The Sun.
London, England, 1862-05-07 00:00:00

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THE SUN.

LONDON, WEDNESDAY, MAY 7, 1862.

Our readers will see that the Ballot Society has
addressed a spirited and business-like letter to the
Liberal members of Parliament, one which the
Premier himself, if he intends to continue in office,
had better not treat as a joke. We can state, from
personal knowledge/
that members of the first posi-
ideal, and of well merited influence in the Liberal
tanks, are not only prepared to respond to the
views expressed in his letter, but are perfectly
satisfied that, unless the Government can rouse it-
self to do justice to the more truly liberal of its
supporters, its duration will be but brief, The
apathy complained of is due to the unreal character
of Government Liberalism. The kernel of the
Liberal cause in each borough is not the men
who will "vote yellow, be the candidate who he
/nay," but the men who regard yellow as but
do emblem of real Liberalism in Church and State.
Dishearten these men, and the life of Liberalism in
a borough is gone. There may still be a fight of
party, that is of wills egainst wills; but principle,
not wilfulness, is the living soul of a conflict. Men
are ashamed in cooler moments of earnestness and
passion for purely arbitrary differences, but no
man, not even when defeated, is ashamed of being
defeated for a noble principle. Oar Government

has too much forgotten this. More than half its
Liberal supporters who have incurred defeat at late
elections have been men of whom the defeated
Liberals have said after the election, that they
should have been little better off had they succeeded.
The Ballot Society recognises clearly this state
of things. They found upon it an appeal to the
liberalism of the House of Commons. On one
matter of fact neither the Government nor the
House of Commons, nor the public, can have any
difference of opinion. " Corrupt practices at elec-
tions" have become the rule rather than the excep-
tion. The slow and generally secret, yet efficient
poison of landlord influence has completely extin-
guished all political life among county electors, and
left what still remains with the landlords only, who
generally know each other's relative strength too
well to trouble themselves about a battle; or, if
there be one, it is for show merely. Of the boroughs
the letter gives a perfectly fair sample. Priestly
terrors, mob law, and bribery, are notoriously the
common agencies employed in the borough consti-
tuencies. We reed not describe or particularise,
because we hardly know that anyone would jeo-
pardise his character for honesty and sincerity by
denying what stares us all in the face.
Facts, then, being thus, the Ballot Society sug-
gests, we think, a very fair issue to the Government ;
indeed, as old and steady supporters of the Ballot,
we had broadly hinted something very similar a
week ago. The society says—give us now a trial
of the ballot. The Government is talking of re-
newing the old Corrupt Practices Prevention Act.
We wonder it is not ashamed to do it. Sir Wm.
HATTER himself declared that he regarded it as a
dead letter from the day of its enactment ; the
Times, though hostile enough to the ballet, yet
described the act as " a pompons profession, meant
to be inoperative." We need not say how every
commission, every Parliamentary election commit-
tee, might we not say every election since the act
passed, has but corroborated the truth of these
prophecies which accompanied the birth of this now
defunct Bill. Yet, with all this before their eyes,
the Government proposes to recal it to life ! It is
proposed to lower the penalties, to lop off the
auditors, and make a few other trivial alterations,
and a feebler Act is then to give a death-blow
to corruption and undue influence !
The Ballot Committee, therefore, calls on the
majority of the Liberal members who have
hitherto supported the Ballot, to demand of
the Government that it should make the Ballot
a Government measure. It is not insisted
on that the measure should be permanent,
but that it should at least have a trial. The Go-
vernment has done all it could—and it has con-
fessedly and publicly failed. One plan alone has
not been tried, and it is a plan for which a majority
of the supporters of Government have for a long
time voted. The minority of Liberals have had
their way all this time, they have voted with the
Tories against the majority of their fellow Liberals.
Surely that majority is now entitled to say—" You
and the Tories have failed—you have almost
broken down the Liberal party by your failure—
try our plan for a while at least." We should say
the demand should be that if the House will not
make the Ballot law permanently without a trial,
let it enact that it shall be the mode of taking the
poll for at least two or three years after the next
general election. Such a trial could not surely
hurt the most timid. When the time ex-
pired the whole subject would of itself
come again under discussion, just as the
old Sham Act now does. If, therefore, _such
a moderate demand be rejected, one which cannot
be pompously rejected as a "Great Change "—for
it will be but a temporary one, a mere trial—
we shall only have fresh confirmation of the
dogged hatred of the Government, or the majority
which resists the proposal, to electoral indepen-
dence. We know, indeed, they hate it—but their
votes against a five years' trial of the Ballot would
proclaim their hatred.
We hope that every really independent mem-
ber of Parliament—by which we mean everyone
who does not fear the Ballot for himself—will
accept the proposal now made. The time for action
is come. Argument is now superfluous. Let fifty
sincere members band themselves together and in-
form the Government that their support is no
further to be relied on if their reasonable request
be any longer denied. They must insist on the
Ballot being made a Government measure ; insist,
at least, on the five years' trial, or henceforth
leave a Government, which refuses to deal with
electoral corruption, to be dealt with by Tories
according to their will and pleasure.

