The Express.
London, England, 1853-06-14 00:00:00

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leernet Itttition .1" The Exprem," ecmt:tame " a pan,. fter.ir tr.
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HIGH WATER AT LONDON AIt!P.M!.
Tits D tT—lktoin:ag. ........ Afterne, )n.
i-iiozary —Morning, 76.516+. ........ Paterlico2.

LONDON, TUESDAY, JUXE U.

THE short-comings of the ('oalition Cabinet have,
—frequently since they took office—been sufficiently
manifest. But often when those who wished for
more decidedly-liberal Ministry were most inclined
to find heavy fault, there: arose an almo,t reproach.
ful recollection of the fact, that the present Govern-
ment were the first to propose an extension of
the Legacy Tax to real property. If the
Coalition would not do all that the progress of
political intelligence demanded, they were at least
ready to get rid of one disgraceful anomaly of our
fiscal system, and to say that henceforth the lands of
Fifty Thousand-a-year Dukes and Thirty Thousand-
a-year Squires should no longer escape the impost
which has regularly pinched its morsel out of the Forty
Pound-a-year of the widow, or the Hundred Pounds
legacy—often the sole fortune—of the orphan. If the
Coalition have not been ready to do very much else
they are at least the first Cabinet that has had cou-
rage and honesty enough to say that fair play shall
prevail about the Legacy Tax by the abolition of
the flagrant injustice of allowing any mil-
lionaire accumulation of property in land to pass
to a new owner by death without paying a sixpence
to the Exchequer, whilst every fraction of personal
property, is, without exception, taxed under similar
circumstances at rates varying from one to ten per
cent. On this question of the Succession Duties the
Ministry may therefore be said to enjoy the full and
hearty support of all sections of Liberals, and—it
might be added—of all honest men of all parties.
Any doubts that may exist in relation to the
Ministerial plan on the subject can refer merely to
the point whether or not the measure pursues its just
object sufficiently far. About supporting it so far
as it goes, there can be no shadow of hesita-
tion. In short, the proposed extension of the
Legacy Duty to Land is the gem of the whole
Budget, for the sake of which the public and the
liberal section of the press were willing to judge with
leniency many of Mr. GLiDSTONE'S other and less
sound or welcome propositions. But what may be
grateful to the people may be hateful to their feudal
lords, as the House of Commons of:eu bears wit-
ness.

The landowners last night found a champion in
Sir JOHN PAKINGTON, who talked very heroically to
a very thin House for the purpose of showing why rich
inheritors of land should still escape a tax long paid
by those whoinherit every other kind of property in the
kingdom. As advocate-general of the landed interest
the ex-Colonial Secretary did the best he could with
the brief entrusted to him. But the result was
wretched enough. He protested, and scolded, and
exhorted, and denounced ; he conjured up those worn-
out departed stalking-horses " burthens on land" and
" justice to agriculture "—and made all the use he
could of the worn-out claptraps of landlord agitation..
But not an argument worth notice could he bring to
bear. He inveighed against Legacy Duties in gene-
ral, and said he would rather they should all be
repealed than be extended to his clients. No doubt.
But if all Legacy Duties are so very mischievous,
why did not the Ministry of which Sir J. PACKING-
TON was a member propose their repeal when in
office? Sir RAIN and his friends did nothing of the
kind, and it is clear that the evils of this mode of
taxation have only been found out by the Tories now
that they are asked to sustain their honest share of
the burthen. All the objections urged against the
extension of legacy tax to real property bear with
equal force against the long-endured legacy tax on
personal property. If Sir Joi.; PAKINGTON'S speech,
then, has any weight, it would go to the exemption
of wealth—real and personal alike—from future pay-
ments of the kind in question ; the man who
comes into possession of a large fortune of which
he has not earned a single shilling, or for which he
has done no sort of service, either to the man from
whom he inherits it or to society at large,—this for-
tunate individual is to be relieved from the payment
of all contribution to the State whose laws secure to
him the quiet possession of his unearned wealth,
whilst at the same moment the day labourer is, with
Sir J. PAKINOTON'S full leave, to be taxed upon his
beer and his tobacco—upon his tea—upon the house
he lives in, and on the newspaper or book he reads,
and on almost every other of the few comforts of his
laborious life. This is the "Country Gentleman"
notion of equity and taxation; this the Conservative
view of the way in which an equalisation of imposts
should be fought against and avoided ; this the leading
idea of the Derbyite Opposition to the best item in Mr.
GLADSTONE'S Budget. In the highest flight of his anger
the ex-Colonial Secretary declared that legacy duty
hereafter to be drawn from a Duke or any other
great landed proprietor who 'by fortune of birth
comes into possession of a huge rent-roll—that

