The Press. — London, England, 1853-05-28 00:00:00

C k L THE PRESS. TO THE WHIGS. LETTER IV. GENTLINEN, — Lord DEBBY'S Government fell. not on a ques tion of free trade, not on any principle opposed to liberal opinion, or to national progress. It fell because the Whigs resolve:l to abet the revenge of the Peelites and subserve the ambition of Mr. Gi.susToxE it fell because the party of the Movement desired at all hazards to cstroy an Administration proving, by the spirit of its policy, that our mixed constitution suffices for the practical purposes of popular government. Not that Lord DERBY'S Government ever pronouneed itself hostile to the principle of widening the existent franchise, or of securing the franchise we possess from whatever liabilities to corrup tion it is in the power of the law to control or counteract. Judging, from the general tenor of its measures, such defects and anomalies in our representative system as are not inherent in all representative systems whatsoever would have received due care and correction. This only was the position Lord DERBY'S Government assumed—it refused to make its existence dependent upon a vague pledge to the Democratic party that it would introduce such reforms as the Democratic party might support. In a word, it was the guardian of those institutions which are essential to a tempered monarchy, and would therefore have been opposed to the innovations that insidiously prepare the way to the republic and the dictatorship. The true statesman regards indivi dual measures less according to their merits, taken per se, than to their eonsequenees as affecting the framework of the political system to which they are applied. States derive their vitality from elements too familiar to be discernible, as the air, the least visible of fluids, is yet the most necessary to existence. Aristocracy with us has no marked limit ; the eye cannot track it. to its vanishing point ; it exists in every circle ; you address a mob by the appellation of " gentlemen " a noble phrase, denoting a sentiment that elevates the whole tone of our national spirit. But it is on this sentiment that the Democratic party wage their war ; Mr. COBDEN defends the French tin• their in difference to freedom on account of their love for e4ptality. Well, then. might the democrats seek to destroy a Government round which the bulk of the gentry had rallied. But why the Whigs ? Are the Whigs not aristocrats? _ _ _ And now, gentlemen, you have made your choice. Half a dozen of you have got place ; and the rest of you are—where ?—and what.? " Torciturna noetis tr Contemplate the position to which you have reduced yourselves after twenty years of political supremacy. You have no leader in the Lords ; you have scareely a voice of your own in that august assembly; and Lord Joux only holds place in the Catbinet as your representative. upon that single question on which he has hitherto most notably failed, and on which all such perilous success as belongs to a compact with democracy must destroy irremediably whatever is substantial in Whig power—remove from between the ex tremes of party the intermediate class of statesmen who, representing none of the more vehement passions that sway the crowds below the hustings. rely for their return to Parliament upon the authority which birth, property. and education obtain among the smaller or more rural constitueneies lwought under the local influences of personal re.pect and hereditary affeetion. Lord Jon,: holds a seat. in the Cabinet solely as the trustee for a new Reform Dill. Rut those who have consigned to him the trust im peratively demand the disfranchisement of small eonstit uencies. and the introduetion of fresh urban voters into the registration for counties. The disfranchisement of small constituencies is the disfranchisement of the Whigs : and, if the territorial interest is to be converted into a new supplement to the electoral influenee of urban householders, it is true that you may weaken Conservatism, but you weaken yet more every principle which can distinguish the Whig from the Democrat. For, after all your endeavours to destroy Conservatism, still the eternal and intmutable tendencies to conserve and to resist must remain. Even in the largest. mercantile or manufacturing towns there is always at least a powerful and united minority in opposition to democratic opinion. In counties. swamp them as you will with town voters, that. opposition will be still so vigorous, so sustained, that. in the ordinary course of events, when undisturbed by great popular excitement. Conservatives will secure a large proportion of their present strength. But you, who can neither accord with the passions of the populace, nor win the favour of yeoman and farmer through sympathy with their class and their calling. will find that, just in proportion as you destroy- all the local influences which con ciliate differences in political opini o n. y ou will vanish more and more front the contests of public life. Here and there. as in the case of Lord JOHN, rare circumstances of name and past popular service may sustain Yonte individual in Parliament, and secure to him the suffrages SATURDAY, of voters proud of his repute, though chafed against the Moderation of his sentiments. But, as a political party. the Whigs, both in name and in thing, will be but as the fossils which speak of the race before the flood. And observe, too, that, under the peculiar circumstances of the position Lord JOHN has assumed, all