Captain WILLIAM WILSON'S recapture of the ship
Emilie St. Pierre, of Liverpool, on the 21st of
March, 1862, will henceforth—we may be quite
certain of this—for ever occupy its place con-
spiculusly upon our national records of hairbreadth
'scapes and heroic acts of daring done upon the
high seas. Viewing the achievement simply as a
deed of valour, it is not in any way extravagant
to assert distinctly that it is one which has seldom,
if ever, been surpassed. The whole achievement,
from first to last, for its consummate effrontery of
pluck was just, in three words, Worthy of DUN-
DONALD. Higher praise than that we could not
it, we do not for an instant
give it. But, in giving
exaggerate the merits of Captain WiLsorr, of the
Emilie St. Pierre. On the contrary, we do him
simply justice. For he is—beyond a doubt of it—
exactly one of those gallant sea captains aftre the
heart of ocean-demigods, like Lord NELSON and Lord
COCHRANE. A salt-water hero, whose soul could
never quail, whose cheek could never blench—
come what come might.

The narrative recently penned by Captain WIL-
SON, and read by him with simple and manly
emphasis on Saturday afternoon in the rooms of
the Liverpool Mercantile Marine Association, we
published in extenso in the columns of 1 he un of
Monday evening. It has doubtless been read by
this time by all who have turned over that impres-
sion, with scarcely one solitary exception. For,
although several weeks have already elapsed since
the first particulars of this astounding ex-
ploit came to the knowledge of the public at
large, getting immediately noised abroad, as
indeed it well deserved to be—it was something
surely worthy of the attention of all when the
Hero of the Exploit himself came forward as the
narrator ! Not spontaneously, it should be remem-
bered, but reluctantly and simply in answer to the
summons of his admiring compatriots. Trifles
though the tokens of admiration already presented
to Captain WILSON, or about to be presented to
him, by his applauding fellow-citizens, may be, it is
still interesting to bear them one and all in mind, as
evidences of the instant cordiality of that admira-
tion, and as substantial proofs that the brave tar's
almost matchless audacity upon this occasion is to
the full appreciated. The gold pocket chronometer—
the massive salver with the inacriptionupon it—even
the homely but costly Silver tea and coffee services—
have their significance in this Way, hardly less than
the gold medal about to be struck in Captain WlL-
scoN's honour, or than the two thousand guineas
about to be presented to him by the owners of the
Emilie St. Pierre as tokens of their gratitude. As
the English reading public has recently had the