money demanded of such a man by the law in the
same way that the law now deducts ten per cent.
from a 501. legacy given to a faithful old servant or to
a helpless young orphan child—money so paid by a
Duke or Squire, or landed proprietor, great or small,
"would (says Sir JOAN PAKINGTON) be plunder."

Did they call that a tax ? Ile called it plunder.
If they carried out that clause, with all its detestable ma-
chinery, it would be plunder, and not taxation.
By clauses 42 to 45 inclusive, what were trustees, •
guardian., and others called on to do ? They were re-
quired to given full and true account of all the property,
and all such other particulars as might be necessary or
proper for caabling the commissioners Cully and accurately

to ascertain the amount due. If the commissioners were not
satisfied with the amount sent in, they might cause an esti-
mate to be made by any person or persons appointed by
themselves, and upon that estimate might assess the
duty.

Dreadful necessity horrible law scandalous
GLADSTONE. What does he wish " trustees, guar-
dians, and others to do ?" asks Sir JOHN. " They
arc required to give a full and true account of all the
property." Fearful atrocity. For on that account
the duty may be assessed. Traders of all kinds have
long been subject to be assessed in this manner—so
also have leaseholders of each degree—so have inhe-
ritors of all and every description of personal property
whatsoever. Bet now to talk of mating " trustees,
guardians, and others, to give a full and true
account" of lands and timber thereon startle, the
Derbyito Squiro into so violent a fit of hysterical
Parliamentary indignation that he can shriek only
'detestable machinery" and " plunder, plumlc.,
plunder."
. _

The pretenaed anxiety of Sir JOHN lON

~........... 41•1.
One -aril proprietors was well dispob,-d of by Mr. ! next general election than this. The quarrel
)(raw in : I between Protection and Free Trade is over and
/Lc re.alat hon. path :nth had hose most singularly tan- done. The existence of a Coalition Ministry renders
fortssAre in revretenting that the bill did not mainly
, sii.ct, I the revival of the old hereditary battle-cries of Whig
~,,„,,,,,,,,,, i,ut these of rmall prop. riy. ano trades- i
W.': . ..
. What ‘11:15 the fact ? Tradesmen in towns , and Tory no longer c ley. But the people every-
'''. '''
"".Thin.iy le.oeholders, soil they would benefit by this I where feel that in the way of all further advancement
'l"' ' Ile - e
a ainst the hill nut a senseless and scandalousbarrier is
bJ. There hid I..en nu •mons•ranc tr . ginterposed by
efj„,.r,--,eareely a petition against it—certainly no large the power of landowners in the counties, and of the
r,
h., meh tines in o;lewition to it. The press were gem- possessors of money in towns, to baffle the free
•
1,4 y.. tit on n.i.: tivacure„ though they were rarely slow , choice of representatives in Parliament. A great
„ deleting II gricsance.
contest is therefore approaching between venality and
Mr. WaLtaw Witt.t.tats and Lord Jolty RUA- vassalage on the one side, and free voting on the
sal. also contributed to the exposure of Sir JOUN other. The issue may a little longer be delayed, but
I,ooN,,y,lN's plea for landlord exemption from a I
the result cannot be doubtful.
jast and proper tax. Let us hope that these and
:.:bc,. spetehes, and their own good sense, will keep
the ]h rhsites as a body from being led into any selfish
and u-doss opposition. We live in days when every
teed change must be made in a spirit of honesty,
and the class is hose interests the ex-Secretary for
ow Colonies lag night advocated will consult their
hest interests and sustain their personal honour most
sartiv by surrendering with a good grace a feudal
priv liege they ought never to have ob-
tained. Any insolent demand for exemption
for the future might possibly some day
kvJ to requirements of restitution fur the past;
whilst graceful and timely concessions to justice
may save trouble hereafter. The whole Liberal
petty regard the Duty on Successions to be the best
pppa,'tion of the financial year—the Conservative
representatives of towns can scarcely hold a different
opinion. How many county members may allow
self interest to blind their view of a plain and
honest case remains to be aeon. The Bill will
tuatiredly peal.

