The Express.
London, England, 1849-04-14 00:00:00

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LONDON,SATURDAY,APRILI4
THE protectionist meeting at Uxbridge was a model
meeting of its kind. It may be taken as a fair sample
of those meetings which are being got up throughout
the rural districts, ostensibly for the benefit of the
agricultoral class, but in reality to play the game of
a political party. The North Hants electors have
seen through the plausibilities of the performers on
such occasions, and cut the connexion ; an analysis of
the component parts of the Uxbridge meeting, with
some itinerations of their manner of setting to
work, may help to couch the agriculturists in other
places whose visual organs are still obscured.
The Uxbridge gathering was what might be termed
in muonio phraseology "a tiled meeting." The
public, it is true, were admitted to see and hear,
which is not usual in the meetings of the mystic
craft; but they were denied leave to join in the dis-
cussion. It was a meeting of tumors attending the
market. A working man—a freeholder in the county
—respectfully begged leave to esy a word or two, but
was teed;aus anda gentleman on the platform, who
ventured to remark that it was unfair not to hear the
man, had his arms pinioned for his puns, and was
pitched into the body of the meeting. Mr. MONTGO-
MERY, of Brantford, a magistrate for the county, at-
tempted to offer a few observations, bat was taken
round the waist and tossed from the platform by the
son of the chairman, while the chairman himself gave
Mr. MONTGOMERY a broad hint that his same might
be scratched from the list of magistrates for his pre-
sumption. By such gentle and gentlemanly means
unanimity among the speakers was preserved.
The meeting, the chairman declared, was "suck-
s:::tia yeoman's meeting." Looking to the list of
present for some elucidation of this epithet, we
find among them an honourable M.P. for the county
of Bucks; the steward of a noble duke, whose
property (so far as we are aware) is not situated
in or neer the county of Middlesex; and along with a
number of Middlesex tenant farmers and corn-factors,
a copious sprinkling of farmers and millers from
Surrey, Bucks, and even as far u Beaks. The free-
holders of Middlesex—the agricultural labourers and
ether residents in the agricultural puts of Middlesex
—were prevented from speaking, lest they should
ss dissent from the views of the select
I mon-
ists recruited from the neighbouring counties,
my, Bill," a Smithfield drover was once overlyard
to shy, when well nigh beaten by some obstinate
pigs, "lend us a bark of your dog." The protec-
t:Taoists of Middlesex have borrowed a few bow-wows
from Bucks, Surrey, and Berkshire to worry and hunt
Mheir own neighbours at Uxbridge, and will
return the favour at Reigate, Buckingham, or
WaMegford. The performers at the Uxbridge meeting
esettered over four counties. At a given signal
they can assemble in any one of them, and pass them-
selves off upon folks at a distance as a meeting of the
agriculturists of the county in which they assemble.
Four county meetings are thus economically fabri-
cated out of materials which, when cluiely examined,
appear rather scanty for the manufacture of one.
When the chairman spoke of a yeoman's meeting, he
must have been thinking of the heroes of Peterloo.
We have said that these meetings are not, properly
speaking, agricultural, but political. The language of
the speakers at Uxbridge amply bears out the weer-
tion. Mr. NASH'a remedy for agricultural distress war
a general election :—" Their coarse should be to petition
her Majesty to dismiss the present House of Commons
and call together a new one." Mr. JORDAN was of
the same opinion :—" The remedy was a new parlia-
ment." The Stanleyites are so cock-a-hoop with the
largeness of Mr. DIsRAELI'S minority, that they se-
lioudy contemplate an appeal to the constituencies.
The Uxbridge, and other meetings like it, composed
of tory members of parliament, and their canvassing
staffs among the farmers, area beginning of the elec-
tioneering struggle; at all events a reconnoitring of
the ground.
The object of the protectionist meetings at Ux-
bridge, at Devisee, at Warwick, and elsewhere, is to aid
in obtaining a majority for the old tory party in the
I event of a general election. The parties who are active
in getting them up are the tory lords and squires, and
those whom COBBETT used irreverently to call " the
bull-frog farmers." C,oBBETT, with his characteristic
prejudices, was rather indiscriminate in his applica-
tion of the term to all farmers who avail themselves
of the possession of capital, and who aim at more of
refinement and intellectual enjoyment than their fore-
fathers. But of the class which ho had more parti-
cularly in his eye when he invented the name, it
is admirably descriptive. It describes the far-
mer, who, having more money than his neighbours,
affects to be above his business; who keeps hunters,
drinks wine, gives hie daughters regular "piano exer-
cise," less because he has a taste for any of these
things than because he imagines it gives him the air
of being • country gentleman. The bull-frog farmer
apm the finery, not the refinement, of the aristocracy.
For the sake of • nod of recognition at " the meet"
he will do any dirty work for his landlord in the
electioneering line; he will submit to be robbed by
high preserving of game; he will truckle to the
domineering of justices at quarter sessions, and
submit without a murmur to the utmost ine-
quality of rates. He seeks to be continued
in his farm not by good farming, but by
the meanest political subserviency. And us
allowing his landlord's game to eat up half his crops,
and permitting his landlord's rates to be lowered by
the.eicrease of his own, are rather expensive sacrifices,
he seeks remuneration through a monopoly of the
markets.
The political magnates in every county main-
tain a regular staff of these bull-frog fumes
to take care of their electioneering interests.
When you hear of a meeting of tenant farmers, you
may be sure if one or two landlords are present,
countenancing but not ostensibly taking part in the
proceedings, that it is by them all the previous ar-
rangements and the allotment of the parts have
been made. The bull-frogs, who croaked at Ux-
bridge, are about as legitimate representa-
tives of the agricultural classes as the strapping
fellows in smock frocks distributed in picturesque
gedups over the lawn at Stowe, when her Majesty
visited it, were of the villagers; as the Yorkshire
omekeepers, whom the highland lairds arrayed in
kilts when GEORGE IV. visited Edinburgh, were of
the indigenous Celts; or as the sham-sailors one sees
begging at every corner are of the British seaman.
We do not mean to deny that the bond jide agri-
cultural population have been humbugged by these
@shoes and month-pieces of the squirearchy, and have
sereliestingly adopted their sentiments hitherto. But
it is certain that late events have given them pause.
The recent tergiversations of these county political
imionists have been too glaring to escape detection.
For years their incessant cry has been .. „pal
the malt-tax." A time has come when the
repeal of that tax is possible. The county
members, and the independent advocates of retrench-
ment, weld carry its abolition in the House ot Com-
, mina Bat the political agriculturists never meant
that the repeal of the malt-tax should be anything
Me than a patty cs,y. They draw back their hands
id= they see it within their reach. Like babbling
Ilni whipped and chidden by the huntsman, they
Ltenilit on another scent.
The real industrious farmers, who have hitherto
known little, and cared less, about politics, are taken
aback by this sudden change. The agricultural
labourers, the shopkeepers in country towns and
villugee, whose interests arc bound up in that of
their neighbours, arc repelled by awl a barefaced
avowal of insincerity. When told by the men who
uttered them, that the denunciations of the malt-tax, to
which they have been lis'ening for years, were all
fudge and exaggeration, they begin to suspect that