The Press. — London, England, 1858-09-25 00:00:00

devoted several days and several leaders, and as late as yesterday morning the public was presented with the following diatribe : " Is it ignorance, or idleness, or mere stupidity which produces these most vexatious occurrences ? Is Lord MALMESBURY utterly unaware that there are large interests involved in this Treaty of Tiensin ? Does he believe that a treaty of com merce is like an appeal at Quarter Sessions—a thing that can be entered and respited, and taken up and opened when it is quite convenient to all parties, and when everybody is at leisure ? It may be that he is quite incapable of compre hending that any one can possibly take any interest in the matter. While the Government is for the most part carried on by gentlemen farmers it is not safe to speculate that any one of them knows much of the exigencies of com merce, or would care to emancipate himself from the slow traditional routine of other days. It is difficult to conceive Lord MALMESBURY, or Mr. HENLEY, or Mr. NEWDF.GATE risking his thoughts upon a telegraphic wire, otherwise there was abundance of time to receive directions to open and copy the Treaty while Mr. BRUCE was yet in London, nearly a week ago." We have stated elsewhere why the terms of the Chinese Treaty have not been in the possession of the Times or of the public so soon as the Times deems it ought to have been; but in no event could it have been the result of anything done or undone by gen tlemen farmers, by Mr. HENLEY or by Mr. NEWDEGATE, and this stale sneap is so entirely inapplicable to the case under consideration that it evidently cannot be the result of any thought or mental process on the part of our contem porary, but must simply be the ebullition of a bitter and uncharitable spirit, worked up to exploding point by disappointment and a special anger. It is hardly worth while, perhaps, to occupy much time and space to prove that the Adminis tration of Lord DERBY does not merit the epithet of " idle" which the Times has applied to it in a later part of the article which we have quoted. There has not been an autumn for years in which the Times has not flung the same accusation against every Government. Anybody who will take the trouble to turn to a file of the paper will find much the same things said every August and September for years back of the Governments of Lord PALMERSTON, Lord ABERDEEN, and Lord Joior RUSSELL. They appear to be stereotyped, these sort of railings. And surely, as regards the persons who are individually attacked, it must be sufficient to remind the public that there arc not in Parliament men who possess or have exhibited more extensive knowledge of the manufactures and trade of this country than the very gentlemen whom the Times foolishly thinks to injure by describing them as gentle men farmers. The late Mr. COPPOCK had as many and as good opportunities of form ing a correct judgment of the business capa cities of public men as anybody, and we have repeatedly heard him say that he considered the country gentlemen by far the best men of busi ness and of administration, and especially the best conductors of Parliamentary committees in the House of Commons. And Mr. Corrocx's judg ment was certainly not likely by his association or by his political opinions to be biassed in favour of the men of whom he thus thought and spoke. They are, however, now in power. Their acts can speak out, have spoken for them ; and whatever the Times may say to the contrary, the public at large perceives clearly that even putting policy, about which men naturally differ, out of the question, the business of the country has not been depart mentally so well done for many years as it is now ; and that, whether we take the new men introduced by what the Times calls a Govern ment of routine and red-tape—whether we take Lord STANLEY, Mr. SEYMOUR FITZGERALD, and Mr. GATHORNE HARDY, or the more practical statesmen, such as the CHANCELLOR of the Ex- CIIEQUEFt, Sir JOHN PAKINGTON, Lord MALMES BURY, Mr. HENLEY, and Mr. WAr.roLE—we have an Administration which in the rapidity, decision, and completeness with which it conducts the business of the empire, has never been sur passed. Mr. NEWDEGATE, the other gentleman farmer, against whom the Times labours in attack, 18 not a member of the Government, but THE PRESS, SEPTEMBER 25, 1858. he is a member of the House of Commons, re markable for his assiduous attention to public business, for his knowledge of commerce, and for the consistency of his political life. We should be extremely sorry to see such a political man out of Parliament, or estranged from the great party to which he has given general support during his career. We do not see any reason to apprehend either the one or the other event. Mr. NEWDEGATE opposed the admission of the Jews to Parliament on religious grounds. He has opposed, and will we doubt not continue to oppose, the attempts of the Papal Church to regain ascendancy in any part of the British Empire on grounds political and social as well as religious, and because he is opposed, as we understand his political career, to everything that can obstruct the real progress of the people, to every kind of Despotism, whether it be the Despotism of a Monarchy, the Despotism of a Jesuitical Oligarchy, the Despotism of a Demo cracy, or the Despotism of an overweening Press ; but we expect that he, and the Conserva tive party with him, will support every measure calculated to remove whatever obstacles may exist to the advancement in due order of all classes in the country, not only preserving, but increasing, when practicable, that transfer by merit from one class to another in favour of in dividuals which has ever existed in this country. We have said on this portion of the subject as much as our space will permit, but before leaving it it may be worth while to point out to our readers that the expression " Down the rails," upon which so much of the article to which we have referred was founded, was not used by Mr. NEWDEGATE. Our readers will find on reference to our report that the expression was " Along the rails." The difference between " Down" and Along" is great. It is the difference be tween Anarchy and Progress. One word more and we have done with the Leading Journal and its misrepresentations. Surely it is the Times which is arrier6, not the Conservative party. It is singular, but surely the Journal of Progress must have gone into a sleep, like RIP VAN