The Express.
London, England, 1852-01-15 00:00:00

ghe erllrtfsts.

TO CORRISPONDENTS.
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sem In at the teaks. W, Ileavennienet. W Two e'en** ea the
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RION WATER AT LONDON BRIDOR.
Trr Divt-711arulas. N. lbs. Aftimisna. AA. 47a
re.mmaiw—yangas. K Um. .... t,ll.

LONDON, THURSDAY, JANUARY 13.

RVIIOUR has it, that instead of seeking to
strengthen himself by a frank and cordial ac-
ceptance of popular condition*, Lord JiniN is resolved
upon trying to evade them; and that, while he affects
to ignore the existence of all claims to political lead-
ership, he is not unwilling to pick up adherents
wherever they are to be found. A few small offices
have, it is said, been condescendingly offered to a
few small men—the great poets being retained in as
strict monopoly as before—for the benefit of the
" great families".
Thiswill' not do. Equal eligibility to administra-
tive trusts and dignities is a broad and intelligible
principle, or it is nothing. In any other sense con-
troversy on the subject were a waste of word.--a
mere contention about personal pre-eminence, an idle
strife concerning particular individuals where public
attention is in reality fixed on the recognition
of popular rights. It can hardly be necessary fur us
to say that we have never put forward the personal
pretensions of any man, or set of men, to share in
tho government. Neither shall we ever stop to
measure intellectual inches of capacity between the
fourth or fifth rote persons who may be taken in tow
by disdainful whiggery. With rival claims and in-
vidious comparisons we have nothing to do. Our
business is with classes whose just rights have been
usurped by a grasping oligarchy ; and only with
political men of note who, by their identity of origin,
their active services, or their conspicuous talents
displayed in defence of their own order. may fairly
be taken to represent them. A wealthy squire or a
pallid lordling who, to gain a seat fur a contested
borough, gulps any pledge that his agent tells him
it is prudent to swallow, is no more a represen-
tative of the industrious, thinking, patient, and
conscientious middle classes of English society than
a painted pauper on the stage is a king, or a
muslin-winged opera girl with her tinsel finery and
impotent wand is a genuine enchantress. With an
inadequate suffrage and without the protection of
the ballot, 14 perplexed constituency arc no doubt
sometimes willing to choose Lord Gambler's son or
Sir Somebody at i.cacre. who is pledged to maiu-
lain everything liberal that is certain not to be
altered, in preference to the old tury lord of the
manor, or the bigh•church son of the Earl of
ha:Mil:ate. But with the people the ono species
of candidate has as little sympathy as the other ;
and the promotion of the former to obscure or
sinecure placer (or political servants-out-of-livery, is
felt to have just as little to do with the solution of
the great social question—Are the plebeians of
England to be excluded from power because they
re plebeians?
W hat do the mercantile and manufacturing classes
care at whose dinner table the pliant member for
Snug-borough made himself agreeable; or by what
hospitalities the playful member for Triatiny'em
contrived to ingratiate himself with some ministerial
patron. Of what good is such enlistment of the fifers
and drummers, unless those who lead, and who arc
competent to lead it, take their legitimate rank in
the allied host? To the calm and single-minded view
of the sections of society to which we are adverting,
there is neither satisfaction nor pride in seeing some
half-dozen of the representative rank and tile dis-
appear from their side, and suddenly present them-
selves in dumb show at the ministerial window.
How these adroit gentlemen may have made their way
them, is' matter of no interest to the people. They
want to see the captains of industry," whom they
confide in, summoned to enter by the public door
the council chamber of the state. When they be-
hold this they will feel the galling yoke of inequa-
lity removed,—but assuredly not till then.
So also with the men of intellectual worth, who,
instead of devoting the prime of their youth to the
acquisition of money, have laboured to acquire pecu-
liar stores of knowledge, or to attain a rare pro-
ficiency in the exercise of some particular gift or art.
'fo these, insulted as they now feel themselves to be
by the oppressive patronage of hereditary dulness.
or the stupid assumption of exclusive fitness for the
most difficult of all arts—the art of skilful rule—to
these what compensation can it he to find that a few
dilettauti public men or amateur performers of
radical parts upon occasion, have persuaded the
l'rime Minister to forgive their holiday freaks of
opinion for sake of their old and respectable county
connexions, and to forget their sentiment of
liberalism in the sincerity of their landlordism?
None whatever. "A breath unmakes them as a
breath has made." Their tenure of powerless office,
ike their admission thereto, depends on the humour
ur the digestion of some whimsical oligarch or privi-
leged clique. Never will the true or rightful position
of men of genius, learning, or eloquence be secured
ur bettered by such instances of aristocratic caprice.
It is not favour or fortune for this individual or for
that which is worth arguing for; it is the concession
of the right of the class to be represented by their
best and foremost men (not by their feeblest and
supplest), in the administration of the realm. And
this we demand in their name.

