The Press. — London, England, 1853-12-03 00:00:00

DECEMBER 3, 1853. cotton consumed per week about IO,'MM► bags, anti over this mass of property and population influence is exercised by such men as Mr. D. NI - 11TR ! The time for the strike could not, for the operatives, have been worse selected ; winter and war at hand. money dear, and foreign markets glutted—just the very tune when it would be advisable to diminish the pro duction. Accordingly we find that, even where the operatives have not struck, their services are par tially dispensed with. At Stockport 20,000 perions are employed in the mills, and there the masters will only work four days a week. tinder these circum stances, it is obvious that the men are fighting a losing game. Political events, the season of the year, the state of the markets, all are in favour of the masters. The trifle the operatives receive from their toiling brethren will cease with mid-winter. The workhouse then may be a refuge from starvation ; but not unless their labour is not wanted. For, whilst our law recognises the rights of poverty when it arises from misfortune, it can never be tolerated that men who had failed, by abstaining from work, to reduce the masters to their terms, should impo verish them by living in idleness on those rates which are obtained from the masters' property. LORD ST. GERMANS AND Co. Lonn Sr. GERMANS and his subordinates are cer tainly not very creditably distinguishing themselves in Ireland. Under the official signature of his Ex cellency the operation of the " Crime and Outrage Act " was most injudiciously suspended in certain districts of Ulster. Scarcely had the proclamation to that purpose appeared in the Dublin Gazette when Ribbonism broke forth with unusual fury. Land lords, Liberal and Tory, were conspired against ; a clergyman was fired at in his own house ; and other plots and crimes came suddenly to light with start ling effect. It will be a question for future con sideration who was the party at the Castle directly responsible for that most ill-timed suspension of the "Crime and Outrage Act "? The former experience of Lord Sr. GERMANS AS Chief Secretary, in the days when he aided in prose cuting and imprisoning OCoNNELL, seems thrown away upon the Viceroy. Since then he has changed his convictions along with his political connections. In his law officers we can have no confidence. Mr. BREWSTER, the Attorney-General, was once an ultra- Tory, and belongs to that peculiar description of Irish barrister of which Mr. WILLIAM KEOGH is a representation. Volatile without eloquence, vehe ment without passion, with a truculent tongue and a browbeating deportment, within the last few days Mr. Attorney-General BenwsTEß received from the eloquent lips of a junior member of the bar such a castigation as will make the Attorney-General think twice before he attacks any one else. At the close of his spirited reply to Mr. littEwsTen the bar vehe mently cheered Mr. ExtrAsr, and the Lord Chan cellor never interfered, but allowed the Attorney- General to flounder out of the scrape in which his virulence had involved him. And here we may add that, according to the reports in the journals, a political confederate of Mr. WIL LIAM KEOGH seems in an unpleasant predicament. The battle of Oaulstown, in Westmeath, in which Mr. MAOAN (Brigadier M.P. by the influence of Mr. Keoon) led on five hundred men against the Kelly faction, and in which an unfortunate person lost his life, far eclipses Ballingarry. We should much like to read Mr. Kitoon's "opinion on the case," if there should be any proceedings taken in it. When he reads of these ferocities of Faction or Ribbonism we take for granted that he reeals his foreboding of "the long nights of November." CAPITAL, LABOUR, AND THE FRANCHISE. TO THE EDIToR OE "THE PRESS." Sir,—No one can be indifferent to the present ac• tion of the various interests and classes among each other, and to the collision of the different ideas and theories which make up that strange farrago of odd thoughts called by courtesy the seienee Of 1)46 • cal economy. It would seem as if we were about to reap some of the fruits of a system of Whig-Radical le gislation which has dealt with human beings as mere counters and machines. We are in the midst of age neration born and bred on the new principles, and have to learn yet how to construe their actions and tenden cies. The severance between employer and employed is just beginning to show in its completeness, and threatens even at the prestnt moment to split into a chasm right across the whole structure of society. All London rubbed their eyes with astonishment one morning lately to find its cabstands empty. The whole kingdom runs a risk that some other morning soon no body will find anybody to do anything. This no likely to ~.,....r~ri THE PRESS. be the final and not far distant result of the mutu a l a we d lugs with each other of the millmasters and their men. Combination on one side leads to counter-combination ou the other, and. however disastrous the consequences, it seems difficult