use to the nation than the obsolete office of Court jester. Nay, further, it is such a clog upon the army and so costly to the country that the abolition of the Master-Generalship and the whole Board of Ordnance would improve the efficiency of the army and save the nation many hundred thousands of pounds annually. Those of our readers who are not intimately familiar with naval and military arrangements may suppose from the title, that the Master-General of the Ordnance must be an officer of eminently scientific attainments, who is particularly qualified to provide for the introduction into the services of the most improved weapons and methods of war. For this purpose an Artillery officer is, primâ fucie, best qualified; and yet, in the list of Masters-General for the last fifty years, scarcely any artillery officers will be found. The late Master-General-the Marquis of Anglesey is a cavalry officer and certainly foremost among the best in Europe: his predecessor was Sir George Murray, a distinguished infantry officer; who himself was preceded by Sir Hussey Vivian, a cavalry officer, and avowedly unacquainted with artillery. So we might trace the line of Masters-General, alternately cavalry and infantry officers, up to Prince Rupert, who, though the very first cavalry officer of his day, and perhaps surpassed by no sabreur of subsequent times, happened to be addicted to chemical and mechanical pursuits in which he was no mean proficient. Many an hour Charles II. whiled away in Cousin Rupert's apartments at Windsor Castle, one of which was fitted up as a laboratory; and, amidst screws, anvils, alembics, and crucibles, doubtless cracked his jokes and teazed his philosophic relative with bantering questions, as he did the Fellows of the Royal Society. In the list of MastersGeneral may be found the most illustrious warriors of their times; but scientific attainments are not necessarily to be inferred as the attributes of those functionaries as the title might lead the uninitiated to suppose.The Master-Generalship is now an honourable and lucrative post; and, if not a sinecure to the occupant, all his work might be more usefully transacted at the Horse-Guards. The Board of Ordnance is a heavy expense to the country and a clog to the public service where expedition is needed. Should it be required on an emergency to despatch one, two, or half-a-dozen field batteries to the coast, the Commander-in-Chief could not, of his own motion from the Horse-Guards order one of them to march from Woolwich without the intervention of the Ordnance Board, though he might have to command them on the field of battle. This may be thought a cavilling at forms, and it may be said that a hint from the Duke of Wellington would be enough to

move any Master-General, and that the time consumed by the passage of a messenger between Charing Cross and Pall-Mall is little nevertheless, in all operations requiring despatch, every moment is valuable and every complication to be avoided. We must, however, hold our pen, or it will run into details unacceptable to our readers in general. But we respectfully and earnestly invite Lord Derby and the Chancellor of the Exchequer's attention to the Ordnance Board and all its expensive offshoots and appendages. By its abolition the whole army will be placed under one head: a nest of favouritism, with all the heart-burnings thereby engendered, will be destroyed; and the public money, to a large amount, will be saved. The extinction of the useless though costly office of Master-General, and the transfer of the different branches of the Ordnance Board to the Horse-Guards and Admiralty respectively, will be an improvement in the efficiency of the disposable forces of the country, acceptable to the army at large, and will operate to such a saving extent as to leave no loop-hole for old Joe or even Richard Cobden to peck at in the next debate on the army and navy estimates-we mean by next the debate immediately ensuing on the change suggested. That the butterflies of the Horse Artillery Brigade-about as useful in real service as a troop of Batty's equestrians-and many a favoured youth whom Ordnance appointments exempt from foreign or even home active service, and his alarmed and agitated aunts will buzz like irritated hornets round the ears of a bold disturber, we are fully aware; but we believe that neither Lord Derby nor Mr. Disraeli lack courage for the performance of any public work if once thoroughly convinced of its tendency to the public good. Mr. Disraeli cannot find a fairer field for his early essays as Chancellor of the Exchequer than in the purgation of the Ordnance Department. He may in that alone save enough to make his estimates for the real service of the country light, or, at all events, comparatively easy; and disarm the carping Cobden and outstrip the persevering Hume. We know full well that Mr. Disraeli has both courage to undertake and perseverance to accomplish any task which human labour and talent can perform.

Now, for the task which we humbly venture to prescribe, there is needed both courage, care, and power to sustain wearisome labour; but the rewards for its performance will be the fame of having accomplished that from which former Chancellors have shrunk the credit of having abated an enormous evil which has evaded the eyes of Cobden and Hume though ever roving for a grievance; and the gratitude of an emancipated army and a lightened country.

Mr. Disraeli's address to his Buckinghamshire constituents at Aylesbury, and his readiness in the presence of questioners, otherwise tormentors, shows how well-fitted he is either to endure or repel the baiting to which a Chancellor of the Exchequer is ex officio doomed in the House of Commons. True, the hustings at Aylesbury and the Treasury Bench in Westminster are confronted by very different antagonists; but we think that Mr. Disraeli is prepared to do battle successfully with either. Dull, plodding, matter-of-fact men of the desk and the ledger affect to sneer at the novelist, Disraeli, assuming an office of difficult details, like that of Chancellor of the Exchequer. What familiarity, they ask, can Vivian Grey have with figures-what community has Coningsby with commercewhat does Tancred know of Tare and Tret-what sympathy has Sybil Grey with statistics?

This scepticism of the dull as to the aptitude of men of genius for drudgery is of old date, and has been again and again dispelled when brilliant men have resolutely set to work. The cart-horse seems primâ facie better fitted for the tumbril than the high-mettled racer; but the latter can sustain a pressure of toil, of continued toil, under which the former sinks. Pope tells us of serjeants-at-law, a heavy race by prescriptive right, in his day—

"Whose gravity would make you split

Who shook their heads at Murray for a wit."

