The Sun.
London, England, 1865-08-07 00:00:00

Henley inclined to a household franchise founded
on rating, and Mr. Walpole has lately published a
letter in support of a similar scheme. No plausible

objection can be raised to a £2O franchise in coun-
ties, except that the highly respectable voters who
would be admitted are not desirous of the suffrage.

Mr. Walpole properly points out the difference 'Be-
tween a £6 rental and a £6 rating, as the qualifica-
tion for a vote. It is certainly fair that householders
in boroughs should be excluded when the landlord

compounds for their rates, and that in counties
the level of the occupation franchise should com-
mence the payment of the house-tax. Almost the
only unjust fiscal measure since the Reform Act
consists in the exemption from the house-tax which
the £lO voters have secured for themselves. If a
Reform Bill is introduced, it will probably corre-
spond with the suggestions of Mr. Henley and Mr.
Walpole. The greatest difficulty will be found in
the small boroughs, which were some years since
eloquently defended by Mr. Gladstone, as they are
still approved by Lord Russell. Lord Stanley is
willing to consent to a redistribution of seats, and
if any considerable change takes place, it will be
difficult to preserve the most useful of existing
anomalies. The members for petty boroughs are
well aware of their danger, and consequently they
will offer a formidable opposition to any scheme by
which the privileges of their constituents may be
menaced. The institution of equal electoral dis-
tricts would be the most ruinous of innovations, and
any approximation to such system must be watched
with jealous vigilance. The advocates of the
rights of minorities ought to understand that
the small boroughs already effect, to a certain ex-
tent, the purposes which they undertake to attain
by elaborate and impracticable contrivances. At
least one half of the most eminent members of the
House would be excluded from Parliament by an
enactment that the smallest constituency should
consist of a thousand voters. Mr. Gladstone, who
now represents one of the greatest constituencies
in the kingdom, first acquired his great reputation
as a nominee member for a little market town.
The advantage of a certain number of small
boroughs is generally appreciated, but in a Reform
Bill, which must necessarily bear some reference to
arithmetic, statistical symmetry may not improbably
outweigh considerations of general expediency. It
would be absurd and offensive for a legislator to say
that Lord Lansdowne or Lord Zetland should be
regarded as severally equal to twenty or thirty
thousand ten-pound householders ; but it is never-
theless undeniable that Calne and Richmond are
better represented than Marylebone or the Tower
Hamlets. Existing institutions which are found
convenient may well be tolerated, but new legisla-
tion must be plausible as well as just. It is not
surprising that all political parties aro puzzled with
the difficulties both of reforming and of abstaining
from reform.
THE " LONDN REVIEW" ON THE GUILD OF
LITERATURE AND ART.—A pleasant county, and a
healthy, is Hertfordshire. According to an old say-
ing, the land is worth a certain amount of extra
purchase-money, by reason of the pure air. Green
slopes of meadow-land, intersected by leafy lanes,
stretch from border to border; small woods of
timber-trees, and coppices of tender saplings diver-
sify the more open ground; stately seats of distin-
guished :families umbrageous with oaken glades
where the deer ;families,
and glimmer, and deep with
ferny dingles where the hares crouch, or flit like sha-
dows in the sunshine before the intruder's footstep,
preserve, at intervals of a few miles, little Paradises
of seclusion and silence ; old villages and farmhouses
lie thickly scattered about the high roads and quiet
way's ; and, at St. Alban's, a venerable abbey, grey
with mists of Saxon and Norman antiquity, and an
ancient town, haunted with memories of Roman
Verulam, now utterly vanished, introduce an ele-
ment of historical interest into the pastoral freshness
and the patrician grandeur. Though seated so near
to London as to be within half an hour's jaunt by
rail into its very core, Hertfordshire is as rural in its
scenery, as bright and pure in its atmosphere, as
though a hundred miles intervened between it and
the huge smoke-cloud of the metropolis. If literary
men really love sylvan, retirement as much as they
generally profess to do in their writings—a point
which must, we fear, be considered rather doubtful
—one could hardly fix upon a better county than
the northern neighbour of Middlesex for enabling
them to gratify their taste. You have in it a sense
of the neighbourhood of London, combined with
immunity from London cares. The peasants talk
in a tone justroughened with country characteristics,
yet not so difficult as to provoke impatience in the
cultivated ear ; and, " sitting muffled in dark leaves,"
or meditating over a tankard of ale in the shady
parlour of a wayside inn, you are still, so to speak,
conscious of the near pulsations of that mighty centre
of intelligence which can never become uninteresting
to any man who is not either a misanthrope or a
fool. The projectors of the Guild of Literature and
