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

THE PRESS.

be the final and not far distant result of the mutual awed
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 capitalists, have as a body 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
..utreege is capable of being justly enforced. But
those who incense people, perhaps, suffering from
at her causes, by talking of their being robbed of
rights, 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.

lu 1

I

I

724

MR. tilbloN's REPORT.

Wrath we to announce that a battle on the Danube
had been fought, and thousands slain, what excite
ment would it not creute, how eagerly would the
public listen to the details ! It is not of battle on
the Danube, but of war waged here, daily and hourly,
in this mighty metropolis, we would speak. tin the
one side are nearly three millions of human ;
on the other but a single warrior—Deuth. His
weapon is poison. It permeates through all that
surrounds nii,—the streets we tread, the river rolling
at our feet, the atmosphere we breathe. The slaughter
of Waterloo is insignificant (impered with the num
hers that perish in this contest. }'rota the masterly
report of Mr. Simon, the Medical Wirer of Health
of the city of London, we learn that whilst the
general mortality of the City has, on an average of five
years, been twenty-four per thousand, the sub.dharicte
which make up the aggregate vary from eighteen
to above twenty-nine. The lowest rate of mortality
know!' in this country is fourteen her thousand. In
the healthier soh-districts of London the cold winds
of winter perceptibly increase the mortality, whilst
in unhealthy localities that effect is masked, and
summer, with its peatilence, is the deadlier season.
of 15,5117 who died, not one eighth had readied the
age of seventy, whilst three•eightlia died within the
first five years of life. But " life has not been capri-
ciously long in one place and short in another. . . .
Where short it has been short red.... Its untimely
extinction has depended en the direct operation of
'oral and preventable causes." Mr. Sit tttttt has proved
the truth of this very efil:etnally, for, since he has
been ill solliee, the deaths have been four per cent.
fewer. The diminution, be antieipstais will be greater
when extramural into: snouts, the extinction of Smith-
field, and the removal of the slaughtering-houses
have been completely effected. But Mr. Minnon does not
rile line his observations to the city of I.4milm : he takes
a cienprehonsive view of sanitary reform generally,
and especially in reference to the cholera, which will
unquestionably slay its thoweohl,4 next autumn,
tw-
-leaa measures of Itreeltetifie are in the meantime
taken.

The experience of two former visitations has
taught us that, ti Of we cannot prevent " this ob-
scurely-wandering plague" crossing the sea and
hovering over our dwellings, yet we can reduce it to
state of intmenons torpidity, by depriving it of
those conditions which are essential to its activity.
lithe venom lurks in the serpent's potison-fang, we can
prevent the pntssure that came% it. to exude. 'Phu
And point that, strikes the investigator is, that the
cholera "is eminently a district. disease." Starting
from its centres in the East, it. pursues the same
winding and devious course until at. last. it reaeltes
Iltunlinty, and thence crosses to our shores, when it
invariably visits tine self-same spots. " I fampness, in
conjunetton with oripinietlectanpitsition," eharactense
these. lhunpuess alone world not "le►eali.o the
liestilence. To be afloat at men might he the safest
edging." II amtm.rsmith is your feet above high•
water mark, Southwark is six ; yet in Southwark
the mortality from cholera was nearly eleven times
grester than that of lammersmiilt. It is, therefore,
the decomposition Of Mill nal mailer, in imakinfictiiin
with the dampness arising from the low level tif the
locality, that causes this difference in the mortality.
"The giant error of Lein kin is its present spoon of
drainage . . . and that habitual itnprimonmenf of
soil and air which is inseparable from our total
drsinage." The incalculable amount of putrefying
matter which is produced in London is all carried
into the river, anti thew rolled latekwartis anti for.
%arils for hours, or " trickling over bnityl belts of
spong. bank, %hidh then dry their contaminated
mud in the sunshine, exhaling fatter and poison."
The sewers, for hours each day, either retain or re-
distribute that. which it is their business to remove
and reject ; anti, "at every tomer° which strikes
against their open mouths, at every title which en-
croaches on their inward %pave, their gases are
breathed into the upper air—wherever outlets exist
—into houses, footpaths, and carriage way ";

' SUM' iudi%iduul householder, dwelling at a high
level, ell concern on the subject may seem to terminate
with the &fluxion of Isis 18%11 sewage. Sit that his own
pipes remain clear. little C 1111194 lie for the ultimate olitrall
of his !illumines!! Pettis:. if he knew better, he would
care more. His gill returns to him with ittensute. Inovit
in the valley, whither his re fits.. runs, exatverge it iiiiiii ter.
able kindred contributions. Ft oin city and submk—
from 14111 area of one hundred square miles, covyrvil by
quarter of a million houses, wills their unprecedented
throng of metropolitan lifc— there pour into that single
t'hatll►t'l every conceivably s'NeiVIIIVat, Oat sire erring, garbage,
RIO IN•AIsC, from tarn tinil Is nst, StIVOt WO Sllllll, Alfiltilde
mid factorl, market and hospital. From the polluted
bosom of Ate liver steam up incossantly, though unseen.
the %swims of a retributive poison : densest mid most
destructive, no doubt. along the wilder hanks and stinking
sewung of lowest Irvtd. but sinv.ailling over miles of land—
amuelintea nillisl high I.) wind, Willtltifill'S 1111'10(11 low
with 1111 A, 81141 1.1134 W thlir Margin, that curls
over theism tittle."