The Express.
London, England, 1858-11-06 00:00:00

THE EXPRESS, SATURDAY EVF4WG, NOVEMBER

mischievous. Delighted with the franchise, they
Irrupt have enough otit "And ade at three,
four/ or bag-Omen pollist places m the/ mime day.
they are the natural prey:ef correart eipots ;
between the vehement ten4icies d thelrish gene--
ally, and the needs and vises of the very low abrt who
are deposited in the ports when the better sort move
on into the country; and, again, between these fac-
tion-tighten and the impassive, submissive, totally
ignorant residuum of the German immigration, long
trains of whom are led to the polls as if marshalled
by an irresistible police, a constituency is set in
action which reduces the genuine citizens to
despair, and favours their inclination to stay at
home en the polling days. These large cities are
ander the spell of the policy of f unctionaryism—a spell
as malignant as that which destroyed the electoral
rights and privileges of Frenchmen ander Louis
Flutter& Mr. BRIGHT should learn that his
pictures of political welfare in the United States
can never be true while tens of thousands of post-
masters, and scores of thousands of Custom-house
officials, and hundreds of thousands of other place-
holders are shifted, or liable to be shifted, with every
change of Administration, which involves more or
leas change of parties. All these, all their eompe-
titon, and all the family connexions of both,
are perpetually exposed to the machinations
of party agents ; and the worst venality,
treachery, trickery, and shameless profligacy
witnessed in England, any time since Mr. Baloar
was born, would compare advantageously with what
every American will admit to be conspicuous in all
important elections in the United States. This,
again, affords no triumph to the anti-reformer, for
the evil does not arise from the extent of the fran-
chise, and would be, if possible, aggravated by any
restriction of the suffrage, while the best protection
daring in existence is found in the ballot-box. How-
ever mischievous the bribery of official promises may
be, intimidation is disarmed. Whole classes of func-
tionaries, and expectant functionaries, and their
supporters, may vote under inspection with a view
to keeping or obtaining place ; but they cannot pre-
vent others from voting the other way. Fine ladies
play off their arta of persuasion or warning occa-
sionally on Broadway tradesmen, as on our country
shopkeepers ; but the Broadway tradesman can
please himself. He may stay away from the poll
from disgust and despair at the proms of New
York electioneering ; but he has nothing to appre-
hend from his customers.

The significance of this truth is beginning, we
are told, to be apprehended in the remoter regions
of the Union, where the elections have always been
a mere faree,—in the Slave States. There, where a
small, self-willed clique has arranged the whole
businees, and carried all before it; there, where
three-fifths of the slaves count as a constituency,
no Englishman of any party would look for
an exemplification of the workings of manhood
savage and its collateral arrangements. There,
however, we now begin to perceive the effi-
cacy of the Ballot, if those who know the country
best say true. We cannot too carefully remember,
if we want to understand the prospects of the Re-
public, which implicates our own foreign policy,
that the non-elaveholding whites constitute seven-
tenths of the white population of the Slave States;
and we are informed by one of their oyez number,
Mr. HILPIR, whose work is one mass of
established facts and irresistible evidences, that
they are becoming c3nvinced of their own wrongs,
and determined to retrieve themselves by the use of
their electoral rights. The slave-holding clique is
in growing apprehension of the retribution which is
to overtake them by means of that " franchise, dim-
" tribution, and ballot" to which Mr. BRIGHT
refers much good which is doe to other causes, and
which his opponents in the Reform question de-
nounce as the cause and the symptom of the poli-
tical corruption of the Republic. The broad frau-
, @hiss and the ballot may, and probably will, re-
trieve the barbaric portion of the American polity.
The broad franchise and the ballot are not likely to
cure that disregard of law, those mob tendencies, and
that insecurity of property which arise from a grave
social anomaly and commercial levity and vice ;
became those evils spring from other than political
atoms. But against genuine political evils they are
believed throughout the Republic to be the best
preventive; and, if we now see the entire body of
the free States united against the policy of the Ad-
ministration—united against a policy of retrogres-
sion at home and aggression abroad—we may appre-
ciate the electoral methods of the Republic as highly
as Mr. BRIGHT, though not for his inapposite rea-
sons. The great point is (when we come to the
end of our own observations), what do the genuine
Republicans of the United States lay to their fran-
chise and their ballot ? The answer that we should
obtain from them, and probably from every citizen
between the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of Mexico,
would be that the bread franchise and the ballot
together are the grand security for ancient liberties
and desired reforms; and that they would surrender
all else that they have and hope for before they
would part with either the one or the other.