Who are the foremost and who the best may be
matter of dispute —possibly even of sincere doubt
with those on whom the task of making a
selection necessarily would fall were a choice
about to be made. But the same diffi-
cult arises under all circumstances. Even among
the dukes and their cousins, there are notori-
ously degrees of incapacity and grades of un-
fitness. The perplexity how to determine between
competing reputations for ability may, therefore, bo
set aside as a threadbare excuse. In reality " there's
no such thing ;" but if there were, what then ? The
people of this country are not biahsd into personal
factions, nor do they wear the rival tartans of political
clans. The eleratsaa at mas mime man of the
commonalty before mem might Ism Ilts subject of
after-diner talk We day 4 tws
i their parti-
cular friss& ; Nave se
pointment, wire inweetbil It, modd gad no
toleration from a and enlightened pub-
lic ; and any attempt to give utterance topaltry and
egotistical feelings of the sort would simply pro-
voke ridicule.
On the other hand, however, the public are too
clear-sighted not to detect attempts at the miserable
imposition by which genuine merit, long standing
and conspicuous talent, would be passed by, in order
to elevate inferior men. There is an easy and ready
test which may in most cases be applied. From the
middle ranks of the community when small men are
selected. it is almost invariably to discharge small
duties and to perform subordinate functions. It is
only nobles by birth who are statesmen at starting,
and who are named to the cabinet without
having the capacity to bo head clerks. Men
of the people who have, in the estimation
of parliament and of the country, asserted
their real equality with the boat of the
bureaucrats by birth, will not consent to own an
inferiority which nobody believes to exist, by going
apprentice to the Tamils. They have served their
time out of office, and in doing so have in many in-
stances learned more than their lordly rivals have
been able to acquire by the most approved method
of official cramming. We say. not this as disparag-
ing the value of ordinary training for
.young men;
but rather to scout the preposterous impertinence
which, because it has been suffered to exclude all
plebeian. from an under-graduate career in Down-
ing street, would presume to question the solidity of
their attainments, or the value of their contributions
to political knowledge.
In our view the matter is reducible to a very plain
alternative. Either the whigs can go on governing'
the empire fur and by their own selfish mate, or
they cannot. If they can, they will never yield one
particle of power to any one whose interests and in-
stincts are not in their sense indubitable. They may,
as we have said, make a chow of conferring office on
certain adds and ends of the Commons ; but no office
that can be truly said to be " conferred" ever wail
accompanied with power. If, on the contrary, a
growing sense of their inherent weakness shall
bring them to seek allies in the middle claaces ot•
the nation, they must doff their outworn an. of do-

urination and superiority, and treat upon the bags of
confessed equality.

