The Sun.
London, England, 1862-04-30 00:00:00

THE SUN g, !LONDON, WEDNESDAY EVENING, APRIL 30. ;186g.

try. They next year voted for the fragments of it
when brought forward, but did not make them
Government measures. In like manner they voted
for Church Rate Abolition, and other Wednesday
measures for religious liberty, but readily allowed
them to be defeated, and made none of them Go-
vernment measures. Indeed, we see no difference
between the Whigs and Tories in regard to such
liberal measures as we have alluded to, except this
—the Tories will not propose them, and the Whigs
will not try to carry them. The Tories come down
in force to resist every advance in civil or
religious liberty ; the Whigs keep their
forces away from their defence. What hold
can such conduct, so uniform too, give the
PALMERSTON Whigs on the Liberals of the country.
In their hands Liberalism is becoming a mere party
name ; it indicates no policy—above all, no soul-
stirring policy. "I believe in PALMERSTON," many
Liberals may think a good and sufficient creed.
We are confident, however, that it paralyses half
the liberalism of the country, because it only fur-
nishes the cry--" PALMERSTON and Italy."
At the present moment we see the Liberal party
rendered so torpid by the chilly temperature of its
leaders, that it seems to have passed into a state of
political Lybernation. Even their very Italian policy,
which some think should save them, becomes their
ruin at most of the by-elections. So feebly does it
move electors, that a few Roman Catholic priests
and their dependents can turn the scale against
them. Broad and obvious as is the Tory trick of
petting a despot POPE under the guise of petting
monarchical legitimacy, certain as it is that Orange-
men will never let their brother Tories do anything
for Catholics, yet Romish priests have always
delighted in revenge without regard to the claims of
gratitude, and they now gladly avenge themselves
on their real friends, and play into the hands of the
successors to Lord ELDON ; just because the former
think Roman Catholics, at Rome, should be as free
,
as they are in England, and as all other Italians are,
the Venetians excepted. " PALMERSTON and Italy"
is a good cry, but as long as Catholics are ignorant,
and their priests vengeful, it will b© a good one for
lasing more electoral votes than it will gain.
But this, again, is due to the heartless home libe-
ralism of our ministry. It is, practically, a Tory
ministry in England. Many of the wiser Tories are
half Unwilling to turn out Lord PALMERSTON,
alleging that be does their work better than they
could do it themselves. He will, in a few years,
they think, make the country so Conservative at
home, that they forgive him for trying to divert
attention by supporting Italian liberty and unity—
better, they think, that Italy should be made more
liberal than that England should be. Were our
Government as liberal as it is Conservative, Eng-
lish Catholics would not have dared, for very
shame's sake, t.) vote for Tory candidates. It would
have been too barefaced treachery to their old pro-
fessions, even for angry priests. All Liberals would
have been awake and earnest, and Catholics could
not have voted against the extension of political
liberties an Britain.
We have been thinking what opportunities the
ministry have, this session, yet to show that there
is Liberal blood, and life in them; there are two
measures, one religious, the other of civil liberty,
which it is the standing reproach of Liberal Go-
vernments not to have made their own. We refer
to Church-rates and the Ballot. Passing by the
firmer for the present, as we shall soon have occa-
sion to recur to it ; let us look at the latter in re-
gard to the Liberal Governments. Honest argu-
ment and dishonest sophistry have exhausted all
that can be said on the subject—it has passed into
a question of fact and business. It stands forward,
this session, as the rival of a Government proposal
—a five years renewal, with insignificant modifica-
tions, of the old Corrupt Practices Act. Let us look
at the claims of that act, as compared with the Ballot.
The act has now had the fullest and fairest trial ;
it has has done what it eould to purify a general
election and numerous by-electicnks. Its operation
has been sifted by Parliamentary Committees, and
by Commissions at Gloucester, Wakefield, and
Berwick. Its uselessness has been proved in scores
of boroughs. In counties it has been a nullity.
" Undue influence," the crime it proposed to punish,
has never been proved in a single instance, although
it is denied by no man, in his senses, that tenant-
farmers are the mere multiplication of their land-
lords votes. Never was Act of Parliament a more
complete failure—we may add, never was act more
deliberately intended to be so.
Of the Ballot at least, it cannot be said, it has
been tried and failed. A very considerable majo-
rity of the Liberals have always voted for it, yet it
has never even been tried. Every one knows the
reason—and it is simply this, that if tried it would
not fail. II it would, it would be accepted as readily
as a " Corrupt Practices Act." All the trials of it,
where it is a real ballot, not a mere sham as in
France, have been successful. Even in France
itself, with all the obstructive powers wielded by the
Prefet for the Government nominee, it sometimes
returns an opposition candidate. But in Belgium,
Switzerland, Geneva, and in our own colonies, there
is but one testimony to it—that it is the very
minister of electoral quiet, purity, and independence.
The last, however, is its crime in the eyes of Wnigs
and Tories. The one reform of independent voting is
the object of their horror. They would like its
quiet and inexpensiveness; but better all the
breaking of heads in Ireland and Nottingham, all
the drunkenness and corruption of Norwich, Glou-
cester, Wakefield, &c., than that landlords should
lose the power to verify in the polling book the
votes of their serfs.