And yet that "silver-tongued Murray," who had "drank champagne with the wits" and was sneered at by plodders as a mere scatterer of "flowers of speech," has left a name as a jurisconsult of almost, if not quite, European celebrity; and to Lord Mansfield, as a practical lawyer, the merchants and traders of England owe that nicely adjusted commercial code by which their multiplied transactions are so lucidly regulated. In the following summary of Conservative policy and prospects, delivered amidst the buzz and din at the hustings at Aylesbury, there is as much precision as reasonable men ought to desire, though more fire than his Whig assailants may relish :—

"Gentlemen, I know well the duties and the difficulties which we as a Government have to encounter. I hear that the late administration and their friends-perhaps their friends, and not the late administion are eager, as they say, that the country should give immediately a decision upon the great issue of Frec-trade. I shrink from no immediate decision; but allow me to say that, as far as I am concerned, the issue shall not be narrowed to the mere question of commercial legislation. I shall ask the country to decide upon the policy of the late Government in every respect and in every department-upon that

foreign policy which we endeavoured to check two years ago though we were defeated in the attempt, and which the late Prime Minister of England, only two months ago, virtually announced that we were right in opposing. I shall ask the opinion of the country on the colonial policy of the late administration—a decision of the House of Commons upon which they escaped-I will not say they evaded-by the local militia. I shall ask the opinion of the country upon that question of law reform to which I have referred. I shall ask the country if the recommendations of the Commissioners for the reform of the Court of Chancery are to be carried into effect or not. I will make the issue wide and multiform; and, whatever may be the Parliament that is collected together, that Parliament shall be one which, at least, shall represent the decision of the people of England, not upon a single question, but upon all those great principles which should give colour to the policy and form to the conduct of a strong administration. I know well the difficulties we have to encounter, but I confess that though our position may be critical I for one do not believe that it is perilous. I have listened to a great deal of bluster within the last fortnight which does not frighten me. I hear great tirades of a resuscitated League. I shall leave the resuscitated League to settle their quarrels with the amalgamated engineers. Confident myself that in taking office we have at least resolved to do our utmost for the advantage of the country, I shall feel that the consciousness of that duty will sustain us under trying exigencies. And, gentlemen, I may say that as the noble lord who is at the head of the administration attested Providence in the Senate of his country that he was influenced by no personal feeling in occupying the post of danger which he now fills, I will also express my hope that, whatever may be the fate of the Government, when we leave office there will at least be among all temperate and impartial men a sense that, however humble may have been our efforts, we have endeavoured to do our duty to our Country, our Sovereign, and our God."

This we call hitting the right nail on the head-shivering to pieces the disingenuous dishonest trick of the Whigs, who are labouring and will labour their spiteful utmost to persuade the country that the sole question they have to decide is, whether they will have Lord Derby and dear bread, or Lord John Russell and a large loaf for next-to-nothing. Every effort will be made to confine the popular mind within these narrow bounds, and we are sensible how hardly the minds of the million will overleap these barriers. The efficacy of a "good cry to go to the country upon" is not only familiar to Tadpole and Taper, but has been proved in many an election where Cagliostro has thereby triumphed over Cato.

At the moment we were penning the above lines, Lord Derby on the evening of Monday, March 15th, addressed the House of Lords in a speech such as this business-affecting, colloquial,

generation seldom has an opportunity of hearing. Fluent talk rather than oratory is the ordinary aim of modern speakers; but Lord Derby, without departing from a strict attention to matterof-fact details, delivered an oration worthy of a Roman orator. Lord Beaumont, in a speech remarkable for its wordy plausibility and elaborate professions of candid courtesy, but evidently framed to entrap the Conservative champion whose chivalric ardour has been so often identified with a want of caution, smoothly solicited an unreserved exposition of the future intentions of the Government.

On Monday, the 15th of March, Lord Beaumont presented to the House of Lords a petition from certain individuals, described as "owners and occupiers of land in the county of York," who complained of "the injury inflicted upon the country by the uncertainty which exists as to the intentions of Government respecting the law regarding the importation of corn." To these recitals Lord Beaumont appears himself to have annexed the prayer that Lord Derby would make a clean breast of it-explicitly declare his future policy-in short, would furnish weapons for the Whigs to turn against himself. To this Lord Derby very properly demurred, and rested his objections on the several precedents of Lord John Russell, Sir Robert Peel, and Mr. Pitt, when they were placed in similar circumstances, and who severally refused to answer questions which their opponents had no right to put. We will, however, make extracts from Lord Derby's own masterly speech, and thus leave him to make his own defence; for such the answer to his interrogators, in and out of doors, must be considered. First, his lordship gives the following playful exposé of this mock petition; for, without offence would we say it, the petition itself was merely a peg whereon Lord Beaumont might hang an interrogative speech :

"I shall be most ready to give to the noble lord and to your lordships such explanations as are consistent with my duty, in regard to the course intended to be pursued by her Majesty's Government, as may have been left in the slightest degree of obscurity in the course of the observations which I had the honour to submit to your lordships a fortnight ago. In doing this it is not necessary that I should follow the noble lord-and I assure him that I have no intention to do sointo the various arguments with regard to the policy of the corn laws, the course which was pursued in 1846, the incidents of burdens or of losses which fall upon the landlord, upon the tenant, or upon the labourer. And I shall not be led by the noble lord, and I trust that none of my noble friends near me will be led, by anything which takes place hereafter on this subject, into a most fruitless and unnecessary discussion upon the subject of the corn laws. My lords, the