Northern Times.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1859-05-02 00:00:00

KING'S LYNN

Lord Stanley, on rising to return thanks, was received
with loud cheers. The noble Lord, after a few remarks of
purely local interest, said---Gentlemen, turning from our
local and private affairs to those which concerns the interest
of the empire at large, I will ask you to consider what is
the occasion of our meeting here to-day. The late Parlia-
ment has been dissolved after an existence of only two
years. There aro many persons to whom a dissolution of
Parliament is disagreeable and inconvenient. Not all are
qnite as ready and quite as willing to face their constituents
as my friend and colleague and myself; and, no doubt, among
those to whom a dissolution is a sort of annoyance,
there are many who are not inclined to find fault with the
policy of the Government by whom that dissolution was
advised. There is no doubt that a general election is an
interruption to parliamentary business, that it causes a
certain amount of delay in useful legislation ; and that it
is a source of expense and inconvenience to many private
persons ; therefore I quite concur with those who think
that, unless a fair reason can be brought forward for
advising a dissolution of Parliament, and unless there be
some definite object to be gained by such a step, and a
fair and reasonable prospect of attaining that object, it
is a step which no Minister is justified in taking.
But I contend that, under circumstances of the
present time, the Government had sufficient reason and
justification for the course which they adopted. (Hear,
hear) In the Parliament which has just expired, the
state of parties was very peculiar, and was such that, in
my belief, no government, from whatever side of the
House, and from whatever shade of political opinions it
was constituted, could have hoped for many months to
have commanded support. To say nothing of various
small sections of men acting under their own leaders, or
acting individually without any leaders at all, there were
three main political parties into which the late parlia-
ment was divided. There were the Liberals under the
leadership of Lord John Russell ; there was the portion of
the Whig party supporting Lord Palmerston ; and there
was the Conservative party, of which Lord Derby is the
recognised head. This last party outnumbered each of
the other sections separately, but did not constitute_ a
majority of the entire House of Commons. Now, let us
consider what is the position of these three parties respec-
tively. Lord John Russell commands the confidence of the
great Liberal party in this country : and I will add, what-
ever differences of opinion there may be between us, that
he enjoys and deserves to enjoy as much public respect as
any public man of this day ; but a Government formed by
Lord John Russell in the late Parliament, whether it had
been formed last year upon the fall of the Administration of
Lord Palmerston, or whether it had been formed the other
day after the division upon the Reform Bill, would have had
to encounter not merely the opposition of the Conservative
party, but the avowed and open opposition of those whose
views differ from those of Lord John Russell. It would
also, I believe, hare had to ctcom cr the distrust and

hostility of a large number of members sitting upon the
Liberal aide, who are no very warm partisans of parlia-
mentary reform ; who probably, many of them in their
hearts, regard it as little better than a delusion; and
whose hostility to a Government formed upon the princi-
ples of an extensive reform would have been not the
less decided and not the less effective because it would,
to a considerable extent, have been disguised under
the semblance of friendship. Lord Palmerston, on the
last occasion when we met here alter the general election
in March, 1857, enjoyed a degree of popularity and influ-
ence such as had not been possessed by any Minister since
the days of Sir Robert Peel. That influence, in the few
short months which elapsed between March, 1857, and
February, 1858, he continied to lose more rapidly and
more signally than any public man in our time. It is not
necessary that I should now go into the causes of this loss
of power. The state of our relations with the French
Government had not, I think, much to with the matter.
There were appointments made by the late Ministry which
started and scandalised public opinion; there was au
undisguised indiffence, not to call it aversion, to many
of those views and feelings which the Liberal party
supporting the late Government had deeply at heart ; and
there was also a somewhat too obviously displayed con-
sciousness of power, as if a Minister with a great ma-
jority at his back was entitled to treat all hostile argu-
ment as mere faction and cavil. Be the causes what
they may, the fact remains, that while, in March, 1857,
Lord Palmerston was carried, as it were, into power upon

the shoulders of the people, the same Administration fell,
February, 1858, with scarcely a voice raised ill its defence.
It is not, therefore, in the Parliament which, only fifteen
months ago, condemned the Administration of Lord Pal-
merston, that another Government could have been formed
under the same leader. The Conservative party possesses
many qualifications at the present time which are not found
in an equal degree in any other. It is united, powerful, and
compact ; it has a unity of purpose, an instinct of discip-
line, and confidence in the leaders which it has chos
these great qualities of the party have never been