If, however, such remain the temper of the
Whigs—why out they must go. Nothing can
save them. What Liberal will care to keep them
in, if they will not even give him electoral
independence ? If, when he asks for it, they hold
up their miserable abortion ofa Bill—a Bill convicted
of congenital imbecility, and spurn the simple
means which civilisation all the world over has
used, when it has wished for an individual's un-
biassed vote. Every club, every association, every
combination of men for political or municipal
purposes, and in every place where absolute free-
dom of voting was the real object, have resorted,
as a matter of common sense, to the ballot. Our
demand therefore is the ballot inbtead of the old bill,
for the next five years—our prediction is that if
such a bold course be not taken by the Govern-
ment, their days are numbered ; but our opinion
of the old Whig leaders is, that they are such
hardened aristocrats, that we doubt whether the
bitterness of opposition would be so unendurable
by them as the bitterness of seeing tenant farmers
electorally free, and bDroughs not sure by either
adjacent "influence or by money."

One by one our celebrities have been of late very
rapidly disappearing from the House of Commons.
How many a familiar form and face do we not
miss there ! Death has carried off several. Others
have been promoted to " the prim benches of the
Upper School"--to that patrician Hades facetiously,
but almost awfully, spoken of by Mr. BERNAL
OSBORNE as " another place !" A few have been
superannuated; or rather, with an affecting con-
sciousness that they have already played their part
pretty well out, have manfully decided upon their
own superannuation:

scanning the array of members still upon any

rare occasion of a tolerably fall house, ranged in
rows four or five deep, to the right hand and to the
left hand of Mr. Speaker—among many a strange,
and as yet unfamiliar face, among the ranks of those
who are still unmistakeably new comers, your
Major O'REILLYS and your Mr. WHALLEYS, and
others almost as dissimilar as those arcades ambo—
who does not become conscious at times of one or an-
other of the late disappearances P Time hasg rad ually
reconciled us, of course, to a House of Commons in
which there was no longer to be seen the dishevelled
beard of that eccentric jokemaster of the Old Tory
Faction, the wagging of which beard was so often
the provocation to shouts of harmless laughter.
And with the more stubbly hirsute honours of
Colonel SIBTHORP all habitues of the House
will still remember to have had swept out
of view long since the more luxuriant growth
descending over the breast of Mr. MUNTZ,
the late stalwart M.P., and Merchant Prince
of Birmingham. The vanishing from the arena of
debate of the grey head of JOSEPH HUME, too, the
House has, long and long ago it seems to us
now, become slowly accustomed to. Habituated
for half a century to his presence and his
voice, it appeared at first almost incomprehensible
how financial measures could ever have passed
clause by clause through Committee,without the aid,
or 'rather without having had to withstand the
stubborn obstructive arguments of the hard-headed,
indomitable, indefatigable member for Montrose—
who, politically viewed, was for so considerable an
interval, as it were, the Parliamentary skid upon
the wheel of the Exchequer, when going down the
steep acclivity of a prodigal and almost reckless
expenditure ! Mr. HUME'S disappearance, however,
we have become imperceptibly used to, just as we
become used to the absence of even more conspicuous
celebrities of the House of Commons. As, let us
say—after Sir ROBERT PEEL had been thrown from
his cob on Constitution Hill !—after Lord GEORGE
BENTINCK had fallen dead in the water-meadow,
near his ancestral home !—after the Right
Hon. WILLIAM HUSKISSON, farther back still, in
an earlier generation, had been crushed to death
under the wheels of the locomotive, upon the
memorable inauguration of the Manchester and
Liverpool Railway ! Very recently we have had
occasion to regret the disappearance from the public
scene—sometimes almost as abruptly—of contem-
poraries of those historical victims of sudden disease
or of abrupt and lamentable accidents. Happily
none of those latter chiefs of the House of Commons
have passed away with anything like the appalling
suddenness witnessed in the instances just enume-
rated. Still, in several cases, there has been cause
for poignant regret at their disappearance at all,
and sometimes for the very nature of the reason lead-
ing to it. When the Right Hon. SIDNEY HERBERT'S
handsome presence was co longer to be recognised on
the Treasury Bench in the Commons, we had, at
first, the consolation of remembering that by his
removal, as Lord HERBERT of Lea, to the compara-
tive leisure and repose of the House of Peers, he
might, perchance, be yet enabled to recruit the ex-
hausted energies of his over-worked and shattered
constitution. That eagerly welcomed hope was only
too soon, however, dissipated, and the whole nation
recognised soon afterwaras in his premature demise
the completeness of his noble sacrifice of self to the
interests of the Crown and of the country. In vain,
moreover, can we now turn at any juncture of
perilous importance, to hear the weighty reasoning
of a matured intellect like that of the late Sir
JAMES GRAHAM, who, although never himself
actually at the head of affairs, never himself the
leader of a party, or the responsible chief of a Go-
vernment, has left behind the reputation of one of
the most skilled and accomplished administrators
England ever possessed. Vainly, again, from the
back benches can we hope to hear now the cheery
tones of honest TOM DUN COMBE, the Dandy Demo-
crat, who, during the principal portion of the past
half century, represented the Metropolitan borough
of Finsbury in Parliament. Lord RUSSELL—Lord
JOHN now no longer—we still, often and often, miss
in the House of Commons. Yet we have the satis-
faction, at least, of knowing yet breathes a calm
atmosphere among his Peers, now that he has
already his Earldom, and now that he is about to
don that most courted of all aristocratic decorations,
the blue ribbon.

Another, and a very different M.P. from
any of those whose names have already here
been particularised, has, within the last few
days spontaneously resigned his accustomed
seat in the Commons House of Parliament. His
retirement is precisely one of those already hinted
at as the result of what, for want of a better phrase,
may be called a self-imposed superannuation.
On Monday evening, it will be yet fresh in the re-
membrance of the pubic at large, there was for-
mally moved for—a new writ for the borough of
Oldham, to elect a member in the place of WILLIAM
JOHNSTON Fox, who has accepted one of those
convenient little oft-changing honorary steward.
ships. Throughout the fifteen last years during
which Mr. Fox has uninterruptedly, save for one
brief and exceptional interval, sat for the borough
of Oldham, in the British House of Commons, he
has most honourably done his duty, not only
by his own constituents, but to the cause of Libe-
ralism generally; by his earnest and eloquent voice
—a voice always raised in furtherance of the inte-
rests of that great cause upon every occasion he could
find upon which so to raise it, both within and
without the walls of Parliament. Before then his rare
gift of eloquence—ever ready to his command, alike in
writing and in speaking—had always been devoted
to the furtherance of the popular interests: equally,
almost, we might say without fear of contradiction,
in his capacities as a man of letters, as an orator,
and as journalist. Recollect for a moment in proof
of this but a few among the more remarkable of
the salient points noticeable in this really note-
worthy career ! The life which is now terminating
politically, and in its purely public aspect, after
a duration of seventy-six years, began conse-
quently as far back as 1786, down at Uggeshall
Farm, near Wrentham, in the county of Suffolk ;
Mr. Fox's father being at that date one of the
honest yeomen class of small farmers. After-
wards, on the removal of the family to Norwich, the
labours of the farmer were exchanged for those of a
weaver ; a circumstance admirably signalised some
years afterwards during the agitation excited by
the renowed Anti-Corn Law League by the issue of
a famous serial of Mr. Fox's, under the title of
"Letters of a Norwich Weaver Boy." Foremost, in
the very front rank of the great champions of the
League, side by side with RICHARD COBDEN and
JOHN BRIGHT, stood forth upon platform after
platform throughout the country—W. J. Fox, after
wards M.P. for Oldham. For the mere splendour
of his oratory, he was unsurpassed even, if ever, in
that one particular, as much as rivalled, by the most
gifted of his eminent associates. Who that heard it
or that once read it, has yet forgotten his master-
piece, perhaps among all his League Orations? The

