The Express.
London, England, 1866-10-12 00:00:00

PRINCESS'S.

TH7B ITINTIIB, THE TRIPE}ZI,LTANCF..—After which TIIE
BrOI:TENOT CAP l'AMessr3.3. (7 hore th O. liouey ; Mimes
Neilson, Augusta Thomson, and Mr.. Stirling,—And Qulsr
LODGING

IfAYM ARK T.

Tins lirmrnio. TTlF:AVEitliliVitOtTlt. Meows. C. Ma-
thews, Ilnelutane, Chippendale de ; Vesdames C. Mathews.
Chippendale, Wright. .te -Ballet Divertissement the Chases
Healey.—THE CRITIC.—And MY IIUdBAND'S

THIS Eviainio, BRUTUS AND cESAR. Miss Heursde.—And
TILE LONG STRIKE. Messrs. D. lioueleault, Emery, Withlicomb.
Cowper', de. ; Mrs. D. E. ouch:milt. —r.:ltelatilog with TWEEDLE.
TON'S TAIL COAT. Mr. IL 11 i(l,lle..mb. —Commence g 7.

STRAND.

TAM HYLNINO, TITS MARRIED BACHRLOR.—After which
WAITING YOH TUE I NM:Ia:ROUND. —DER YRIKSGHLTZ ;
O. A GOOD CAST FOR A HELL—AwI JACKII DELIGHT.

BRITANNIA

Twis Hymn., THE TRIM. Mrs. Lane —The
woudrous Brothers Victor,lll ; The Great Vaulting Tempe; The
Delaeanti ; H. Wardiul ; The Louinillo Ulastrels.—And MARY
ELMONSTONL

man W.kTED AT LONDON BRTDOL

THIS DAT —Morning, 311. :Jon.
To-mozzow—murning, 411. 251.1

7.7:Aitt7rtsomi7 A. 11m.
....Aitornoou, A. 42m.

LONDON, FBIDAY, OCTOBER 12.

LORD MACAULAY dwells in one of his essays
upon the strange exchange of principles, or rather
of professions, which took place between Whigs and
Tories under the earlier years of the Hanoverian
rule. The Whigs became strong Royalists, and
endeavoured to aggrandise the power of the Crown.
The Tories affected zeal for popular liberties, and
strove to reduce that power. At heart, both the
two great parties were what they had always been.
Dynastic predilections and antipathies veiled their
real doctrines. The almost servile loyalty of the
Tories was given to " the King over the water ;"
and their dislike of the " usurper" disguised itself
as a zeal for fretaloni. To the Whigs, the house of
HANOVER was the symbol of resistance to the
spiritual and temporal despotism of the Swains ;
and in fortifying the power of the Crown they
believed that they were serving public liberty.
A somewhat similar transfer of principles has
marked the course of the political agitation in
which the country is now engaged. Since Mr.
BRIGHT took his stand upon the old lines of the
constitution, toryism has begun, unconsciously,
but not the less dangerously, to coquet with revo-
lution. By implication, it pronounces the consti-
tution obsolete,—a thing of the past, to which
return is neither desirable nor practicable.
But, at heart, both parties are still the,
same. The Tories desire, in new arrangements,
that assurance of the continued ascendancy of a
class which they can no longer fled in adherence
to traditional maxims and practices. They are,
therefore, innovators. The Liberals believe in the
constitution, not as it existed in its rudimentary
stage, but as usage and precedent have widened it
into adaptation to the growing life of the nation ;
and they would not artificially restrict its ex-
pansive power, or clip into fancy shapes its stately
natural growth.
The tendency to twos., Parliamentary Reform,
on grounds which implicitly involve a political re-
volution, has been exemplified very lately in the
columns of the leading organ of the party of
resistance. With the constitutional lore of the
Times we leave one of our correspondents to deal,
only suggesting that for a beginner in the studies
to which our contemporary's attention is now
turned, Archbishop WIIATELY'S " Easy Lessons"
would probably be found more suitable than the
learned volumes of Mr. IlAtxum. The equality
of the three (so-called) Estates, which is said to
be the theory of the constitution, has, it is
urged, long since disappeared in practice. The
House of Commons has encroached upon the
other two—it has practically absorbed them into
itself; and the influence which they manage to
exert within it is their only hold upon power.
A Reform, therefore, which should make
the House of Commons, as its name implies,

