The Press.
London, England, 1856-10-11 00:00:00

Volitttal.

PARLIAMENT was further prorogued on Tuesday
last until Thursday, the 13th day of November next.
The Right Hon. the Lord Chancellor, the Right Hon.
the Earl of Clarendon, and the Earl of Harrowby,
were present.

LORD PANMURE'S SPF.ECH at a tenantry dinner at
Edzell, briefly noticed in our second edition last week,
we now give at greater length. In reply to his

967

1 health, proposed by Major Mackay, the Minister at
War gave a sketch of his political career, alluding to
the present position of Lord John Russell, to the
past military administration of the Duke of New-
castle, and to the causes of his (Lord Pantnure's)
return to political life after voluntary retirement:—
For the last three or four and twenty years I have been
very much engaged in the political conduct of affairs in
this country. After the passing of the Reform Bill, when
you were enfranchised, and when I was enfranchised my-
self for the first time, circumstances threw me into the
melee of politics, and in 11435, under the auspices of a man
whom I will always look up to with the greatest respect
and affection—f mean Lord John Russell—a man who has
elevated the liberties of his country to a higher point than
any man living—l entered public life first as his Under-
Secretary of State. Under such a muter, gentlemen, it
was my good fortune to learn nothing but lessons of con-
stitutional liberty, and to the lessons then learned, and
the friendships then formed with that noble lord, I trace
my subsequent success in political life ; and for any little
credit I may have earned I look to him as the principal
author of it—the person to whom lam indebted for it. 1
rejoice that this public opportunity occurs to me for making
this heartfelt tribute to my noble friend, because at this
moment it is the fashion to look upon him with something
like a cold eye, and turn upon him something like a cold
shoulder; but I believe the public good sense will soon
see the injustice done him, and that the noble lord's name
will yet be connected with the public liberties and public
duties of his country.
Gentlemen, from one step of politics to another I have
gone, filling various offices ; and I thought that upon the
retirement of Lord John Russell's Ministry, my political
career was drawn to a close—l mean my public career in
politics, because I bold that every man in my position
ought never to lose sight of the politics of his country,
although he may not be officially connected with those who
administer them. But when my noble friend, Lord Pal-
merston, took office I was invited to accept the office of
Secretary of State for War. I accepted that office with
hesitation, because I had no wish, for my own part, to re-
turn to public life. Other duties had occurred to call me
to reside upon my own property, and I was then looking
forward rather to the study of the interests of my tenants,
than to the study of the public interests of the nation. But
I was assured by my noble friend, Lord Palmerston, that it
was his opinion that the experience which I had had of the
administration of military affairs, not simply from having
passed an apprenticeship in early life in the army, in that
gallant regiment of which my gallant friend, Major Mackay,
was a member, but from having been six years connected
with the administration of the civil affairs of the army
formerly—Lord Palmerston stated it to me as his opinion
that that experience would be of benefit to him in his
Government, and that I might devote the knowledge I bed
then acquired profitably to the army and to the public. In
these circumstances I did not hesitate to accept the office
tendered to me, and I will say this, that from the moment
I accepted that office up to the present instant I have
enjoyed not only the full confidence of my noble friend at
the head of the Government, but such able assistance from
him as has enabled me to conduct the affairs of that office
with satisfaction to my own conscience ; and, feeling that
satisfaction in my own conscience, I am enabled to hold
light the opinions of those who have not been backward
in decrying the exertions which I have had the satisfaction
to make.
My gallant friend Majcr Mackay has laid too much
stress upon the benefit which has resulted from any admi-
nistration of mine. I have on many occasions disclaimed
any special credit for restoring the army from the state
into which it had fallen to the state in which it left the
Crinu a.
I have said often, and I repeat it now, when I succeeded
to the administration of the affairs of war the barometer
was then steadily on the rise, and many of the plans which
had been laid, and the steps which had been taken by my
friend and predecessor, I had only to work out as he had
left them, and little to add in order to bring them to a
fortunate maturity. I believe if the Duke of Newcastle
had remained in office—if that clamour, for I must call it
clamour, which drove him from the reins of the office in
which I succeeded him, had not occurred, he would have
succeeded as well as I have done in bringing the army
round from the state into which it had unfortunately fallen
to the state of discipline and of improvement in every way
in which it left the shores of the Crimea.
Lord Panmure then briefly alluded to the changes
he had effected in the moral condition of the
soldier, to the increased political power dissemi-
nated among the people, and concluded his speech
with a defence of the new Police Act against the
charge of centralisation preferred by Mr. Baxter, M.P.