to give a reason why it should be otherwise. A universal strike or lockout of labour or service in all its forms would be too serious a cala mity to all parties for any one to remain indifferent to the possibility of its occurrence, yet the danger is certainly being at present recklessly incurred. No one should blind their eyes to recent proeerdings tending in this direction, and which, by a universal combination of labour, not a very difficult thing to effect in those days, easy eommunication would under a paralysis of the whole working system a per fectly possible achievement. Nor can labour be' fairly blamed for trying by legitimate means its strength with that employing power, whether capital or credit, of which the labourer has hitherto been in great measure the toy and sport. The system made the ono a helpless child in the hands of a giant, who could caress or beat, fondle or drive it into the streets, as it suited his convenience. Ily a universal combination of labour a fair but possibly disastrous trial of strength will be made, and it may turn out, if the country survive the struggle in its integrity, that labour is the more indispensable of the two. Mutual service is become necessary to the condition in shic!l we have come to live; and those who have taken on themselves the management and distribution of the several casts and duties of the parties will have themselves to blame if they prove that they are in • competent, or their system insufficient for quietl:, and properly doing their part of the work. It be comes the duty of those who wish to see somewhat conserved the old honour and glory of Great Britain to attend to this subject while there is yet hope that a wise handling and understanding of it may save us front the worst of evils. No one could grudge that that thoroughly respectable and not at all equivocal part of the community who earn their hard-won and often not too abundant bread by the actual unmis takable sweat of their brows should, by lawfid means, be able to raise themselves to a state above serfdom, and absolute dependence on the nod ore few masters. They will be all the more likely to be the better subjects and the better citizens that they have an interest in the country not totally submerged in the pleasure and will of the chimney aristocracy. And if they succeed so far in their attempt, and are not this led by those of their self-styled friends who peeved history to deceive them, it. will be only a moms of unmitigated satisfaction to all who wish well to their country. No country can expect to preserve its own independence if it does not allow and encourage the same spirit to rest on its individual subjects, and pre vent their becoming a mob capable of the extremes of cruelty and abjectness. It is, however, in political sulkjects, and in the ambition fir, perhaps, private political purpose's of some of the Serums and other people's friends, that the principal danger to the people themselves These people's friends are principally those who would persuade the people in their present depen dent position to agitate for what they call political power, by means of which alone they will be able to free themselves front the dominion of a few masters. Why, is not such a course only to put more power in those masters' hands, and to give those masters, through their own luckless selves, the greater power to control them? Those masters, indeed, generally style themselves, by a strange misnomer, " Liberals." Yet, of all the narrow illiberal views taken of great questions, the narrowest seem to be theirs. Those who have had opportunity of testing the capacity for truly liberal and enlarged views of what are called the leading Liberals can testify that not only do they not hold such enlarged views, but that they ' do not know what such views mean : they do not seem capable, most of them, of rising above mere parrot•talk about the ballot, household suffrage, taxes on knowledge, and a few other cries more or less good to go to the country upon. This strange incapacity to discuss larger views, or oven rationally to discuss their own, is, next to their obstinacy, the most striking feature of the standard character of a Liberal leader in these *or days. The only beautiful point about the theory of repre sentation, and that which, in its removal, takes any value that theory may have from it, is, that an elector does not possess his vote as a property which he is to use as he likes, or to use for his own indi vidual benefit or advantage. The only way in which the system of representation can be hindered from being a fierce struggle of personal and selfish ambi tion is for its exercise to be viewed as a public duty performed on public grounds for the good of the whole country. Yet this which is the AItC of a real statesman is a view which has never been known as a tenet of your Liberal leader. It is, on the contrary, if they understand it at all, a dangerous novelty to them, proclaiming at once the futility of their favourite ballot, and shaking to their very foundations their hackneyed