length, when its exclusion and party annihilation seemed imminent, forth comes Lord John with the promise of a new Reform Bill for 1852. Keep me in office, he says, till that time, and I will satisfy your longings by a large and liberal measure of reform. The Reformers of the House of Commons yielded to that reasoning.” In 1852 he indeed proposed a Reform bill, this time of his own invention, but of such Liliputian features that neither the Conservatives thought it worth while to attack nor the Liberals to support it. Still, it afforded the little man a pretext when resigning his ministry for throwing in his flight a Scythian dart at Lord Derby, by uttering the pompous threat that he would “insist on the extension of the suffrage.” Hardly out of office, this child of expediency, now emphatically called by his own followers Foul-Weather Jack, summoned to his private residence at Chesham-place the different sections of the Liberal party to make solemn asseverations of his own large-mindedness, and to hand to them another promissory bill of a larger amount of reform. When a member of the Coalition cabinet, he amused the House with a Reform bill which he knew would prove another Iphigenia, to be sacrificed by himself, another Agamemnon, for the benefit of another Trojan war. He performed the sacrifice indeed in true melodramatic style, his eyes filled with tears, but these soon passed away.

Another of the false pretenses on which he sought a niche in the temple of fame was his efforts on behalf of Ireland. Since the Anti-Jacobin war, the Whigs, feeling themselves at an extremely low ebb in England, endeavored to fortify their position by an offensive and defensive alliance with Ireland. Stepping into office in 1806, they introduced and carried through the second reading a small Irish Emancipation bill, which they then withdrew to flatter the bigot idiotcy of George III. Before and during the Reform agitation they fawned upon O’Connell, and the hopes raised in Ireland served them as powerful engines of party. Yet their first act at the first meeting of the Reformed Parliament was a declaration of civil war against Ireland, a “brutal and bloody measure,” the Irish Coercion “Red-Coat Tribunal bill,” according to which men were to be tried in Ireland by military officers, instead of by Judges and Juries. O’Connell was prosecuted for sedition. The Whigs fulfilled their ancient promises with “fire, imprisonment, transportation and even with death.” They carried, however, the Coercion bill only on the express stipulation that they would bring in and carry an Irish Church bill, with a clause stipulating that a certain portion of the revenues of the Established Church in Ireland should be placed at the disposal of Parliament, with the view to employ it for the benefit of Ireland. This clause was important from acknowledging the principle that Parliament had the power of expropriating the Established Church, a principle John Russell ought to be convinced of, the whole immense property of his family being formed of church plunder. Having engaged to stand or fall by that bill, they hastened, on the ground of avoiding a collision with the Lords, to take out that very clause, the only part in the bill of any value at all. They then voted against and defeated their own measure. But when Peel came in, at the end of 1834, their Irish sympathizers were roused again as by an electric shock. John Russell was the principal agent in bringing about, in 1835, the Lichfield House compact, through which the Whigs surrendered to O’Connell the Irish patronage, and O’Connell secured to them the Irish votes. But there was wanting a pretext for ejecting the Tories. John, with characteristic impudence, chose as battle-field the Ecclesiastical Revenues of Ireland. He attacked and turned out Sir Robert Peel because of his resistance to that very clause, now called the appropriation clause, which the Reform Ministry themselves had abandoned. The Melbourne cabinet was formed, and Lord John became leader in the House of Commons. He now began to boast on the one hand of his mental firmness, because although now in office he still adhered to his opinions on the appropriation clause; and on the other hand of his moral moderation in not acting upon those same opinions. He never acted upon them. In 1846, when Premier, he contrived to get rid of the opinions too. He professed that he could not conceive a more fatal measure than the disestablishment of the Church, and declined to take any further notice of the project of 1835.

In February, 1833, John Russell as a member of the Reform Ministry denounced Irish Repeal, and stated that the real object of the agitation was “to overturn at once the United Parliament, and to establish, in place of King, Lords, and Commons of the United Kingdom, some parliament of which Mr. O’Connell was to be the leader and the chief.” In February, 1834, the Repeal agitation was again denounced in the King’s speech, and the Reform Ministry proposed an address “to record in the most solemn manner the fixed determination of Parliament to maintain unimpaired and undisturbed the legislative union.” Immediately on being shifted to the opposition benches, the very same John Russell declared that, “with respect to the repeal of the union, the subject was open to amendment or question, like any other act of the legislature.”