opportunity of seeing done upon a larger scale, in
the instance of the Autobiography of the late daunt-
less THOMAS CGCHRANE, 10th Earl of Dandonald,
it may be seen very readily indeed, through Cap
tain WILSON'S own pithy narrative of the recap-
ture of the ship Emilie St. Pierre, with what
perfect good taste, and with what manly and
unaffected eloquence, a hero may relate the particu-
lars of his own exploits, without one momentary
idea of boastfulness on his part recurring the while
to the mind of his hearer or his reader. In this way
C2ESAR led the way long since in his "Com-
mentaries," and XENOPHON in his incomparable
record of the " Retreat of the Ten Thousand."
The like has been done within this very
nineteenth century of ours by a Conqueror,
to say the least of him, upon a level with the Great
Captains of Antiquity. " Soldiers," said NAPOLEON,
when bidding adieu to his Old Guard at Fontain-
bleau, before his departure for Elba, " Soldiers, I
go to write the history of the deeds we have done
together." And delayed though the fulfilment of
that promise was by the episode of the Hundred
Days, it was, nevertheless, fulfilled at last in the
voluminous narrative dictated at St. Helena to Las
CASES and GOITRGAUD. Now, to breathe thus the
supreme names of C/ESAR and NAPOLEON, of
NELSON and DUNDONALD, when referring to the
recent achievement of the brave merchant captain
who recaptured the Emilie St. Pierre, almost, one
might say, singlehanded, will not appear in any
respect whatever an extravagance to those who
ere acquainted with the actual facts of the case.
And—by this time—who is not ?Itis an incident
that the " bravest of the brave" might have been
proud to have passed through thus triumphantly.
Does any one—yet ignorant of the facts of the case
—remain disdainfully incredulous ? Let him turn
to Captain WILSON'S own simple and plain-spoken
statement of those facts, and, as certainly as we
are now writing these words, the observer's lip
will curl no longer with disdain. He will there
learn how it was that Captain WILSON, the skipper
of the Emilie St. Pierre, then a prisoner of war
upon his own vessel, and aided only in carrying out
his daring adventure by his two fellow-prisoners,
one his cook, the other his steward, contrived, upon
the 21st of March, while out at sea, to recapture
his ship from the prize crew of the United States
navy, a crew consisting at the time of two officers
and thirteen seamen. The consummate coolness
with which this astonishing recapture was effected
beggars all description—except Captain WlLsoN's
own. The manner in which, one after another,
this daring skipper seized, and gagged, and hand-
cuffed—first of all the master's mate, and
immediately afterwards an engineer, who
was passenger on board the vessel. The adroit
manner in which, after quietly making this good
bold commencement of the work down below, Cap-
tain WILSON went on deck, a few seconds later, as
if he had bat just turned out—the way in which he
thereupon walked the deck for ten minutes side by
side with Lieutenant STONE, while he pleasantly
chatted with that doomed commanding officer about
the weather, &c.—the delightfully careless fashion
in which he decoyed him down into the cabin to
examine the chart, and there brought him up in the
door-way with a brandished belaying-pin—to be
quietly seized, gagged, and ironed immediately
afterwards. All is admirably done, and admirably
told, too, by the doer of it. The rest of the narra-
tive shall be given in Captain WILSON'S own words.
" Three men were walking the deck ; one was at
the helm and one on the look-out. I called the
three men aft, and, pointing to the hatchway of the
storeroom near the helm, said that a coil of rope was
wanted up. I shoved off the hatch, and pointing to
a corner where it was, they all three jumped down.
I immediately closed the batch, and warned the
man at the helm of his danger if he moved or spoke.
The look-out was then called aft, and when asked
whether he would help to work the ship to a British
port he said No.' I therefore put him with the
others, guarding the hatchway. I then called the
watch, and as sailors do not come on deck all to-
gether we got two aft and secured before any sus-
picion was aroused ; the third man of the watch
below drew his knife at the steward, upon which
he fired, and the shot went through his shoulder;
the others were soon secured, and in the space
of a morning's watch I was again in charge of
my ship." No wonder the brave sailor who has
accomplished a feat of prowess so consummate in
its audacity, should be cheered to the echo, as he
has been very recently by the assembled merchants
of Liverpool. No wonder that, by this single
deed of valour, he has won for himself a brilliant
and lasting reputation.

" WHALLEY! WHALLEY !" shouted some rude
members last night ; and ♦ery rude it was. Lord
STANLEY wanted to speak—Ceylon was the subject;
yet the son of the ex-Premier, and a lord who is
much more than his father's son—the best that can
be said of most lords—is greeted when he rises with
cries of " WHALLEY ! WHALLEY !" What, it may
well be asked, is the charm which Mr. WHALLEY
exercises over the House P We all know, by what
we read, why it calls for the great Tory leader, or
the Radical JOHN BRIGHT—we all understand why
an assembly, weary with routine work, must be
glad to refresh itself with the eloquence of genius,
whether the eloquence be on one's own side or on
an opponent's. But why does it shout out
" WHALLEY ! WHALLEY !" when a man of Lord
STANLEY'S mark rises to speak P

We are sorry to be obliged to confess that after
all, as Mrs. BEECHER STOWE has it in "Uncle
Tom's Cabin," "a senator is but a man ;" and our
elected senators being but men, even in the midst
of their grave deliberations, they enjoy a joke and
a bit of solemn fun. We would not answer for it,
if Mr. SPEAKER were not in the way, whether
Punch and Judy might not almost prove a season-
able relief sometimes. The House must pardon
us, but it was Mr. WHALLEY'S speech which re-
minded us of the popular amusement; the
" whacks" on the poor Roman Catholics sounded
so much like those which we see or hear
dealt on the heads of the wooden combatants in the
streets—" lying,perjuring, thieving, and homicide,"
and again, " theft, homicide, murder, and sedition"
chronic spirit of disloyalty" came quite feebly
afterwards—Can our literal Punch beat all that with
his literal thumps on the head of Judy ? Members,
however, must beware how they invoke such en-
tertainments as Mr. WHALLEY'S. They soon began
to have enough ; but " Divide ! divide ! divide !" was
of no use when once the performance had begun.
It only furnished the performer with an oppor-
tunity to suck an orange and refresh his parched
mouth with the juice, and hiq eyes with the favou-
rite colour, and on he went with the theological
burletta, when his audience had had enough of it,
and more than enough.
But, after all, 111 votes have some importance,
whatever may bo that of Mr. 'WHALLEY. There is
a party, at least, which is ready to put a WHALLEY
forward, to say what they like to have said, but are
ashamed to say themselves. There is evidently an
abundant leaven of selfish sectarianism yet in the
House which is not m ashaed of itself, but rather
deems its sectarianism " doing GOD service." We
except from this censure /hose members who vote
against all religious grants from the National Ex-