Art have therefore chosen a charming spot for the
erection of their Homes for the decayed man of in-
tellect, supposing him really to desire a country life ;
and certainly the ceremony of last Saturday, with
its accompanying festival at the fine scat of Sir
Bulwer Lytton at Knebworth, about two miles to
the south, was calculated to exhibit the project in
the most attractive light possible. The country
around Stevenage, where the Homes are situated, is
at once open and well wooded ; the buildings them-
selves are pretty Gothic structures ; the day was fine,
and a jocund company, headed by Mr. Chas. Dickens,
the Vice-President of the Guild, and one of the chief
promoters of the undertaking, passed a merry
afternoon at the seat of Sir Bulwer Lytton;
the President. All the circumstances were of
a nature to captivate the imagination, and to
call forth some of the kindliest and most sympathetic
emotions of our being. The old hall of Knebworth
was draped with the banners of many generations of
its owner's family, and the host had provided for
his guests a luncheon such as formed no bad prelude
to the speeches, and to the subsequent dancing in
the green alleys of the park. It was pleasant also
to listen to the two most illustrious of living novel-
ists speaking each other's praises in words of which,
we are sure, the sincerity was equal to the elo-
quence. Literary men are so often charged with
mutual jealousy and and the charge has
been supported by so many ugly facts, that it is
truly delightful to see two foremost men in the same
walk of literary art thus crowning one another. We
do not marvel that the words of both speakers
should have been interrupted by " loud cheers,"
for the enthusiasm of such moments is contagious,
and it is then that we find even cold and reserved
natures betriying their latent heat and brightness.
That the day was in the highest degree successful,
is certainly no wonder ; and that it will impart a
powerful stimulus to the Guild, which has lan-
guishM a good deal since its first establishment 12
or 13 years ago, we cannot doubt.
THE " SPECTATOR" ON CHILD MURDER.---The
public, in its healthy horror of the crimes committed
by Charlotte Winsor, the Torquay murderess, has
we think rather missed the point of the ghastly
story told by her accuser. It has fastened justi-
fiably and naturally upon the sickening revelation
involved as it were incidentally in the woman Elar-
vis's statement, upon the fact that in 1865, in a
pleasant village of Devon, there lived a woman of
forty-five to whom child murder was a profession,
who would, by her own statement, " put by" any
other woman's offspring if only she were paid, who
was willing to kill " forty" children if it were made
worth her while, who had put her finger under the
jugular vein of one, and stifled another three weeks
old, and put away a third " for her sister Poory,"
and killed a fourth while her accuser looked on by
throttling it under the bed-ticking, who took
" orders" for murder as other women take orders
for washing, who when a doubtful commission ar-
rived only bjected that her customer, had she been
" honest, would have prepaid her fee, and who
when asked if she had no supernatural fears, bade
the questioner " go to hell, for she was doing good."
Murders like those committed by Pritchard or Con-
stance Kent are justly felt to be trifles by compari-
son with massacres like these, with a habit of mur-
der contracted by a woman who had no motive
other than a desire for very trifling rewards, who
had no animosity and no remorse, who wept when
her accomplice gave evidence against her, and who
seems, by one of those awful perversions of nature
which almost justify the Calvinistic view of hu-
manity, to have been willing to commit a murder
as an evidence of goodwill. Thugs do not reach
that.point of degradation, and to see it reached in
the present day in England, and among a village
population, has given a shock to the community
such as no murder ever gave—a shock deepened by
an impression, instinctive rather than logical, that
Charlotte Winsor may not be the only woman who
increases her means by making a trade of the one
great crime supposed to be stopped by civilisation.
We do not wonder that the public, well aware
that infanticide is one of the specially English crimes,
that in Lancashire " overlaying" is one of the most
frequent causes of infant death, the overlaying
being deliberate, that the Coroner for Middlesex
has affirmed and proved the existence of 12,000
women in London each of whom must have mur-
dered a child, that no week passes without the police
reporting the discovery of the bodies of infants,
should have seen in the Torquay horror new proof
of a condition of affairs it had all along suspected,
should have fastened upon Charlotte Winsor, and
altogether forgotten what seems to us the main
sentence in Mary Harris's story,—the story, let us
always remember, of a woman almost as guilty as
Charlotte Winsor herself. She stood and saw her
own child killed, killed " barbarously," to use her
own words, from a ghastly curiosity to see what its
death would be like, and then helped to strip the
poor infant, not yet cold, and pack it away in a
rabbit-box, all apparently without a sigh, though