WINKLE. The remarks which it makes now in September, 1858, would have done well in the days of the Anti-Corn-Law League and of the Game-Law Agitation ; but are now singularly out of place, address them selves to no sensitive ear, and touch no raw place in the social system. Land now has many duties and many burdens, as the moneyed men who are daily acquiring find out, but few or no privileges. The sports of Great Britain, once aristocratic, are now national. The shooting, the hunting, and the racing of the kingdom are accessible to all who have means. The moors for grouse, the forests for deer, and the rivers for salmon, are possessed in at least an equal degree by the manufacturers of Manchester as by the ancient Peerage or the old Squirearchy. The two keenest sportsmen and largest holders of moors in Scotland are manufacturers in Lanca shire; and the winner of the heaviest stakes and greatest prizes on the turf this year is a manu facturer; yet the aristocracy of the country alone are perpetually held up as occupying for grouse and deer acres of land that it is said (falsely said) would support a large population, and Lord DERBY, we are told, is responsible for the career of every man who disgraces or ruins himself upon the turf. It would be as reasonable to require Messrs. BARING to abandon commer cial and moneyed transactions because penniless adventurers gamble in railways or foreign loans. VOLUNTARY versus INVOLUNTARY INCARCERATION. PUBLIC attention has of late years been so often directed to the treatment of criminals in this country, and so many various theories have been broached on the subject by politicians of every shade, that we may almost consider the final solution of the gigantic difficulties which have hitherto blocked up the way as at hand. A con viction is rapidly forcing itself on the minds of all, at least all who view the movements in this direction in a practical as well as a philosophical light, that humanizing influences are, after all, the most effectual in dealing with human beings, 915 however far removed they may be, to all appear ances, from the pale of humanity. So strongly, indeed, has this been felt, that the penal bondage of the felon, with all its inevitable concomitants of degradation and misery, is yet a sore invidenda when contrasted with the sufferings and priva tions undergone by such of our pauper popula tion as groan under the present execrable tyranny of the workhouse system—a tyranny the more grinding, because tolerably irresponsible and lacking a powerful exponent of its system. That some comment on the present state of things is not uncalled for may be inferred from the fact that, while the mass of the lower orders are known to entertain the most deeply-rooted aver sion to " durance vile" in the Union, very many amongst them view a detention in our correc tive and didactic" prisons with philosophic indif ference, not to say complacency ; and hence we often hear inferences drawn by no means compli mentary to the English character. The premium now-a-days placed upon crime is, no doubt, too strong to be resisted by minds tutored only in the harsh schools of Poverty and Adversity, accompanied too by a perception too blunted to allow of discrimination between the nice distinc- tions of vice, positive and negative. In fact, the problem to be solved by the poor too often resolves itself into the following shape :—Given, Hunger without the means of satisfying it ; required, a choice between the Gaol and the Union—the Gaol, with its multiplied comforts, and the Union, with its maximum of labour and minimum of the bare necessaries of life. Nor is this description a mere rhetorical trope, since the lot of a " Union-pauper " has by no means fallen in pleasant places. Crowded quarters; miserable accommodation; food which would be indignantly rejected even by a Russian serf;—these, and worse than these, are the vita incommoda which are indeed stern realities frequently encountered without a murmur by the aged, needy, and dis tressed. What wonder, then, if the working man's keen sense of justice and love of fair treat ment induce him to prefer an abode in prison, which he knows can be obtained with little loss of self-respect, and with scarcely any concomitant degradation in the eyes of his mates ? Many a poor man has responded to the interrogation, " How could he disgrace himself by committing " an offence against the laws ?" by a counter thrust to the effect that detention in a prison branded him with far less infamy than the reductio ad pauperum system of the Union. It would be quite beside the mark and foreign to our purpose to inquire whether we have not erred somewhat on the side of humanity in deal ing with our criminal population ? whether those rare exotics now being forced in the refor matories of the country will not ultimately prove a decided failure, and the raw-head-and-bloody bones party again emerge triumphantly ? But what we do wish especially to impress upon the minds of our readers is that the claims of misfor tune upon our sympathy are unquestionably stronger than, and prior to, those of crime. Now, from the days of the philanthropic HOWARD to our own much-vaunted nineteenth century of enlightenment and progress, the condition of the felon has been one of marked and rapid amelio ration. Nothing, indeed. has been more notable than the entire subversion of the pre-existing mode of treating our criminal fellow-subjects. In this respect, if in no other, we are prone to pique ourselves upon our far-sighted philan thropy. Our houses of correction and reforma tory prisons are more essentially national insti tutions than are our press, our railroads, and our telegraphs. The anomalies and abuses of our prisons have been portrayed by more than one master-pen, and iniquities, hitherto deemed in separable from any organized system of punish ment, have been scanned in all their revolting details by the microscopic glance of the philosophic mind. Reform has accordingly ad vanced a pas du Oant in this direction ; and the movement originated by individual efforts has now become national in its scope and amplitude, and, with so laudable a victory in the foreground, it certainly does seem very surprising that the poor man should never yet have found a champion of su ffi cient mettle to do battle with the grim Demogorgon ECONOMY, falsely so called, especially as the public pursestrings are readily relaxed whenever a loud though indis criminating cry is raised.