MK. BERKELEY'S annual motion upon the Ballot
stands in the List of the House of Commons for
this evening. The time is certainly propitious for
the practical discussion of such a question. Never,
perhaps, in the memory of this generation has such
an amount of public disgrace been beeped upon our
existing representative system. During the last
three months the public ear has been daily forced
to listen to disclosures the most scandalous in a moral
sense, the most damaging in apolitical one. From
Lancaster to Plymouth, the evidence taken before
Election Committees, though diversified in detail, all
tends to the same result. Corruption anal intimida-
tion revel with impunity at the people's cost,
and to the people's shame. Voters arc bribed
and bullied without disguise. Seats are no-
toriously disposed of by rival brokers in Lon-
don, to opulent candidates without capacity, or
toruined row's without principle. Half the contests,
at the last general election, are proved to have been
mere gambl in g struggles, between lavish prodignli ty on
one rde and accomplished knavery on the other.
Not in one case out of twenty, in county or in town,
have the constituencies had the selection or nomina-
tion of candidates. As between the competitors who
have been put forward by overbearing local influence,
or by the impudent dictation of a West-end club, the
electors have, indeed, been nominally called upon to
decide. But even this semblance of power has
seldom been truly left them. The poverty of some,
the cupidity of others, has been confessedly worked
upon without stint or scruple ; while a still more
numerous class have openly and ostentatiously been
browbeaten into voting against their deliberate con-
victions and opinions. All self-respect in our
middle classes is boldly set at naught. Save for the
purposes of indecent and disgusting exposure of par-
ticular individuals, the inquiries lately made by Ejec-
tion Committees have been utterly devoid of results.
In some half-dozen instances the inning of writs has
been suspended, but in a far greater number of cases
even this clumsy homage to public decency has not
been paid. Major BMW-9EORD has had the tip of his
ear pinched by a Committee, and received an admoni-
tion to be more cautious ift future how he commits
himself in writing. Sir F. Swim is declared by the
House of Commons to be a soldier and a gentleman,
and, as such, not amenable to the obsolete laws
which our great-grandfathers passed against bribery.
Messrs. COPPOCK and BROWNE coolly declare that
they have, for party purposes, withdrawn so
many petitions for bribery, as against so many
others, without ever consulting the parties con-
cerned, either candidates or constituencies; whereupon
the llonse has merely stared for a moment, laughed
a little, and passed without comment to the orders of
the day. Redress or remedy under the present sys-
tem seems almost hopeless.
Prevention alone remains—the simplest and purest
remedy, yet hitherto the only one that has never
been tried. All who are not mere political empiric.
feel that the likeliest way to check the recurrence of
this moral typhus, is by checking the generation of
its causes, and preventing, as far as is possible, that
contact with corruption, of the fatal effects of which we
have so many proofs. If measures for the promotion
of public health will not eradicate every seed of physi-
cal disease, is that any reason why we should
hesitate to labour at the work of prevention, or to
strive for the curtailment and circumscription of
the pestilent power of contagion? So with Secret
voting. Nobody means to say that bad men will not
still be influenced by selfish motives in giving a
silent suffrage as they are now ioflommed in giving
a noisy one. Nobody argues that the hungry expect-
ant will not mutely endeavour to bring into power
the party amongst whom he reckons his patrons.
But what the advocates of the Ballot Insist on Is thin
that thousands of industrious men, who have no
paltry interest to serve and no personal gain to seek,'
will be enabled by means of the Ballot to vote
without being intimidated; and that an equally an-
morose section of the community will be saved from
• the degradation and the defilement of direct and
personal corruption, because the tempter would have
no security, if he offcred his money, that he would
receive in return the consideration he now exacts.
If the Ballot could only prevent one half the intimi-
dation and bribery that now prevail, would not
such a means of voting be a benefit to the nation at
large ?
The number of members in the present Parliament
who pledged themselves on the hustings to vote for
Mr. BERKELEY'S motion is considerably greater than
that to be found in the late House of Commons.
Even in that Assembly it will be remembered that
the principle on two different occasions was affirmed
by the vote of a majority. On the occasions referred
to, however, the triumph of electoral freedom and
right was more apparent than real—the numbers
voting on each side being small, and the actual result
being attributable in a great degree to the absence
of the Tories from the divisions. It is not by acci-
dent or surprise that great moral victories can be'
filched from oligarchical corruption ; and it is more
important to the cause of safe and permanent pro-
geese that the great question of free voting should
be fully and thoroughly discussed; and that, by
a division in a full House, the country should
be enabled to judge of every man who calls
himself a represeetative of the people, whether he
be for the existing system of bribery and bullying,
threatening and treating, or whether he be a friend
of electoral emancipation. Another general election
cannot be very far off; and the vote which the mem-
bers of the present House of Commons may give
to-night will assuredly be remembered in their
favour or against them when they stand upon the
hustings next time. No test is likely to be more
rigorously or more universally applied at the