IT is an historical mistake to core the coup
d'
eltat of Louts N%POLSON and the • which has
grown of it to that of the lathßrumaire and the
consular constitution which succeeded it. The
18th Brumaire was marked by the facility with
which it was accomplished, in broad daylight, with-
out the shedding of one drop of blood, or the com-
mitting of one act of vengeance. What rendered
the revolution of the lath Brumaire possible and
even popular, was the preceding coup ilitat of
l"ructidor, 1797, which rendered the Directory
odious, and made the constitution a mockery, equally
powerless to attract sympathy or command respect.
There aro a great many points, indeed, which
create a resemblance between the coup (raid of De-
cember, 1652, and that of Fruetidor, 1797. One
circumstance common to both is the wholesale depor-
tation of those supposed to be hostile to the measure
to the pestilential climate of Cayenne. The govern-
ment, that is the majority of the directors, consist-
ing of BARK %A, REWAY.LL, and LAREVEILLERE, hav-
ing lost the majority in the upper and lower horses,
determined to dissolve them, and get rid of their
opponents by. intimidation, imprisonment, or exile.
PietieGau was the CHANG tItNIF:It of that day,
the general on which the assemblies relied, and
CAR(OT was their CAVAIMISC. l'tenetisu was
arrested in the night. Casson escaped. Those
deputies and senators favourable to the go-
vernment were convoked in a new and sepa-
rate hall of meeting. When their colleagues pre-
sented themselves at the Tuileries, which was their
old and habitual place of meeting, the soldiery for-
bade their entrance and drove them away with their
bayonets; upon which, trying to meet elsewhere,
they were arrested and sent to different prisons.
There was ono strung sentiment then pervading
society, a sentiment which durst not be outraged
even by those who were prepared to outrage all
others; and that was a horror of the guillotine, an
aversion to blood. And the same prevails strongly
down to this very time. So much so that there
was no one thing that fermi public opinion
more strongly against the lloultinNs, than their
execution of political victims, such as NET and the
four sergeants of La Rochelle. HARASS was there-
fore compelled to invent a punishment short of death,
though akin to it. And it was deportation to Sinna-
mari, as a slip of land along the coast in the colony
of Cayenne was called. In the men condemned were
sixty deputies and senators, and about fifty editors
and writers for the press. The fate of those who
were dAporti's was what might have been expected.
Active men and soldiers, likePteneortu, soon escaped
from their worse than galleys. The journalist fell a
victim to the climate. BARBA-MARRON, who lived
to an advanced age, surrounded by wealth and ho-
nour, has left in his memoir a touching account of
his sufferings under a sentence intended to be worse
than death.

What killed the republic in France, what discre-
dited even the principle of a first magistracy, or a
government, chosen by election, was that popular
election which could raise to the head of the state
creatures at once so infamous and so cruel as BARRAS,
80 contemptible as RETEILLERE and ltEw BELL With
power in such hands, society was not insured against
a re-erection of the guillotine, or against the inflic-
tion by arbitrary decree of punishments which
were a refinement upon death. The trans-
portation to Cayenne was nothing less. This
it ;was which undermined the directorial
constitution. fhis it was that enabled BONAPARTE
to turn the legislature out hr his bayonets. This it
was that reconciled France to a new constitution,
concocted by SIETES, a constitution in which the
principle of popular representation was omitted, and
the mockery attempted of a free and liberal govern-
ment without it.