Mn. ERNEST JONES held a politico-musical soiree
at St. Martin's-hall, on Tuesday evening. Between
two and three hundred persons only assembled, and
shortly after eight p.m. Mr. Ernest Jones appeared
on the platform, accompanied by seven or eight
ladies and gentlemen, who turned out to be singers
and musicians. Mr. Jones then stated that he was
about, for the first time, to attempt to blend dry
political discussion with a musical entertainment,
hoping that by these means he should attract many
persons on whose minds he was desirous of engrafting
essential political knowledge. The first part of a
vocal concert was then proceeded with, embracing
several well-known songs, glees, and madrigals, and
among them the " Marseillaise," which the audience
failed to recognise. The programme included two
" odes " written by Mr. Jones—the first the "Song
of the Lower Classes," a lugubrious ditty ; and the

other, " A Song of the Times of Cromwell," preten-
tious, and unintelligible. Mr. Jones' lecture was
devoted to the consideration of the relations between
labour and capital, between employer and employed ;
the condition of the workman, the causes of that
condition, and the remedy for its evils. After stating
that England was on the brink of mighty social
changes, and that the character of those changes
depended on what was done before the crisis in the
way of harmonising the interests of all classes, on the
basis of justice to all and wrong to none, in which
case he doubted not that things would go on in safe
constitutional progression , and deprecating all desire
of setting class against class, he proceeded to point
out what, in his view, was the condition of the Eng-
lish labourer in relation to capital. He urged that
capital was nothing but the surplus production of
working men, either immediately or remotely, and in
very vigorous language denounced capital, as at pre-
sent distributed, as the curse cf the labourer ; inas•
much as he, the producer, bad no share in that which
be produced. He argued that in this country poverty
was treated as a crime, and adduced a case at Halifax,
in which the majority of the board of guardians laid
down the principle, and acted on it, that a destitute
able-bodied man who applied for parochial relief was
guilty of the crime of vagrancy, and punishable and
punished by imprisonment with hard labour. In the
second part of his address Mr. Jones dealt with the
question of the causes of poverty among the working
classes, with all its difficulties for the present and its
dangers for the future. Ile said that pauperism was
owing to the simple fact that there was not work
enough in England for the people, and that was
entirely owing to the undeveloped resources of the
land and the absence of cultivation, stating that there
were in this country more than twenty-eight millions
of acres uncultivated, besides a vast quantity of
arable land, which bad been turned into grass land.
He denounced the monopoly of great landowners,
whose policy it was to depopulate the greater part of
their estates ; and he entered into detailed statistics
to make out his case. By bringing the idle land and
the idle labour of the country together, we should
solve the great social problem in dispute. Wages
would rise, food and taxes would fall, vagrancy would
end, and employment would be constant. This measure,
ho maintained, was the only remedy for the great
social disease, for it was a moral, political, physical,
and national regenerator. Mr. Jones concluded by
an exhortation to the people to try a Chartist Govern-
ment. They had tried every other, and all had failed.
The chartista alone remained to them. The chart-
ists had been wilfully misrepresented :

The truth has been kept from you ; you do not know
us. But lam determined you shall know us better now
—you know us better tonight. The party of progress is
generally the party of the pour, and we cannot usually
afford to publish our views. The lecture-hall and the
press are too expensive to be used by the working man, and
the press of the rich will not allow him room. Thus we
are misrepresented, and cannot answer; or we speak, and
cannot make our voices heard. But this shall be so no
longer. I, at least, have got the means to speak the truth,
and make it known, and I will thunder it through England.
Let the rich know there is a man among them, ou the
people's side—ay ! on the chartist side—who has got the
power to make the world hear, and the courage to tell it
what be thinks. They have stifled us in—crowded us
down—pent us up within the folds of poverty and per-
petual silence. But I'll make elbowroom among them.
Boom fur the people ! The aristocrat has choked up the
avenues of legislation with land monoply, game laws, pri-
vilege, and pelf—he has closed the edits to the land against
your labour, anti driven you into the towns till you have
barely space to move. Boom for the people ! The cotton lord
has rolled his shoddy-bags before the path of progress—
hedged you in with the steel fence of his machinery till
you swelter in your poverty and gasp for life. Boom for
the people ! The lawyer has made laws for them which
he himself can't understand, but expects you to know,
and crowds you with quibbles for the courts of justice.
Room for the people ! The bishop shows you how he
would open heaven by closing every little paradise on
earth—spreads his lawn sleeves before green fields and
music, and stifles you back into the fetid town. Room
for the people ! We'll make a breach in the ramparts of
prejudice and the barriers of monopoly. Close in after
us, the pioneers, as we enter, lest they fill up their ranks
again and overwhelm us. To night I have struck
the first blow with my chartist pickaxe. I'll strike
another soon.