FRANCE.

PARIS. MONDAY EVENING.
Count Panin, the Russian Minis:er of Justice, ar-
rived in Paris yesterday from St. Petersburg. He
is said to be charged with a special mission to the
government. The purport of this mission may
be collected with tolerable certainty from
the following article in the Asse»ihMe Nationale,
a paper which in the character it evidently aspires
to fill of the Russian Munitcur in I'aris, has, doubt-
less, received a communication from the Russian
embassy. The .Assemblt:e says :
We learn that a note from St. Petersburg, which arrived
in Paris on Satiardey by a cabinet courier, has been commu-
nicated to the different courts of Europe by the different
ministers. In this note the eahinet of St. Petersburg is said
to declare that it is the intention of the Emperor to mein-
taio the demands which he thought right to address to the
Porte on the maintenance of the privileges and guarantees
of the orthodox Greek religion, in the terms in which those
demands were drawn up in the la.t dispatch of Prince
Menchikoff. After having developed the motives which
induced the Emperor to exact new guarantees from the
Porte, and to insist thereon, the cabinet of St. Peters-
burg is said to declare that the Emperor in unwise in-
tends to make war upon Turkey, or to seise this
occasion for encroaching on the integrity and independence
of the Ottoman empire. The cabinet of St. Petershurg
adds, however, that in case the Divan should persist in re-
jetting the demands presented to it, the Emperor would
think right to give to his army in Bessarabia the order to
occupy Use Danubian provinces. This oecopatioa would
not have the eharacur of a declaration of war, since the
difference at this moment pending between the Porte
and Russia enters into the category of those whiA,
according to the terms of the treaties existing be-
tween Russia and Turkey, may lead to the occupation
of the provinces. The communication of this note,
if it be real, es we do not doubt, is of a nature to dissipate
ell apprehebsiont. Ru.sia, in occupying the Danubian pro-
vinces, desires, no doubt, to constrain the Porte to make
the emiceseions demanded from it, and which it still op-
poses ; but there vs every reason to hope that after the
occupation of the provinces by Russia, diplomacy will in-
tervene, and that it will find means to conciliate all inte-
rests engaged in this sad affiir, which, we repeat for the
hundredth time, did not merit all the emotion it has caused,
and which it still causes, in the political and commercial
worlds. Tease persons who may believe that war can arise
fr •in misting complications, would give proof, iu our opi-
nion, of but little correctness in the appreciation of the
character and the hearing of political events.
If Russia be permitted to pursue the course indi-
cated in this article, without being treated as an
aggressor, she will have gained an immense ad-
vantage from her own wrong, and will have
the laugh against all the courts and all the fleets in
Europe. There is no rightful pretence for her occu-
pation of the Danubian provinces for the purpose of