In March, 1846, Lord J. Russell in strange alliance with the Tories, then burning with the passion to punish Peel for the repeal of the Corn Laws, broke up Peel’s administration by an unconditional opposition to their Irish arms bill. He became Premier, and the first act of his government was an attempt to renew that same bill. In 1844 he had denounced Peel for “having filled Ireland with troops, and with not governing but militarily occupying that country.” In 1848 he occupied Ireland militarily, passed the felony acts, proclaimed the suspension of the habeas corpus, and gloried in the vigorous measures of the Clarendon reign.

Let us now look at his Free-trade pretenses. The Corn Laws had been enacted in 1815 by the concurrence of Tories and Whigs. At the parliamentary elections of 1835 and 1837, John Russell stigmatized Corn Law reform as “mischievous, absurd, impracticable and unnecessary.” Since he came into office he had resisted all such demands, “at first contemptuously, and then vehemently.” He was a more thorough advocate for high Corn duties than Sir Robert Peel. During the prospect of dearth, (1838-39) he and Melbourne did not contemplate any alterations in the existing duties. The deficit, however, in the Whig exchequer rising to £7,500,000, and Palmerston’s foreign policy threatening to involve England in a war with France, induced the House of Commons to pass, on June 3, 1841, upon the motion of Sir Robert Peel, a vote of no-confidence in the Melbourne cabinet. The Whigs, always as eager to grasp at places as unable to fill and unwilling to leave them, endeavored, although in vain, to escape their fate by a dissolution of Parliament. Then in the deep soul of Lord John awoke the idea of stultifying the Anti-Corn-Law agitation, as he had hoped to stultify the Reform movement. He declared himself all at once in favor of a moderate fixed duty—friend of moderate political chastity and of moderate reforms as he is. He had even the effrontery to parade himself through the streets of London in a procession of the Government candidates carrying banners, on which were exhibited in contrast two loaves, a loaf of a two-penny size inscribed the Peel Loaf, and a loaf of a 1s. size inscribed the Russell Loaf. The nation, however, knew from experience that the Whigs were wont to promise bread and to give stones, and, notwithstanding Russell’s ridiculous street theatricals, the new election left the Whig cabinet in a minority of 76, and they were forced to decamp at last.

During the years 1841-45, the Anti-Corn-Law League became formidable. In the Autumn of 1845, it found new and terrible allies in the famine in Ireland, the corn-dearth in England, and the failure of the harvest all over Europe. Sir Robert Peel therefore at the end of October, and between the 1st and the 6th November, held a series of cabinet Councils, in which he proposed the suspension of the Corn Laws, and even hinted at the necessity of repealing them altogether. A delay in the resolutions of the cabinet was caused by the unexpected resistance of Lord Stanley, the colleague of Sir Robert Peel. John Russell, then on a pleasure trip at Edinburgh, got scent of what passed in Peel’s cabinet council. He resolved at once to improve the delay caused by Stanley’s opposition, to cheat Peel out of a popular position by anticipating him, to give himself the appearance of having forced Free trade upon Peel, and thus deprive the acts of his rival of all their moral weight. Accordingly, on Nov. 22, 1845, he addressed from Edinburgh a letter to his city electors full of malignant imputations against Sir Robert Peel, on the pretext that the cabinet was adjourning its action concerning the Irish distress. The periodical Irish famines of 1831, ’35, ’37 and ’39, had never induced Lord John and his colleagues so much as to reconsider the Corn Laws. But now he was all fire. Such a terrible disaster as the famine of two nations conjured nothing before the eyes of that little man but visions of clap traps against his rival place-holder. In his letter he tried to conceal the real motive of his sudden conversion to Free trade under a shabby confession, sneered at in all England: “I confess that on the general subject my views have, in the course of twenty years, undergone a great alteration. I used to be of opinion that corn was an exception to the general rules of political economy; but observation and experience have convinced me that we ought to abstain from all interference with the supply of food.” In the same letter, the little man urged that it was the duty of Sir Robert Peel to interfere with the supply of food for Ireland.

