The Sun.
London, England, 1864-06-27 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS,

THE EXAMINER ON THE BALLOT.—Lord Pal-
merton is mistaken in supposing that Mr. F. Ber-
keley regards the right of voting as a personal
right which may be exercised for the private benefit
of the individual. The suffrage should neither be
turned to private gain nor to private detriment,
and it is to guard against the latter wrong that the
protection of the Ballot is demanded. And it is
a notorious fact that for want of protection great
numbers of the class of ten-pound househo:ders
in trade take care to disqualify themselves, and
avoid the register as they would avoid the loss
of custom and the displeasure of all persons who
have the power of injuring them. Lord Palmer-
ston's objections to the ballot would be all sound
if independence were the common condition of
the people of this country, if men always chose
their parties from conviction, and in conformity
with them went boldly to the hustings and deli
vered honest votes. But every one knows that
such is not the case, and that where bribery
and intimidation prevail there is a corre-
sponding false show of opinion to save the
shame of the corrupted or the bullied. The
voter against his will is made a hypocrite,
and wears with the badge of party in whose ser.
vice he is pressed a pretence of the opinions belong-
ing to it. He cannot for very shame avow Radical
principles, and go and vote for an ultra-Tory can-
didate. He delivers a false suffrage in conformity
with lying professions. Lord Palmerston ignores
all this, and holds—
In this country, I maintain that a man is proud of his
party. He may be thought right or wrong by his neigh-
bours, but I do not believe that, when he has been enlisted
under the banner of one candidate or the other, he is not
proud of the side he has taken. So far from wishing to
conceal his vote, or sneaking with it to the ballot-box,
he tells all his friends what he is going to do, and is
rather anxious than otherwise that the whole community
should know it.
This is true, no doubt, of the independent man,
who has his opinions, and acts in conformity with
them, fearless of any one's displeasure; but how
many are so happily circumstanced ? and it is for
those who are not, and who have to consider the
consequences of the resentment of landlords,
patrons, and customers, that protection is asked.
'1 he State has no right to require a man to ri3k
ruin in the discharge of a public duty. Lord
Palmerston holds that the franchise is a trust, for
the due performance of which there must be re-
sponsibility to the unenfranchised, and with it pub-
licity. Whether the franchise is a privilege or a trust
is not worth dispute, but whatever may be its nature
there is no responsibility to the unenfranchised, and
if there were, it would be an irresistible argument
for universal suffrage. For nothing can be clearer
than this, that if the unenfranchised are competent
to judge of the way in which the electoral duty is
performed, and, indeed, to exercise a control over it,
they must a fortiori be qualified to discharge it
themselves. To deny them the franchise as unfit,
and to hold the classes fit to be trusted with it re-
sponsible to their judgment as to the exercise, is a
gross and glaring inconsistency. The argument
t hat publicity is essential to a trust is plausible, but
not always sound. And in the dependent elector's
case publicity is fatal to the honest discharge of the
duty. It has always struck us that an anecdote
told by Froissart is highly illustrative of the fallacy
in question. A poor woman complained to Bajazet
that one of his grooms had stolen her milk. Ba-
jazet called for the man, who protested his inno-
cence of the charge. "We will soon discover the
truth of this matter," said Baj3zet ; "cut open the
man's stomach, and let us see what there is in it."
This was pushing light rather further than justice,
for the man was killed in the process of inquiry,
whether innocent or guilty. And in like manner
the electoral body is cut open to see how things go
on in it.

rHE SATURDAY REVIEW" ON SMITE{ O'BRIEN.
The ex-rebel and patriot who has just terminated
a remarkably useless life in harmless obscurity was
not devoid of qualities which have always been
recognised as mitigating the censure due to legal
and even moral criminality, end which partially
redeemed from contempt a career presenting an
unusually broad mark to ridicule. Though tech-
nically a felon and traitor, and really a mischievous
and conceited monomaniac, the late Mr. Smith
O'Brien never utterly forfeited the esteem of his
contemporaries ; and though one of the weakest
and silliest of men that ever claimed to act a part
in history, he was at no time altogether despicable.
In fact, paradoxical as it may seem, it would not
be difficult, without the slightest deviation from
literal accuracy, to Construct a Very toler-
able panegyric on the character of a man
whose life from first to last was an absurd
and dismal mistake, whose mediocre abili•
ties would never have excited notice, but
for the stupendous vanity which accompanied them,
and whose solitary service to his country was that
he exhibited treason and insurrection in a ludicrous
point of view. He was unquestionably sincere, dis
interested, and, according to his very feeble lights,
patriotic. He had the feelioga and principles, as
well as the education, of a gentleman, and was
wholly incapable of a- mean or sordid act. As an
agitator, he devoutly believed in the delusions which
prop gated ; and as a rebel he risktd his life by
the side of the miserable peasants who formud him
extremely ragged regiment. He never made a trade
of patriotism ; he never sent round bis hat ; and
while his most prominent coadjutors found seeitton
a good paying business, Smith O'Brien staked and
lost property and position in a cause which he had
persuaded himself to regard as that of his country.
There was always a certain chivalrousness about the
man. It is recorded of him that, a few days before
the campaign which began and ended at Bailin-
garry, he was all but deposed from the command
by a rebel council of war, beeause rather (absurdly,
by the way) he would not " tarnish the fair fame
of an ancient family: by having recourse to plunder
and robbery" to maintain his army that was to be.
Again, at the most critical moment of the cabbage-
garden fray, he is said to have gone on his knees
to dissuade his followers from burning a party of
police in their extemporised fortress. Such anec-
dotes are often more or less apocryphal, but there
can be no doubt that Smith O'Brien was a humane
and gentlemanlike rebel, and wished as far as pos-
sible to make his revolution with rose water. When
he stood in the dock as a traitor, he received with
entire composure a sentence which he had every
reason to suppose would be punctually carried into
effect; and he would, in all probability, have en-
countered with dignity a fate which he had
undeniably merited. It may be confidently
assumed that no earthly consideration would
have tempted him to purchase, by any con-
cession which he deemed degrading, the
mercy which was extended to him by the
Crown, In oldie, he honourably ciibLinguiziauti Liao,