simply the representative of the commonalty, and
impress upon it a purely popular character, would
amount to the exclusion of the Crown and the
nobility from any control over public affairs. In
other words, the separate authority of the Sove-
reign
and that of the peerage have disappeared as
completely as the power of the clergy—which has
become so fare lost Estate of the Realm that
the Times entirely forgets it, and is, therefore,
forced, in order to make up its tale of Three, to
press the Crown into the service, and to repre-
sent the Sovereign as pos.wesing, according to
the strict theory of the constitution, only a co-
ordinate and co-equal authority with her subjects.
This is a new view of Sovereignty.
Pushed to their legitimate consequences, the
arguments of the Times involve the abolition of
the House of Lords, and the substitution of govern-
ment by a single elective chamber, constituted

fliNgE 4!.1
\

as the House of Commons n 1i;11,43
be, namely, so as to repreAt elsOle—fick
numbers, but wealth, ingerillOrrOsierty, kb-
cation, and privilege. If it does this, where
is the justice or expediency of having a
=te assembly to represent one of these
over again, and that the class which
has the most ample representation in the
elective chamber I The reduction of the House of
Peers to the position new occupied by the two
Houses of Convocation is the least that can be
loOkied for in sooordance with the latest anti-
•tellorni doctrine. Reformers are not so revolution-
ary. It is true that an alternative is held out.
If we go back to constitutional principles, mud
make the House of Commons the repre-
sentative solely of the common people,
we must also, it is said, restore to
the House of Lords and the Crown the co-equal
authority which they possess in theory. But
unhappily for this suggestion, power is not s
question of theory. It cannot be given or taken
away by ingenious devices. The Crown and the
peerage would not have lost the power which it is
proposed to give back to them if they were capable
of keeping it. These speculations which stir the
sleeping lions of politics are scarcely justified by
the occasion. No practical statesman proposes
the sweeping changes in the constitution of the
House of Commons to which they would be
relevant. Mr. GLIDSTONIeIi Bill, which was de-
nounced as democratic and revolutionary, would,
perhaps, have given an electoral body of a million
and a half. It would have left about five mil Pons
of the community unrepresented. In the United
Kingdom there is at present one voter for every
twenty-three inhabitants ; in France there is one
voter for rather more than four inhabitants. The
distance which we have to traverse before reaching
the representation of mere numbers ought to re-
assure the most timid. No conspicuous poli-
tician proposes to enfranchise mere numbers, as
opposed to property, intelligence, and education—
only numbers so far as they have acquired pro-
perty, intelligence, and education. The authen-
tically established progress of the working classes
in the qualifications for the discharge of political
duties is the ground on which their enfranchisement
is always urged. The precedent of a blank reduc-
tion of the suffrage is sometimes deprecated. But
that precedent is not now to be set ; it was mare
in 1832, and there has been no dangerous haste
in acting upon it. The representation of the
working classes in the House of Commons,
to the exclusion of all other orders in
society, is denounced as if it were a
present danger, threatening the just claims
of privilege and wealth ; and yet out of 658 mem-
bers of the present Parliament 458, or consider-
ably more than three-fifths, belong to the nobility
and landed gentry ; and 110, or one-sixth, are
bankers, merchants, and others engaged in great
commercial undertakings. The real danger comes
from an opposite quarter than that to which the
alarmists point. It consists in allowing a great
social power to organise itself outside of the
representative institutions of the country. It
cannot be met either by excluding the working
classes from the representation, or by isolating them
by special franchises from the rest of the com-
munity. If the upper classes had confined their
action to the Upper Chamber, the Upper Chamber
would probably before this have ceased to exist.
They have wisely penetrated into the Lower. The
same amalgamation and association which have pre-
served their influence in Parliament will alone
maintain it, so far as it ought to exist, in the con-
stituencies. To divide the higher and middle,
and the working classes into hostile camps, and to
draw them up in array against each other, is to
ens..re the defeat and political annihilation of the
minority.