The coup (Mot of Dec., 1851, is a counterpart, not
of that of the 18th Brutnaire, which had some excuse,
some generosity, and which did not shock public
opinion; it is a counterpart of BARRAS'S coup-
traat in 1797. In personal character and position
Louts NAPOLEON far more resembles BARRAS than
he does his uncle. NII'OLEON was a man who
despised money, toil cared not for either convivial or
immoral indulgences. The character of BARRAS we
need not depict. The dispersal, seizure, and impri-
sonment of the deputies and senators in Fructidor
was brutally managed by Atontr.su. We need not
say that General St. ARNAUD followed that model,
and not the example of the 18th Brumaire. The
iliyorMs of Fructidor were carried off in iron cases.
The cellular vans in which CILANGARNIER and LA-
IiOnICIERE were trotted off to 11am were equally
humiliating and incommodious. The press, swept
clean away in Fructidor, did not survive to be de-
stroyed in Brumaire. How B.txass filled his pockets
after Fructidor is well known. How the rail-
road concessions, together with the inexplicable rise
and too natural fall in the French funds, have
poured money into the Elysi,e, is equally known to
all the world at present. The Directory after Fructi-
dor introduced the Progretaire Direct Impost to
punish the royalists, and NAPOLEON alter the 18th
Brumaire abolished them, and reared the more
equitable system of finance. And instead of pro-
scribing and confiscating, as BARILAS had persisted
in doing, NAPOLEON opened France to the emigrant
snd restored to him what he could of his property.
In these recent events, then, Louts Nsroceox does
not come forward as the copyist of his uncle. On
the contrary, ho carefully avoids everything that was
generous, great, and just in the conduct of that military
usurper. Loris NAPOLEON'S model is BARRAS. Ills
coup d'Atat is that oven more of the ro'e than of the
soldier. His financial schemes, his policy, his vin-
dictiveness, his ploughing and harrowing of society,
instead of providing for its tranquillity,—all this is
the restoration of 1797 rather than of 1799. It is a
resuscitation of Directorial tyranny and turpitude,
rather than of imperial sagacity and usurpation.
The ministers whom he has chosen, and the acts
which signalise his government, recall the worst days
and the worst school of the French revolution.
There can be no virtue or secure order under a
tyranny that sets justice, humanity, and decorum
at defiance, and which cannot exist apparently
Without daily insults and outrages, inflicted by
turns upon evesy class and every grade of French
society.

Tim ENGINEF.ItIe STAHEL—Yesterday the esta-
blishment of Messes. Horn, machinists, of Whiteehapel,
was suddenly closed, it having been stated that the Arm
had on Saturday UMW to an arrangement with the men. It
wee understood among the members of the Amalgamated
Society, that Maus. Lees and Barnes, of Manchester, had
closed their works; while Mears. Saville and Co. had re-
tained only their millwrights. In the council of the society
a resolution was yesterday passed, calling upon workmen
in employ to set aside a day's wages per week in aid of the
unemployed. A well-attended meeting of boilermaker'
was held last evening at the Lambeth Temperance Hall,
when a resolution pledging the men nut to take situations
upon terms opposed to the interests of the trades alaoCille
Stub, wee adopted. At a meeting of the employer,' com-
mittee, it was resolved that the various firms should make
a point of stopping their engines entirely until other in-
structions were issued by that committee.

THE PUTRID " PRESERVED teAte."—(To the
Editor of the Erpryss.)—Loodon, January 13, 18.52.
Sir,— On reading the accounts of the examination at °ca-
pon of " preserved mesh.," one cannot but be reminded
that the bad quality of food supplied to her Majesty's ships
was one of the principal causes of the mutiny at the Nore,
at a time when everything depended upon the nary;
sad as just now we have more particularly to look forward
to the necessity of keeping that branch of the service free
from discontent, and in a state of thorough efficiency, it is
to be hoped that everything will be done by the Admiralty
Board to ensure ship's stores being of good quality. With
the mutiny of the Nore before them, let them remember
how nearly wu our country's honour perilled on a ques-
tion of provisions, and that poor Jack" ought no longer
to be obliged to complain of beef which has acquired the
nickname of " mahogany."—AA 01111111VSZ.

COLLINTON AT LIVF.IIPOOI..—On Tuesday night a
serious collision took place near the mouth of the N ersey,
between the steam-ship Clarence and the ship Gladiator,
which has produced much injury to property, but, so far u
we have been able to learn, with no personal injury. The
Clarence, recently built by Mr. I. of Birkenhead, com-
manded by Captain Wiseman, and now on her first voyage,
left port that morning for Sydney, New South Wales. The
weather liking thick, the ship Gladiator, from Dantsig fur
Liverpool, rail into the Clarence, and carried away her
mixetimut and bulwarks. The steamer was so much in-
jured, that she had to return to port, where she arrived at
II o'clock yesterday morning, and went into Birkenhead
Dock at high water fur repairs. The (Radiator was also
much injured, and leaking.
ItAILViAT ACUDEN 1 AND ACCIDENTAL DE %TH.—
The companies representing these two objects propose to
amalgamate them, and to apply to parliament fur the pur-
pose.