rights-of-man argu • ,nests about universal suffrage. For it is plain that, while it is nut inexpedient to have a wide basis fur 723 the confrage, that still the proper parties to whom to entrust it are those who are least likely to abuse it, and who have the independence of position and cha racter which hinders them from being the tools of any one. In short, under present circumstances, it wiwild be as proper to appoint as trustees and admi nistrators of a hove property men wholly without substance anal reputation, as to be indiffereut to the c"iiillosilioo, in those respects, elf the constituenciess which taught tat be, not the holders, but the trustees of the ismer and, in great meaxure, of the property of the country. No one will feel inclined to deny that the working clauses, especially if they free themaelyes from ab ject dependence on the capit a li s t s , h ave as a b o dy a valuable interest in the prosperity of the country, anal will he fitly entitled to be entrusted with a share of this common trusteeship. 'Their assistance will, indeed, be valuable in the joint management of it, and it is on this view of the propriety of representing all interests, that thereby a more general intelligence of all the conditions of the legislative problem is Go 'mired, that the proper and safe extension of the .. u tre e ge is capable of being justly enforced. But those who incense people, perhaps, suffering from at her causes, by talking of their being robbed of ri g hts, which rights would be national evils and sus tional wrongs, are merely incendiaries. That can iii•ver be a right which enforced would endanger the existence of the nation ; nor if the only proper view of the franchise is taken, via., that it is a publie trust, can any one claim it as a right ; nor it it in justice to deprive any one of its exercise. It is on other grounds that the propriety of investing any Clots or individual with it must be argued.--1 am your obedient servant, E. M. E LEC TION INTELLIGENCE. SorTII WARWIS K.—The election of a member for this division to supply the place of Lord Brooke, now Earl of Warwick, is appointed to take place this day siourdayl, when Mr. E. P. Shirley, the Conserva tive candidate, is expected to ho returned without opposition. EAst tiim•crsrva.— A contest in announced for this division. Mr. Holland, formerly M.l'. for East Worcestershire, from which position he was rejected on account of Ilia ultra- )(wheal prineiples, has allowed himself to he put forward in opposition to Sir William Hicks Beach, flat, of Willianistrip-park. The registration is so decidedly in favour of the Conserve live party, that Mr. Holland's chances of success only depend upon the non .attendance of the Conserva tive voters at the poll, and the mamma's which it is known the Radicals at Cheltenham can resort to at. popular elections. SOW Eli STai vininsituss.—We have heard of no lIIIIHNitiOn to lAied Ingestra; nor do we expect any, it being the wish of the influential gentlemen of both parties to avoid a contest, each party having one re presentative. It will be remembered that the lion. E. It. Littleton was IdloWell succeed General Ainusa in August last without trouble or expense from the !, isery oil v es. Chri‘lopher ifamillon, a Comer. vutive, ()plumes Mr. John O'Connell for thin bo rough. A leiter from Paris, in the Independatwe Delo', says : - -" It opiware to be confirmed that a new Rus sian note has been sent by 111. 11/4 Nesse!rode to the iliplomstic agents of the Czar in France and Eng land. This note would determine the meta of inter ruption or of complete rupture of international rela tions bctseen !tussle and these two tiovensmetita. .1 1141 eiroilisr will announce moreover a new 111611 i • fe.sto of tits. Emperor of Moods to Europe." The Augsburg Ga:elte ham intelligence from ro lim4l of the approaching meal of MM. Kiareeleff and Wm:now, Rinssiato Ministers at l'aristand London. _ The 11;,seri 'anent lawyers in l'arin have, it in said, been instnieted to consider whether a case may wA he made out for the confiscation of the Count de Chaushord's proge•rty in Frame. An order has been issued that all ladies admitted t"' the receptions at the. Tuileries on New Year's-day mutt sppear in Court mantles. Winter has set in early in Paris. The thermome ter on Thursday morning at It o'clock stood at 26 Fahrenheit, 7 degrees below freezing point. The Frankfurt Gazette is empowered to state that the elilolucnient« or acknowledgments made at Fr. , h.dortl• by the Duke de Nemouri were not made by the authority or on acs•onnt of the Duchess d'Orleans, who has not acknowledged the transaetion in any nay. Letters from Vienna of the 27th inform us that the I►uke and Duchess of Nemoura and the I hike of Coburg dined with the Comte de Chambord on the previous day. Letters from St. Petersburg say that the late events in the Fast have greatly irritated the Em peror Nicholas, and that those who are hest ac quainted with his intentions do not think that he will mow enter into any negotiations, or listen to any propositions fur a compromise. I