time more signally displayed than in the last two sessions.
But the Conservative party, however powerful, does not
constitute a majority of the House of Commons. The other
two political sections to which I have adverted, however
incapable they may be of permanently uniting for purposes
of action, are quite able and quite willing to unite for pur-
poses of opposition. lam not going to complain of that,
or to raise a cry of "faction." It is, I suppose, a law of
nature, that, where there are several parties, those parties
will from time to time have trials of strength ; and
no Government, be its principles what they may, can carry
on administrative business for any length of time without
giving fair occasions of controversy and dispute ; but the
result of that state of things is, that in the late Parliament
no Ministry, under whatever leader, could have long
escaped difficulties and defeats. It is difficult to say to
how many defeats and how much humiliation, in a

cal sense, a Minister is bound to submit before 11

the extreme step of interrupting public business either by
resignation or a dissolution of Parliament. This is a ques-
tion which will always be, in a great degree, settled by

men's temperament and feeling as well as by their abstract
opinions. The noble lord, having proceeded at conside-
rable length to quote precedents to vindicate the Govern-
ment in their appeal to-the country at the present moment,
continued : One result has sometimes been predicted from
this dissolution, which I think is not likely to follow.
You sometimes hear it said that the next Parliament
will be divided into two great parties---all on one side
pledged against reform, and all on the other pledged
strongly in its favour. Ido not think- this is likely to be

the cise, and I am not sure that it is desirable ; because if
the House of Commons is worth anything, it oug.ht faith-
fully and accurately to represent the general feeling of the
country. (Cheers.) I believe that upon reform, as upon
all other subjects, there aro quite as many shades and gra-
dations of opinion among the public at large as within the
walls of the House of Commons; but I believe the next
Parliament will be returned with more definite and decided
ideas upon the subject, and that it will not he a Par-
liament packed upon a party-cry like that of the China
war. (Hear, hear.) In constituences where Liberal opi-
nions prevail, pledges given by members will be more
closely looked to; and in other constituencies, where the
predominant opinion is really Conservative, but where from
apathy that opinion has been overborne, I believe both
parties will exert themselves to have an honest expression
of their opinion, and that it will be kn )wn. In the late
parliament the strength of the Conservative party was 275
members, and I believe in the next parliament it will ex-
ceed, perhaps, considerably, 300. Whether that is a suffi-
cient number to give an effective support
ment now in power, is a matter of comparatively
moment ; but it is a matter of much more importance that

to the govern-

a body so numerous and united will necessarily exercise

upon public opinion, the course of

.tblic affairs, Lind fatur

legislation, a very pOwerful influence and contrld Wit'

giving you minuie:or detailed pledges upon reform, I will

briefly staze what are my views on the subject. I have
always thought that the county franchise was fixed too high,
and I cordially concurred in the proposition of the govern-
ment to reduce it to £lO. On a former occasion I felt it my
duty to vote against' Mr. Locke King's motion to that effect,
and you may remember that I told you that Inv only reason
for resisting the change then proposed was that I thought the
question of a £lO franchise could not be considered
separately from the general question of reform
cerity of that assertion has been proved, so far as I am

The sin-

concerned, by the insertion of a £lO county franchise in the
Government measure. You have heard, no doubt, a great

deal criticism on that part of the Government scheme; by
which it was proposed to assimilate the borough ai,d county
franchise. I have listened to the arguments against that
proposal, and weighed them in my own mind as carefully as
I could; but they are objections to which I entertain very
little weight. I still think that, as long as you have an
unequal franchise in boroughs and countries, you will
have a dissatisfied class that to give one man a vote
becouse he lives within an arbitrary line separating
a borough from a county, and to take away a
vote from another man because he lives beyond that
line, is not to be defended upon any principal of
reason or justice. (Hear, hear.) By an assimilation of
the two franchises you go a great way to solve the difficulty
which will present itself to all future parliaments which
undertake to deal with reform—the perplexing question of
disfranchisement. It is idle to suppose that you can avoid
it. But lam bound to say that the proposal in question
did not appear to be received with favour by parliament ;
and in a matter not involving any great principle, but
simply a question of the fairest and most convenient ar-
rangement which can be made, it is, of course, impossible to
overlook the general expression of public opinion. With
regard to the borough franchise, I think that that franchise
ought to be extended, but that we are far too much in the
habit of looking to the extension in one particular direction
—from £lO to £6, or to any other figure.