The Sun.
London, England, 1852-03-13 00:00:00

evidence, and yet it was the only borough in the kingdom
which was to be punished, although it had been instrumental
in doing much public service. The next plea which he ventured
to offer was, that when confessions were extracted from cri-
minals, under the promise of indemnity upon their revealing
the whole truth, it was not fair and juat to turn round and
use, the confessions thus obtained as the grounds on which
to convict. Now, the manner in which the Commissioners
bad been received in St. Albans, and the frank and candid
manner in which they were furnished with information,
contrasted very favourably with the' reception which other
commissions, having a similar object in view, had received
in another borough. The confessions which were made to
the Commissioners were made with a distinct and firm reli-
ance upon the good faith and honour of Parliament, and it
would be a violation of both if Parliament were now to turn
round and use those confessions as a pretext for punishment.
He had not in his haud a copy of the Bill now before the
House for the disfranchisement of St. Albans, but, if his me-
mory served him right, it distinctly stated that all persons
who being cited should truly answer questions put to them
by the Commissioners should be indemnified from all the
pains, penalties, and disabilities which they might have
incurred by their illegal practices. This he apprehended was
the text and the spirit of the Act, but he could not con-
ceive how a man, after making a full and true confession of
his crime, was to be indemnified from all the conse-
quences of his act, if at the same time he was to be de-
prived of the privilege of the franchise.—(Hear, hear.)
This struck him .as being unjust and at variance with the
letter of the Act. As lie had been held up so -much
to public animadversion as .the author of a system of
corruption, he would assume for argument sake, that there
was some foundation for the charges made against lahn,
and upon that assumption, and upon the principle of " put
a thief to catch a thief," he would, with the permission of
the House, state the present mode of electing a Member of
Parliament, with the view of showing the inefficiency of the
present law to check the offence of bribery. The present
dill, as he before stated, was one of three, the ostensible ob-
jest of which was to put an end to bribery and corruption at
elections. Now, in his opinion, none of those Bills would
answer the object in view. The difficulty of getting evidence
on which to convict for the offence of bribery was so great,
that even in the borough of St. Albans, where it was supposed
to be so rife, the rewards which were offered at the election of
1850, of 1,0001. and 5001. for proof to insure conviction, were
not claimed—no person amid the constituency having been
found to sell his evidence, although it was alleged that votes
were sold in the borough for 51. each. During the fifteen
months which he ( Mr. Bell) had been in purgatory, in con-
sequence of his election, he had inquired into the law and
practice of elections, and his conclusion was that the ex-
treme stringency of the law rendered it inoperative. The
law was so strict that if an elector travelled 40 miles to vote
for a candidate he durst not offer him a glass of beer, nor
could any person on his behalf offer a voter that refresh-
ment which, under the circumstances, he would be entitled
to as a matter of course. The penalties upon all persons
concerned in what was termed bribery were so absurdly
stringent that an agent might be fined in a sum of 150,0001.,
or committed to prison for 400 or 500 years, if he could live
so long. All experience with respect to criminal punish-
, meuts proved that the extreme stringency of the law led to
its most glaring evasion. When sheepstealing was a hang-
ing ffence, how very few criminals were executed in pro-
portion to sheep stolen. Why, it was well known that the
judges had a consultation where the offence became aggra-
vated in any county, and it was agreed among them that a
few sheep stealers should be hanged, by way of an example
to the rest. The consequence of this mode of administering
the law was, that some fine morning a lot of fellows were ex-
ecuted who never expected to be hanged at all.—(Hear,
and laughter) The election of a Member of Parliament was
altogether managed by his agents—of the genus agent there
were several species. It was the practice of an agent to have
a committee-room, of the existence of which the candidate
had no knowledge whatever. In this room the agent met
the electors. The manner of bribing was effected some-
what after this fashion :—The elector called upon the agent
to make inquiries. " How you do, Mr. Smith ?" says
the agent—holding up three of his fingers to denote thereby
the number of sovereigns he was prepared to pay. " Oh, I
don't feel at all well to-day," replies the elector. " How is
that ?" responds the agent (holding up his five fingers)