exercising a pressure upon Turkey in support of the
claims to the Protectorate of the Greek subjects of
the Porte, put forward by Prince Menchikoff. That
is a subject wholly distinct from the peculiar rights
of Russia in those provinces, secured by the treaty of
Adrianople. It is said, indeed, that a sum of money
owing by Turkey for the expenses of the Russian
occupation in 1848, would give Nicholas a right to
enter the territory until the sem due—a million
sterling, I believe—should be paid. But, as-
suming this proposition to be well founded, it
is against common equity and common
sense that he should invade the Turkish
territory, avowedly with a totally different object.
This note of the Assemblele has produced a
marvellously good effect at the Bourse to-day,
because it is considered as a positive avowal
that the Emperor of Russia has no present intention
of besieginfr Constantinople. But, if he be allowed to
establish himself quietly in the Danubian provinces,
he will have gained a most important step towards
his ultimate object. The English and French fleets
cannot be for ever doing police duty at the mouth
of the Dardanelles, and it mast be borne in
mind that their presence would' not suffice
to prevent the taking of Constantinople
by land, if Russia should be allowed to
make all her preparations without let or hindrance.
If the Sultan sets any value upon the preservation
of his empire, be must treat the very step indicated
by the Assembles as a declaration of, war, and I
have every reason to believe that he is pre-
pared to do so. The French and English
fleets have orders to proceed at once to Constantinople,
if the Sultan, construing the treaties for himself, shall
be of opinion that the peace has been broken by
Russia. It is plainly to be inferred from an article
of the Pays of to-day that the French government,
contrary to the expressed opinions of the Russian
organs both of Paris and London, is prepared to see
the crossing of the Prath treated by Turkey as
caress bell'

There has been a still further improvement at the
Bourse to-day, and the public securities have now
nearly recovered from the unfavourable impression
caused by the posture of affairs in the East. At the
termination of business the Three per Cents. had
risen 2f. 35c. for cash, and 2f. 20c. for the account ;
whilst the Four-and-a-Half per Cents. for money
improved 2f., and 2L 20e. for the end of the month.
Bank of France shares advanced 20f. Closing prices:l
—For cash : Three per Cents., 78f. • Four-and-a-
Half per Cents., 102 f. For the account : Three per
Cents., 77f. 90c.; Four-and-a-Half per Cents., 102 f.
20c. Bank Meek, 2,660.
In the railway share market there was much ac-
tivity is business, and eventually a considerable ad-
vance in prices had taken place ;—Lyons to the
Mediterranean shares rose 70f.; Paris and Rouen,
63f. ' • Paris and Lyons, 63f. • Westerns, 47f. ; Paris
and Strasbourgs, 43f. ; and Northam, 40E The
Anal quotations were:—Northern, 8801; Paris and
Orleans, 1,0121.; Paris and Strasbourg, 886 f.; Paris
sad Lyons, 9001. ; Paris and Rouen, 1,016 E ; Lyons
to the Mediterranean, 7471.30 c. ; Western of France,
707 f.