the ordinary difficulties that attend the recasting of the constitution, the remodelling of the franchise, are gratuitously increased. For—by the declarations, hints, and vague promises Lord Jolts has made, not only to his allies amongst the Movement, but to that more moderate, though not more thoughtful, portion of the public which imagines that for every ill legis:ation can find a remedy—this bold statesman has committed himself to a task much more difficult than that of commanding the Channel fleet—the task of bringing the law written upon parchment to bear against the laws impressed upon human nature. He undertakes to find, against the bribes which the rich candidate otters to the poor elector, remedies more effectual than those comprised in the rigorous severity with which Committees of the House now unseat every member to whom the practice of bribery is brought home—remedies that shall meet all of which the advocates for secret suffrage complain, yet dis pense with secret suffrage itself. My Lord JOHN, you are pledged to an impossibility ! Not that we need subscribe to the cynic code of Mr. DRUMMOND, confound all men in one principle of corruption, and see no distinction between the sale of a vote for 5/. and the generous ambition that makes the soldier de sire the token of honour, or the patriot labour for the power to accom plish noble schemes for his country. Narrow the view to the evil imme diately before us—viz., the bribery or intimidation of voters; acknow ledge the state anti conditions of our civilisation, with all ;its dispari ties of wealth, all the passions of ambition and of greed that it engenders. See all those disparities brought to bear, all those passions let loose, at a contested election, and ask yourself if it be possible by any law to pre vent wealth from the exercise of its power, or place avarice out of the reach of temptation ? Yes, there is one law, and but one—the law that would erase the theory of popular representation from our system ; the law that would suspend the franchise or restrict it to an oligarchy; the law that would take wealth and poverty front juxtaposition ; the law that would annihilate constitutional liberty in England, with all its virtues, and with all its concomitant excesses. There is no other law, fill your statute book as you may. And the worst of it is, that when men enter into a war with human nature they go on adding threat upon threat, penalty upon penalty, till the disproportion between the offence and the punishment makes justice itself disappear before the common sense of the tribunal to which the verdict is referred. The advocates for the ballot have this at least in their favour—all your remedies will fail one after the other, and leave but the ballot box alone untried. Manlier and wiser would have been tho frank avowal, " We must take civilisation and liberty as they exist, lamenting the temptations they offer, the excesses to which they are incident, seeing that the more civilisation and liberty are brought to hear upon the ferment of masses closely pressed together in towns, the more your evidence shows that the corruption of individuals is in ratio with the active principle that gives life to the state ; and that thus the sparser population of agricultural districts is comparatively free from the vices which rage in the towns, whose electoral intittenee you desire us to increase. Nor is the large city more pure than the small borough. We can disfranchise St. Alban's to please you. Would you have us disfranchise for the same offence Ll.iverpool and London ? Or, it' we are to adjust constituencies accord ing to the evidences ofbribery before our committees. would you have us accept those evidences and say, " Agricultural constituencies are so rarely condemned in comparison to urban, that the facts call upon us to give to the rural populations the very influence of which you would deprive them ? No ! we cannot separate civilisation from all its eonsequences—the same causes that produce the vice call forth the virtue ; you show us only the temptation to which men have yielded—show us also the magnanimity with which all threats have been defied, and all bribes have been disdained. An election is hut an epitome of human life. And it is to the glory of our commonwealth that, upon the whole, honesty is so prevalent ; and that there never yet existed in the world a popular assembly in which the corruption of the representatives themselves was so rare as in the British House of Coinmons. Honour to us that, amidst all our hot feuds of faction, amidst all the changes of opinion and of party which our statesmen undergo, it neveryct was suspected that one man to whose voice the English Parlia ment would listen for a second had accepted a pecuniary consideration for the change of an opinion and the record of a vote. Can you say . this even of the first statesmen of France, of America, of the chiefs of the old republics? Individuals may be corrupted in our boroughs —the National Assembly is incorrupt." Nor is this rash undertaking to accept Civilisation, yet reject its conditions, the only difficulty Lord JOHN - leas created for himself in becoming sponsor fin: a new Parliamentary Reform Bill. He has undertaken what would obviously require the most cordial unanimity as to the ulterior objects which such reform, he it large or small, should etfeet.—in connection with men of opinions the most opposite, and with whom the peculiarities of his owe mind can have the least of I