" I'm sorry to hear you're unwell." " I'm better now, thank
you," says the elector, and he walks to the window to look
into the street. The agent then sports five sovereigns on the
table, and turns round to look out of the other window. In
the mean time the five sovereigns and the elector disappear
simultaneously, and both agent and elector positively swear
before a Select Committee of the House that the one did not
give, and the other did not take, a bribe.—(Hear, hear, and
laughter.) Now this was the mode in which the affairs of
an election were carried on by the agents, spies, messengers,
and clerks employed, but so cunning were the agents, and
so dexterously was everything managed so as not •to
compromise the candidate, that, whatever his suspicions
may be, it was impossible for him to detect anything
illegal. He would, however, do those agents the justice
to say, that although, like lawyers, they cared not
on whose behalf their services were retained, they
discharged their duty to their principals with the utmost
fidelity. A great deal had been said about the corruption of ,
St. Albans, but let it be remembered that there were
nu e• trs of Honourable Gentlemen in that House who had
s in the most barefaced and unblushing bribery,
b 1- hose return there could be no petition, on
t- 4 guilty complicity of the rival candidate ; and ,
yet these : onourable Gentlemen were prepared to vote for
a Bill to disfranchise the borough of St. Albans. According
to the present system of electing a Member of Parliament
the candidate was obliged to be kept in ignorance of the man-
ner in which he was elected, and as far as the electors were
concerned, in the generality of instances they knew nothing
whatever about politics. They looked upon an election as a ,
Christmas festivity. If an elector was asked what he was, ,
his usual reply was, " I votes with the Blues or the Reds,"
as the case might be. If he were asked about the corn-laws,
his reply would be, "Oh, I don't know nothing about that ;"
and if he were asked whether he liked a cheap loaf,
hie reply would be, "In course I does; I'd rayther
pay fourpence than sixpence. "—(Loud laughter.) He main-
tained that bribery was a disease,—(Hear, hear.), It was
extremely like small-pox.—(Laughter.) It was contagious
and communicable from one person to another—the person
who suffered much by its attack was marked as long as he ,
lived, and the contagion only operated where there was a
susceptibility towards it. In order to put an end to bribery,
the primary object ought to be to imbue the public mind
with a repugnance of the offence, and to provide that the
person convicted of bribery should lose cast in the world. It
might be said that it was a Utopian idea to expect that all
classes in the community could be purged of this immoral
tendency, but he assured the House that, even in the
much-abused St. Albans, there were two hundred electors,
in very humble positions of life, against whom no charge
hal ever been made of receiving a bribe.—(Hear, hear.)
He would come now to the method of curing this evil; and
that was to rescind the laws which now existed, and which
were so severe that they were never enforced. Remove the
penalty, as they had done in the case of St. Albans, against
all lawyers, agents, and solicitors, and then remove the ab-
surdity of their committees up stairs, where gentlemen, all of
whom were probably equally guilty, sat upon each others'
cases, and get in their place a Commission composed of such
men—and he believed they could not get better—as sat upon
the St. Albans case. He respected those Learned Gentle-
men as a child respected the father that corrected him—
(Laughter)—and he could assure the House that a mouse
was not more helpless before three bull terriers than a wit-
ness was in the hands of these three gentlemen. If the one
missed him, the second was sure to snap him up, and the
third to swallow him.— (Renewed laughter.) If every one
suspected of bribery had the prospect of being sent before
such a tribunal as that, the man who attempted either to
bribe or to receive bribes would only be fit to spend the rest
of his days in Hanwell.—( Hear, and laughter.) And it
should further be borne in mind that the Commissioners
ought to be remunerated by the State, to prevent them being
retained in the. interest of either party. While he attended
the Committee on his own case he was struck with the in-
genious manner in which business was done, and the expe-
rience he had there led him to see the fallacy of adopting
such a mode to discover bribery. As long as a witness talked
irrelevantly he was allowed to go on as he pleased; but as
soon as he appeared to be going to touch upon anything that
would have been decisive he was stopped. If he had been a
member of the Committee, knowing nothing of the case but
what transpired there, he would have voted for unseating
himself, because, though there wes no legal evidence against
him, yet he could smell, what was bottled up.—(Laughter.)