THE '4 SPECTATOR" ON THE COMING WAR.—
The Conference which ought never to have met has
risen, and the possibilities of peace are slipping
away by hours. One more formal meeting takes
place to-day, and then the plenipotentiaries sum-
moned to register and legalite an act of armed
spoliation disperse to countries more deeply em-
bittered than they were before the assemblage,
:Throughout the negotiations every eonntry en-
gaged has maintained the attitude which it had
assumed in Wart Prussia, insolent, unreasoning,
and aggressive; Austria courteous in seeming, but
following steadily Herr von 13ismark's lead ; Den-
mark complaining, and moderate up to a point, but
pressed beyond that, hard as iron, or as the op-
pressed are apt to be; Russia unintelligible; France
watchful; and England, conciliatory to the verge,
or over the verge, of national humiliation. After
surrendering the treaty 0f1g52, which England her-
self prepared, after giving up Holstein and selling
Lauenburg, after offering one largo slice of the
country whose integrity he was bound to defend,
after compelling hie unhappy ally to abandon the
boundary of a thousfind years, and suggesting that
she might live without a defensible frontier, Earl
Russell made his final effort in favour or peate and
accepted a crowning humiliation, lie abandoned
his own ultimatum, the line of the Sehlei, and by
agreeing td gii aWard of any boundary between the
Dannewerke and Apenrade, agreed to place purely
-Danish "e3pulation under the rule of their foes.
raven that shameful concession was rejected, eagerly
by Prussia, reluctantly by Austria, despairingly by
Denmark, and then at last the uselessness of the
Conference became clear even to the diplomatic
mind, and it remained only to decide whether Ger-
many should carry out the design which she has
pursued all along, and Denmark ceases to exist, or
England should declare that concession being ex-
hausted,she was prepared to defend the right of small
nations to exist by arms. Then at last the thesis
maintiined tr.,m the firs! by Earl Grey aione among
p.mtietan,, and the Spectator alone among journats,
was felt to be true. Ilia England trom the first
preterred her honour and her policy to her comtort
and the surplus, had she counselled the formal re-
nunciation of Holstein, and sent 20,000 men to the
Dannewerke, the war would never have broken out,
and with Holstein assigned to Germany and
Lauenburg to Prussia, the Danes might have
remained the guaranteed and independent masters
of all that is truly theirs, the Peninsula north of
the river which before Latin ceased to be a oni-
loquial tongue was described as the Scandinavian
frontier,

self from his less scrupulous companions by refund
ing to snatch freedom at the expense of his parole;
and he would, we doubt not, have lived and died a
convict rather than seek a favour from the Govern-
ment which at last pardoned him. Altogether, the
descendant of Brien Boroihme had a sort of regality
about him which marked him off from the mercenary
or bloodthirsty patriots with whom an unkind
destiny associated him, Intellectually, he was a
very poor creature ; as a political guide and leader
of men, he was an incapable simpleton ; but he had
at least a fall aterage share of the moral qualities
which, when found in conjunction with common
sense, claim the respect and admiration of mankind.
What Ntrae really wonderful about a character which
otherwise offers little to invite or repay the labour
of psychological analysis was a vanity which ap-
proached the preternatural. For a man who had
had the benefit of the best education that England
has to give, and whom 20 years in the House of
Commons might have taught to take the measure of
his own abilities, there is something astounding in
the dull, stolid audacity with which he uniformly
thrust himself into positions for which he was ludig
crously unfit, and assumed responsibilities which be
had not a single qualification, natural or acquired;
for creditably discharging. Without a particle or
oratorical talent, he set up for a demagogue; and;
with the pro`oundest ignorance of the art and
science of war, he headed an armed insurrection
against the British Empire. He was cased in a
perfect rhinoceros hide of self-conceit on which no
amount of ridicule, remonstrance, or censure could
could ever make the faintest impression.