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Leader (1850-1860), 12th April 1856, Edition 1 of 2, Page 348

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      Untitled Article

      his wife was known to he a noble lady by her bearing , although tiey were poor wanderers ; and John- Ledtabd , Captain Cook ' s " Serjeant Ledyard , " was one of the most chivalrous of gentlemen—ever bold , ever ready for enterprise , loyal to his friend , even when his friend was deceived into slighting him , gentle and grateful to woman , trusting in God . Ifc is the possessing or lacking high qualities that makes the gentleman ; and , verily , we have had some humbling disclosures lately as to our own rampant gentility .

      knew his men : he looked down upon his inferiors , " and they acknowledged their relative position by their sufferance . The assumption ofaLucAir is justified by the submission of the others , and they , the obsequious , are of the class that supplies officers , officials , diplomatic statesmen , even plenipotentaries . Are we then wrong in vindicating the right of Mascahillts to treat the Conference as his affair 1

      And the English people , who sneer at the mmkeyism of the Low Life above Stairswhat of them ? The flunkeys insolently arrogate the right of placing themselves above the people , and the people let them . The flunkeys may be low ; but from the facts we find that the contented people are lower . It is degradation , but we make no effort to escape 'from it . We may despise the motives of the flunkeys ,

      but we can get up no higher motive . Luoan is still at the top of the tree . Commissioners and witnesses tacitly allow that he is above them ; commissioners and witnesses are above us— -they are our rulers , the governing class de facto . But if Lucan is of the highest level in the social scale , what is our own , and what right have we to look down upon him 1 We not only let him be there , but make not an effort to bring him down , or to raise ourselves .

      In Hyde-park and in Paris we have had exhibitions of arts and manufactures , in 1851 and 1 S 53 ; in Chelsea we now have the exhibition of 1856— -an exhibition of British peers , officers and gentlemen . Certainly those manufactures do not keep pace with the other products-of-the country . Sir John M'Nbill and Colonel Tullocii describe Lord Lucan as letting- his horses die , and threaten ing to arrest an ingenuous Colonel who modestly suggested a a uestion as to the shelter of the beasts . LtrcAN

      denies the fact , denies the words , arraigning equally M'Neij . 1 ,, Griffiths , and everybody else who questions his conduct . A special commission is ordered to investigate whether Sir John M'Neill and Colonel Tttlloch have told ^ truth or not ; and Lucan has a theatre to himself , all among the Chelsea pensioners . It is his purpose to show that he has done Ms duty , and to disprove the charge of having threatened a gentleman and an officer with a vulgar stretch of authority , to vent his spleen by an act of petty revenge ; and how does he comport himself ? He takes up the time of

      the Court with long questions as to its mode of procedure ; tries to make bargains for getting his own case dismissed first f wishes the Judges to promise a jud gment before they go into other cases ; exclaims , "I don ' t want to come here again ; " makes a long rambling statement ; bandies words with the witnesses , trying to extort confirmation of his own denial by repetitions , leading questions , and remonstrating questions ; and seems incapable of perceiving what a . painful position he is making for himself . Aye ; but is he not an officer , a . gentleman , and a P <* er ?

      Yes , there it is : he is a " Lord f he expects others , witnesses , Judge Advocate , and Judges , to . call . him " Lord . " There is a difference . He is not only a Lord , but a picked officer , lo questxon his efficiency as a soldier is to question the Horse Guards . All that he has done is right , for it has had official sanction ; and he has tie tangible proof of it in his colonelcy . It is not any man who gets a crack colonelcy , but Lord Luoan did ; he must be better than other men ; how then dare inferior men to question him , to gainsay his word !

      Mow dare they % Why in a very minor degree . The indignant Griffiths sticks to his own account , but no provocation can make him disrespectful to « My Lord , " whereas " My Lord , " has no such coinpunotious regard for his inferior . He treats Griffiths no better than if he were « a person . " Others Are not less pliant than the Oolonel . If any unfitted and unfavoured defendant has addressed the Court with tedious requirements , his petulant palaver would have been cut short

      in a trice . If any commoner had used the same bearing to the Judge-Advocate , ho would £ ave been pointedly rebuked by the bench . If « ri » jtith 8 had treated Luoan as Luoan treated UawjiTue , the President would angrily have interfered--and justly . Why then was « My Lord Luoan , « Ma jor-Gtenoral and Colonel , " treated with such leniency 1 Because tho chivalrous spirit is not predo-SSSF ? w ° . " oavaliwa ' tifclod o ? untitlea ; but a Bpint of flunkeyism . Lucan