He thought it right to make these remarks, because he had
been blackened from one end of the country to the other as
the most corrupt Member of the House; and, therefore, he
was determined to do what he could, whether in the House
or not, to stop bribery and corruption. But the Bill now
before the House would not effect that object ; it would
operate as the old punishment against sheep-stealing used to
operate; the enormity of the crime would be lost in disgust
at the punishment, and other boroughs equally corrupt would
be allowed to escape. Besides, he could not see the propriety
of first promising an indemnity for speaking the truth, and
then, when the truth was spoken, turning round and dis-
franchising the borough. It was true the fine was remitted,
but then capital punishment was inflicted, which was much
worse than any fine.—(Laughter.) He had, perhaps, tres-
passed upon the time of the House longer than he ought to
have done. It was because he felt it was a case of lite and
death with him and the borough of St. Albans. St. Albans
was in the mud, and he was in the mud, and unless he could
drag St. Albans out of the mud, he must stop there himself.
He would move, therefore, that this debate be adjourned,
and he would leave those Honourable Gentlemen who con-
tinued to persecute the borough to name any day for its ad-
journment they pleased.
The motion was not seconded.

Mr. HUMShaving could
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they meant to reform all crying abuses, and after the long
speech of the Honourable Member, who allowed that he sat
in the House illegally, and that if he had sat upon the Com-
mittee he. would have disfranchised himself, he hoped her
Majesty's Government would not allow this to be an isolated
case, but that they would go to the root of the evil by put-
ting an end to these small boroughs, where, according to the
testimony of the most competent witnesses they could have,
bribery was all but universal.
Sir DE LACY EVANS also tendered his acknowledg..
ments to the Government for having taken charge of the
Bill. It would indeed have been much to be regretted if this
Bill had been lost; but at the same time it would be equally
hard if St. Albaas were to be made the only black sheep,
while other culprits, not less guilty, escaped; and he would
beg to suggest that a similar Commission should be issued in
the case of Harwich.
The Bill was then read a second time, to be committed on
Friday next.
The Personal Estates of Intestates Bill went through Com-
mittee.
Sir R. H. INGLIS presented a petition from the trustees
of the British Museum, praying for the annual Parliamentary
grant. _

Mr. HUME gave notice that on an early day
he would
ask the Home Secretary whether he intended to carry
out
the resolution of a Committee which sat three years ago, that
there should be a change in the government of the British
Museum
, but which recommendation had never yet been at-
tended to.
Sir R. IL INGLIS then presented petitions from Ban-
bury. Ross, and towns in the West Ridings of Yorkshire
and Essex, against the Maynooth grant; also from Mr. Ju-
lius Jeffries, drawing attention to the merits of his life-boats
in connexion with the burning of the Amazon, and praying
for a Parliamentary inquiry into the value of his improve-
ments.
Mr. SPOONER presented several petitions from Church-
men and Dissenters in North Warwickshire against the
Maynooth grant.
Mr. IIUME presented a petition from Arbroath against
Maynooth ; also petitions from Suffolk against the malt tax ;
also a petition from an individual praying for the enfran-
chisement of copyholds belonging to the church also a peti-
tion
pfroofmotheepoirstlasnodt
Dover and Ramsgate. of Jersey against the tolls levied on
Captain HARRIS presented a petition from Christchurch
against the post-horse duty
pthe polic nroewsenteil pursueda ipnetsiotiuotnh
Afrofrmicaßirmingham,
c9AtintlacQ of the grant to blaynootb, 4110
egallast xl3o°
Lord A. HERVEY presented a petition from Brighton,
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