one, the perpetually recurring refrain of which was,
"Don't be dependent nu Foreigners I" Apart from
the League, Mr. PDX has laboured for years habi-
tually both by pen and voice in the popular cause.
As conspicuous among the original founders and

among the foremost contributors to the Westminster

.Review, Mr. Fox has the distinction of haying writ-

ten the very first article of its very first number.
As Editor for some time of the Monthly Repository,
as contributor to the Prospective, but, above all, as
one of the principal writers in the Weekly Dispatch
newspaper, he has turned his abilities as a journalist
heartily to the furtherance of liberal ideas. Now
that he is passing out of the view of all but his im•
mediate friends and intimates, we cannot refrain
from casting a regretful glance at the closing
of his political career, or from turning a grateful
look of retrospection down the long perspective
of years extending back to its commencement! Mr.
Fox has, in simple truth, earned the repose in quest
of which he is now passing from the arena of the
House of Commons. That repose, which he has so
well earned, let us hope he will now long enjoy.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer was last night

in the most consenting and conciliatory mood pos-
sible. Three committees of inquiry into the busi-

ness of his department were proposed one after
another, and all were accepted in the most friendly
tone. The last, to be sure, Mr. CRAIVFORD'S on the

Sugar Duties, with reference to assessment accord-

ing to quality, was one he had almost invited in

his speech; it was now, of course, welcomed; yet,
like the Pompeian House in the Crystal Palace,
at the entrance, Mr. CRAWFORD found not only the
inscription Salve, but that other more dubious one,
Cave Canem. Welcome, said Mr. GLADSTONE—
but, beware of trenching on the amount of revenue
obtained by Sugar duties.
The next, in backward order, Mr. MOFFATT'S,
was, however, a direct attack on Mr. GLADSTONE'S
petty charges on commerce. Yet Mr. GLADSTONE
took that also good-temperedly. He will, he
doubtless knows, have some sharp sarcasms fired at
him for his miscalculations as to the produce
of these vexatious charges ; but confident, we
suppose, in the results of his more impor-
tant arrangements, he is prepared for this.
From Mr. MOFFATT'S statement it seems clear that
the vexation to the men of business of six petty
imposts he enumerated, is out of all proportion to
their productiveness to the revenue. Mr. GLAD-
STONE, however, required him to limit his motion
to "the bearing of the charges on the entry of
goods inwards and outwards, and the duty on
bills of lading and shipping bills." The Govern-
ment was not willing the committee should exa-
mine into those affect►ng the home trade. Yet
there seems reason enough to do so. One of them,
for instance, the tax on warrants of 3d. each, only
affects the port of London, and is so far unequal ;
while its produce, estimated at £lOO,OOO, has turned
out to be but £B,OOO ! Yet they are, in London, a
useful class of documents. The penny tax on
delivery orders is also found to be a special source
of annoyance to trade.