Lord John Russell is supposed to have opened his career with efforts for religious tolerance, and closed it with the anti-Popery cry. It is true that he brought forward in 1828 a motion for the repeal of the Test and Corporation acts; but, as we learn from a cotemporaneous author, “*to the astonishment* of the mover himself, the motion was carried by a majority of 44.” The acts had, in fact, become a dead letter, and the Tory ministry that carried, in the year after, the Catholic Emancipation bill, was glad to get rid of the Dissenters’ disabilities. Russell defended his measure on the ground that “he was fully convinced that it would tend to the security of the Church of England as by law established.” When in office, he always opposed the separation of Church and State—the great thing the Dissenters prayed for. He even opposed the small concession of abolishing the church-rates. His anti-Popery cry is still more characteristic of the shallowness of the men and the littleness of his motives. We have seen that in 1848 and 1849 he baffled the Reform motions of his own allies by the support of the Tories. His tenure of office, therefore, had become very precarious, because dependent on the sufferance of his opponents. Such was his position in 1850, at the time when the Pope’s bull for the erection of a Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and the nomination of Cardinal Wiseman to the Archbishopric of Westminster was creating a factitious excitement among the shallow-headed, stupid and hypocritical portion of the English people. As to John himself, the Pope did not take him by surprise. His father-in-law, Lord Minto, was still at Rome when the *Roman Gazette*, in January, 1848, published the nomination of Wiseman to the Archbishopric. We know further, from Wiseman’s letter to the English people, that the same Lord Minto had in the same year shown to him by the Pope the bull for the establishment of the hierarchy in England. Under Russell’s Premiership, Clarendon and Grey had officially given the Catholic Bishops in Ireland and the Colonies the titles they pretended to. In 1845, when out of office, John Russell declared: “I believe that we may repeal those disallowing clauses which prevent a Roman Catholic Bishop from assuming a title held by a Bishop of the Establishment. Nothing can be more *absurd and puerile* than to keep such distinctions.” But now, considering the weakness of his Cabinet, recollecting that the Whig cabinet of 1806 had been expelled by the anti-Popery cry, fearing lest Lord Stanley might be tempted to imitate Percival’s example and out-general him during the recess of Parliament, as he had endeavored to out-general Peel by his own Edinburgh letter, he flew suddenly into an unbounded Protestant passion, and addressed his scurrilous letter to the Bishop of Durham on the 4th November, 1852—just the day before the anniversary of Guy Fawkes. In this letter he tells the Bishop: “I agree with you in considering the late aggression of the Pope upon our Protestantism as insolent and insidious, and I therefore feel as indignant as you can do upon the subject.” He speaks of “the laborious endeavors which are now making to confine the intellect and enslave the soul.” He calls the Catholic ceremonies “mummeries of superstition, upon which the great mass of the nation looks with contempt;” and he finally promises to enact new laws against the Papal assumption, in case the old ones should not prove sufficient. In 1851 he brought forward his Ecclesiastical Titles bill; but, being beaten on Locke King’s motion, by a combination of the Irish Brigade with the Radicals, Manchester men and Peelites, he recanted and promised an alteration of his bill, which died of consumption before it had come out of the House. Some months later, being ejected from office, he fawned again on what he had called the Pope’s minions.

As his anti-Popery zeal was a false pretense, so was his Jewish Emancipation zeal. His Jewish Disabilities bill has obtained reputation as an annual farce enacted to secure to Lord John the city votes at the disposal of the Austrian Baron Rothschild. His colonial reforms, educational schemes, anti-slavery moves, were false pretenses all. “Your opposition,” writes Lord Brougham to him in 1839, “to all the motions in favor of the negroes, and your resistance even to the attempts for stopping the newly-established slave-trade, widened the breach between you and the country. The fancy that the opposers of all the motions on the slave-trade in 1838, the enemies of every interference with the Assemblies, should all of a sudden have become so enamored of the negro cause as almost to risk their tenure of place upon a bill for its furtherance in 1839, would argue a strange aptitude for being gulled.” His legal Reform attempts—false pretenses! After the expulsion of the Melbourne cabinet had become imminent, upon the vote of no-confidence passed against them on June 4, 1841, John Russell endeavored to hurry through the House a Chancery bill, in order “to remedy one of the most urgent evils of our legal system, the delays in the Courts of Equity, by the creation of two new Equity Judges.” He announced this bill as “a large installment of legal reform.” His real intention was to appoint two of his followers to places in a tribunal not yet created before the Tories had yet come in. Sir Edward Sugden, to ward him off, carried a motion that the bill should not take effect before the 10th of October. Although no change whatever was made in the substance of his large and most urgent Legal Reform installment, John Russell, without any kind of excuse, threw up the whole bill at once. His tenderness for the liberty of the subject, his belief in the public press, and, as we have lately seen and shown, his warlike enthusiasm and his peace-loving moderation—*false pretenses*, all!

The whole man is one false pretense, his whole life one great lie, his whole activity a chain of minute intrigues for shabby ends, the swallowing of the public money and the usurpation of the mere show of power. No other man has verified to such a degree the truth of the Biblical axiom that no man is able to add one inch to his natural hight. Placed by birth, connections and social accidents on a colossal pedestal, he always remained the same *homunculus*—a malignant and distorted dwarf on the top of a pyramid. The history of the world exhibits, perhaps, no other man so great in littleness.