MR. W. T. M'CULLAGEL and Mn. E. W. WATKIN
addressed a meeting at Yarmouth on Monday even-
ing, as future candidates for the borough, in the Liberal
interest. Mr. M'Cullagh expressed his opinion that
the faults in the administration of public affairs
rusted not so much with the accident of who might
be the Minister of the day as with the House of
Commons, the centre of all power in the country.
They had successive Administrations, but no change
m respect to efficient government. The grievances
sought to be redressed in 1852 still existed,
taxation continued to be enormously increased
although the war had ceased, and were the Execu-
tive even disposed to propose measures of progress
it would not be able to carry them as the house was
now constituted. The oligarchic power had never

THE PRESS.

been greater in the country than at the present time,
and no disposition was shown by the House of Com•
mons to effect a change. The heads of each depart-
ment were members of a compact body who had no
sympathy with the middle and industrial classes, and
he claimed for the latter a fair share in the govern-
ment of the country. Mr. M'Cullagh then glanced
at the political state of Europe

While the British Ambassador was doing honour to the
new Czar, and while the solemnities were actually in
course of performance, Russia could not control the
exuberance of her contempt for the manner in which she
had been let off, and she had issued a manifesto which
showed that, though her power might for a moment be
weakened and her prudence be the better part of her
valour, she was determined to hold the same tone of defiance
to the free Governments of Europe. She laughed at the
alliance between this county and France, for, with the
sagacity of the serpent, though not the harmlessness of
the dove, she knew full well that between a despotic power
and a free people, when the latter awoke to a sense of their
true external policy, there could be no cordial friendship.
She waited the hour therefore when it suited her purpose
to break up the alliance and to wreak her resentment.
What were we doing in the meantime ? Where were our
representative institutions, which should shield us and
strike terror into aggressive powers? No where, because
the present House of Commons had never lifted up its
voice for the war, when war was imminent ; had never
sought for inquiry but once, when the war was mismanaged,
and had soon repented of doing so, and had been ready to
accept peace at any price, rather than continue the burdens
which they hated, and the dangers to the despotisms which
they loathed in their hearts. The only security was a
popularly elected and popularly responsible House of Com-
mons, and the Czar would never be convinced that the
house was a representative of the industrial free heart of
England until there was a fair and equal representation of
the hard heads and the strong hands which had made the
country what it was.
Mr. Watkin delivered an address of a similar cha-
racter, and the meeting unanimously passed resolu-
tions pledging those present to do their utmost
to secure the return of both the candidates at the
next election.

Mn. SERGEANT SHEE, at a public dinner at Buckle,
a fishing village on the north-east coast, expressed
the following opinion of the House of Commons :

When I came into the House of Commons, I confess
that my impression was very different from that which has
been lately promulgated in Scotland. I found it com-
posed of orators who would have held. if not the first rank,
at least a place amongst the first in the earliest annals of
our parliamentary history—of statesmen not only familiar
with the interests of their own country, but with the power
and the resources of all the empires and countries of the
world—of lawyers of the first eminence—of eminent mer-
chants, manufacturers, and bankers, whose mere signature
would be the key to treasures of wealth in every city in the
known world—of a landed aristocracy, who would bear
comparison in intelligence, patriotism, and independence
with the aristocracy of any country on the face of the
earth. My opinion of that house, I confess, was very
different indeed from that which younger men have lately
expressed of it. I found that every man who had any-
thing to the purpose to say—every man who had taken the
trouble to prepare himself, and exhibited that reasonable
diffidence which all well-bred men will exhibit when they
address an assembly composed of persons of education—
is sure of an attentive audience—that a fairer assembly
does not exist in the known world than the House of
Commons. For the presumptuous and self-sufficient, the
loquacious without information—with nothing to attract
attention about them but their presumption and their
ignorance—there is no toleration, nor ought there to be ;
hut to every man who has anything to say to the purpose,
who knows what lie is talking about, every encouragement
is given by the House of Commons. I have observed that
the oldest members, and the most distinguished members
of that house, are those who would be least likely to find
fault with the well•meant industrious efforts of younger
members to serve their constituents and do good service
to their country. They are not the meu to sneer at per-
sons—"members who have hobbies to ride upon ;" they
are not the men to talk of persons in terms of disrespect
who do their best for the service of their country.

Mn. HUTCHINS, M.P. for Lymington, was lately
called upon by 124 electors of the borough to resign
his seat, since lie had definitely renounced the Pro-
testant faith and joined the Church of Rome. Mr.
Hutchins, on the Ist and 3rd of October, replied
that he always thought a member represented the
political, not religious, opinions of his constituents,
and that, as he had tendered his resignation six
months ago, when he joined the Romish Church,
which offer was then refused by the majority, and as
out of the 124 names appended to the present requi-
sition only 32 had voted for him at the last election,
lie thought lie should fulfil his duty better by retain-
ing his seat.
MR. CRAUFURD, M.P., met his constituents at
Oban, Aigyleshire, and at Inverary, last week, and
addressed them at great length upon the past session.
Mr. Craufurd approved of everything that had been
done, applauded Lord Palmerston, admired Lord Cl-
arendon, and sang a man over the Peace. The last
session he was astonished to hear characterised as one
barren of result. Many small measuresAof ',great
importancoto Scotland had been;passed.