Mr. HORSFALL'S motion, also modified by the
wish of the Government for consolidating, not
the Boards of Inland Revenue and Customs, but
the establishments governed by them, furnished
Mr. GLADSTONE with an opportunity to exhibit
our advances in economical collection of the re-

venue. Such vast amounts as we now re-
ceive ought to be collected more cheaply than
smaller sums, and it would seem they are so. He
told us that in 1848 the cost of collecting the Cus-
toms revenue was £slss. 3d. ; in 1857, £4 12s. 5d.;
in 1860, £3 lls. 6d.; in 1861, £3 6s. 9d.; and for
the year ending March, 1862, £3 2s. 6d. per cent.
That was a gradual and very great practical dimi-
nution in the cost of collecting the revenue. The
cost of collecting the Excise revenue was, in 1842,
£6 15s. '7d.; and in 1857, £4 15s. 9d. The whole
cost of collecting the inland revenna, including both
the direct and indirect taxes, was only £2 15s. 6d.
per cent. In France the cost of collecting some
of the taxes was not less than £l6 per cent.,
and the cost of collecting the Customs duties
in the United States was 8 per cent. This
is, so far gratifying. Mr. GLADSTONE, however, is
not the man to forget that cheap collection and high
taxation is not the greatest blessing to As tax-
payers. Happy would he be, and happier still
those to whom he sends his collectors, if we paid
the old rate of 1848 for collection, provided the
totals collected from us were the same. Mr.
HORSFALL brought out the remarkable facts,
amongst others, in support of his motion, that
nineteen ports yielded a gross revenue of £73,736,
the cost of collection being £32,621, or forty-four
cent. on the receipts. But twenty-one other ports
far surpass this—they yield £5,262, to collect which
sum we pay £14,683 ! The ports, perhaps, must
have their Custom-house officers, but Mr. HORS-
FALL proposes that the officers should, in such cases
attend to the Inland Revenue duties also.

There was quite a little Parliamentary " spree"
last night over a very small matter—nothing more
than a vote of £550, But the vote, which had
passed the previous night, was for Roman Catholic
religious services in prisons. Mr. SELWYN thought
it for the honour of Cambridge to get rid, if he
could, of this vote on the bringing up of the report
of supply, He did not wish to offend Roman Catho-
lics, but how could we help voting money for the
same purpose to other Dissenters. He was followed
promptly enough by, as the Americans would say,
the 'tarnal WHALLEY—who was by no means so
tender to Roman Catholics as Mr. SELWYN. Mr.
WHALLEY denounced the Roman priest as a
political agent, and, doubtless, he has
been too mach of that lately,—and also priestly
instruction, as directly contravening the ends of
jurisprudence. Then came Mr. HADFIELD, who
told Mr. SELWYN to make himself quite easy about
other Nonconformists, for they would not take the
State money if offered them. He, however, should
vote against the grant, but not as against a grant
to Catholics; he would vote against all State grants
for religion. Sir GEORGE GREY fell in, telling
Mr. SELWYN that other Dissenters were not to be
found in our prisons ; he at least had not heard of
them. Mr. WHALLEY then vainly &lei to wriggle
in another speech. Mr. NEWDEGATE ran a full
tilt against the " ambitious, tyrannical, political,'
Church of Rome—declaring that " one Established
Church was quite enough for this country," on the
utterance of which somewhat equivocal statement,
he was surprised by a loud " Hear, hear," from Mr.
HADFIELD.

A Catholic or two at last said a few good words
for the effect of Catholic ministrations to
Catholic prisoners in gaols. We rather wonder it
did not occur to these gentlemen, however, to re-
member that in Catholic countries, Spain for in-
stance, at this moment, not only are Protestant
ministers refused permission to visit prisoners of
their own persuasion, not only are they not paid to
do it, but Protestants are sent to prison, even to the
galleys, for being Protestants. Mr. DISRAELI,
afraid to offend, either his new Popish allies, or his
old orange supporters, wished to postpone the ques-
tion. Lord TAALMERSTON, however, doubtless be-
cause he saw out of about fifty members a large
majority of Liberals, pressed the vote on the simple
ground of justice to prisoners. The State which
confined them was bound to see that they had the
religious assistance they desired. We think so too
—but we hope Catholic, electors will henceforth
have sense to sec en which party they can most
rely for consistent liberality.