      Civil Seuvice Superannuation

      There are two parties in the Civil Service , who hold different opinions as to the best settlement of the . question . The senior party consists of a committee , formed in 1846 . It proposes tliat the pensions to superannuated servants should be awarded , as at present , by the State , "but that all connection between these pensions and the deductions should cease ; that the deductions should then be administered as a fund for the benefit of the widows and orphans of civil servants who had died without making

      adequate provision for their families . ( In the case of an unmarried civil servant , he can lea . ye his claim in the fund to a relative or friondV It is argued in support of this proposition , that the present deductions to which the civil servantshave become accustomed form a good means of organising a system compelling officials to lay by a small sum yearly to provide against the future wants of their families . It is said that painful scenes present themselves occasionally in public offices , when the widow of a

      deceased brother officer comes round with a begging-letter praying for relief , inducing many of the petitioned to tliink Low eanly their former- colleague might have laid by ten or fifteen pounds a-year to preclude the humiliation . To organise a system that would carry out the good intentions ,, as to a provision-for their families , of the majority of the officials , and frustrate the selfishness of the few -bad rnen who would wish to live comfortably and leave their families to want—is

      CIVIL SEtiVICE SUPERANNUATION . Soue public questions have a tendency to get " dry . " Matter-of-fact men get hold of them , and so cover them with figures of arithmetic that the impatient public associate them at once with essays on education and tables of logarithms—the only two literary productions entirely unreadable . Unless some person of " wit and honor about town ' " . takes up the two or three public questions connected with the Civil Service , they wili assuredly fall into the limbo of tlie great unread .

      The Superannuation question is not necessarily dry . A clerk in a Government office , putting by money for a rainy day , or for old age , is not more uninteresting than the same act done by a hard-worked artist , or a gentleman-farmer in Devonshire . The further circumstance that Government has instituted a system , compelling their officers to make the annual saving , still leaves the question as worthy of attention , for that is done in the Bank of England , and in that factory of

      attractive topics—the Times office . Despite , then , all the figures of Dr . Faur , and the long dull memorials of the civil servants themselves , we persist in considering the question not quite dry . Some very intelligent fellow citizens—men who , in their quiet life , exercise a great deal of mental power , and whose steadiness in work is a peculiar characteristic—are individually , and with their

      wives and families , bound up in the question . We cannot but sympathise with them as men—notwithstanding the tendency of dreary < c minutes" to call them clerks . We cannot but believe them wronged when wo know , on good authority , that Government takes more money from them in annual deductions than suffices to pay their pensions . The proprietors of the Times have also

      organised deductions , but these monies go undiminislied to pay pensions , the expense of managing the fund being borno by the proprietors themselves . The newspaper authorities do not deduct heavily from Jones , employed as reporter in 1856 , to onable thorn to pay a good pension to old Brown , who retired in 1830 ; but the Government does commit this injustico . Its deductions from tho present oivil servants are heavy , in consideration , it is avowed , of the heavy burthen of tho whole Civil Service Pension List . This injustice is aggravated by tho fact that the older class of

      oivu servants ( who entered bofore 1829 ) pay no contributions towards tho pensions to which they aro entitled .

      the object of the committee . In opposition to its views another committee has been more recently formed . It asks for the ' -abolition of the deductions , an increase of the pensions , and suggests that wives and families should be left to the care of individual heads of families . In our opinion this xiew committee asks tod much , and promises too little . They ask to have their own pensions increased , and will not even promise to provide for their families . It may be said that provision for families is

      not a question for the Government . But , to a certain extent , it is . The widow in distress of a good civil servant has a kind of claim on the Government , and it is a claim that has been more than once recognised . Look , for instance , at the case of the late Mr . Edwin Crater . He was private clerk to successive Secretaries of the Treasury , and discharged his very confidential duties with great propriety-He had a salary of about £ 800 a-year , but , dying very suddenly , left his wife and family very poor . Government could not well see Mrs . Crafeb , and her children sink from comfort

      to poverty , and it gave her ; £ 100 a-year . Such cases arise frequently ; but the Government is obliged to be hard-hearted , and allo-w the widows and orphans to sink from independence to poverty , or worse . But wliether the Government should organise the compulsory system of provision for families , or leave ib to the care of individuals , it should , at all events , abolish the injustico of exacting deductions moro than sufficient to pay the pensions . In this prayer all classes and sections of the Civil Service unite . A

      good civil servant , worn out in tho service of the State , deserves a pension from the State without any conditional deduction . In strict justice , tho Stato is not bound to pension widows and orphans ; but we ha . ro stated our opinion that , from considerations of decency , Government might properly orgauiso a system enabling the officials themselves to provide for their own families .

      Untitled Article

      348 THE LEADER . [ No . 316 , Saturday ,

      Untitled Article

      BEAMES ON RELIGIOUS TEACHING . We have assorted many times that tho methods taken by the advocates of a roligion , professedly so called , result in preventing th < j extension oi religion , and even in rendering its very immc

  • Citation
    • Leader (1850-1860), April 12, 1856, page 348, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2136/page/12/