SATURDAY,

THE QUESTION OF THE UNION OF THE PRDICIPALI.
TIES OF MOLDAVIA AND WALLACHIA Was considered at
a public meeting held at Brighton on Monday
evening. The arguments adduced in favour of the
measure were-1. That the Rouman people de-
sired union ; 2, that union would give strength ; and
3, that, united and free, the nation would offer the
best barrier to a Russian absorption, and go far to
secure Turkey and the peace of Europe. The
meeting was addressed at great length by several.
gentlemen, including Mr. Montagu Scott, Dr. Rouge,
Mr. J. Dodson, Mr. Scholefield, M.P., and Mr. St.
John, who urged these views, and proposed and car-
ried various resolutions and a petition to the Queen.
Mr. Roebuck was unavoidably absent, but wrote to
express his approval of the union of the prin-
cipalities.
ME. Ancatnun RASTIE, M.P., addressed his con-
stituents in Paisley on Friday last, and referred
briefly to the various measures introduced during
the past session.
THE PROPERTY AND INCOME TAX ASSOCIATION held
a meeting on Wednesday at the London Coffee-
house, and various resolutions in favour of the
immediate reduction of the tax to sevenpence in the
pound, and for its more equitable adjustment,
were proposed and passed.
GOVERNOR DARLING, of Newfoundland, will be the
successor at Jamaica of Sir Henry Barkly, appointed
Governor of Victotia.

Mx. T. B. BURCHAM, of the Norfolk Circuit, and
Recorder of Bedford, is appointed a police magic.
trate in the metropolitan district in the room of Mr.
G. A. A Beckett, deceased.

_ltttrognlttan.

THE METROPOLITAN BOARD OF WORKS apparently
find it difficult to settle the question of the drainage
of London. Motions and amendments are negatived
one after the other, month after month passes away,
every proposal doubted or denied, and nothing
decided or done. A "special" meeting was
held on Monday " for the purpose of con-
sidering the report of the engineer of the board on
the whole question of the northern and southern
drainage, with comparative estimates of different
points of outfall, and modes of disposing of the
sewage." One member, Mr. Carpmael, moved that
the report, so far as it related to providing an outfall
at Plumstead Marshes, be adopted ; whereupon Mr.
Doulton moved an adverse amendment, that the
board was unprepared to approve any such plan,
which he ultimately withdrew ; when Mr. Wilkinson
moved another of the same nature, which nobody
seconded ; upon which Mr. Harrison supported the
original motion of Mr. Carpmael, which Mr. Leslie
opposed, on the plea of enormous expense, and Mr.
Savage and Mr. Bristow further opposed by moving
an amendment similar to that moved in the first
instance by Mr. Doulton. A division at last took
place, after four hours and shelf discussion, when both
original motion and amendment were rejected, and
the board found themselves on leaving their office
much in the same position as when they arrived, so
far as coming to any decision upon the question of
the drainage of London. Another meeting will be
held on Wednesday next.
THE MARYLEBONE VESTRY was numerously at-
tended on Saturday, as it was known that the law
proceedings at the workhouse would be criticised,
and a vote of want of confidence urged against the
guardians and directors for their conduct in the late
alleged woman-flogging. A motion of censure, prc-
posed by Mr. Gliddon, was followed by an amendment
of approval, proposed by Mr. Russell. The discus-
sion wss ultimately adjourned.
THE ROYAL MAIL STEAM COMPANY have issued a
circular to their shareholders, proposing to establish
the long desired connection between Sydney and
Panama. They recommend a fleet of auxiliary
screw steamers, and calculate that the entire voyage
could be performed in fifty-flve days. The departures
would be monthly, and would be fixed between the
times of the Suez line, so as to secure a fortnightly
communication.

THE FAMOUS GRAVESEND " STAR " PACKET COM-
PANY held their final meeting at the close of last
week, and came to a decision to wind up the affairs
at once. The Tilbury railroad had completely ab-
sorbed the traffic to Gravesend, and against such a
competition the " Star " company has set.
THE LONDON CLERGY held a meeting on Monday
at. Sion College, to prepare an address to Dr. Blom-
field upon his resignation of the see. The meeting
was addressed by several of the leading beneficed
clergymen in the archdeaconry, and resolutions were
adopted expressive of regret that the bishop's health
had compelled him to resign his see, and declaratory
of their conviction that during the many years over
which his episcopate had extended he had been in-
strumental in an extraordinary degree in advancing
the real interests of the Church. An address to the
late bishop founded upon the resolutions was adopted.