The Sun.
London, England, 1865-10-16 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS,

THE " EXAMINER" ON PROJECTS OF REFORM.—
Lord Brougham reverts, after 35 years, to house-
hold suffrage, a portion of the project submitted by
him to the Whig chiefs assembled at Lord AlthoiT's
rooms in the Albany; on the eve of the Duke of
ellington's fall from power. He was then the
newly-elected member for undivided Yorkshire, and
his return had been hailed as one of the most signi-
ficant events of the general election which took place
on the death of George N. It was read as a signal
that the long-lagging rate of political progress was
henceforth about to be accelerated, and there were
many symptoms noticeable by keen observers that
the quickening process was beginning to be felt in
the pulse of the great demagogue of the day. He
had never committed himself to what were called
Radical opinions. Brought into Parliament origi-
nally for a close borough, his ambition had always
been to lead the moderate Opposition as far as pos-
sible in the popular direction. Against Tory jobbing
in Lurch and State, and the preponderance of
Tort votes by the making of parasite peers and the
retention of pensioned nominees of the opposite party
in the House of Commons, he was ready to go any
length. But it was not easy for a man who was en-
trusted by Lord Darlington, one of the great borough-
owners, with the management of the Parliamentary
part of his property, a man who was as proud of
entertaining the Whig magnates at his table as of
making a six hours' speech at Westminster or read-
ing a philosophical paper at the Royal Society, to
risk the coveted hope of leadership by proposing a
very anti-aristocratic Reform Bill. What his noble
friends wanted most to keep was a large portion of
the borough seats, many of which had cost them so
dear. If he could make decent terms for them on
that point, they would not have been squeamish
about the form of the franchise. Household suf-
frage was not regarded as by any means a thing
so formidable as the transfer of seats for market-
able boroughs to counties and towns. The prac-
tical consequences of either change were far
from being thoroughly understood, and it must
be fairly owned that the question is a very different
one in 1865, when the mass of rated householders
can read and write, and when they have a penny
postage, railroads, and a cheap press, from what it
was in 1830, with the opposite of all these condi-
tions. Lord Chatham had proposed something very
like household suffrage seventy years before, and
his ultra-Conservative son had subsequently done
the same. It would indeed have been easy enough,
we believe, to have carried concession thus far in
1831, had it been proposed as part of the bill of
Lord Grey. It was otherwise determined, however;
and the Brougham project was so far set aside or
modified that Schedule A was made to include many
more nomination boroughs, and that instead of the
good old Saxon franchise, founded on the payment
of scot and lot, the arbitrary test of £lO rent, with
all its inherent inequalities and anomalies, was
for the first time set up as the measure of citizenship.
Lord Grey and others who belonged to the second
order of nobility were not sorry to break down the
exorbitant Parliamentary power of the greater fami-
lies, and then by way of compensation they left the
working classes out of the Bill. Henry Brougham,
become Lord Chancellor and Chairman of the
House of Lords, assented ; and bubbled by certain
vague promises of a.second chapter of concession,
deferred only, as was said, for the sake of making
sure of the first, the working classes were beguiled
into acquiescence. The Reform Act of 1832 passed,
and two-thirds of the householders of England
still remain without a voice in the selection of
the men who make the laws and impose the taxes.
And now in his old age the venerable statesman re-
calls the inaudible bidding of his earlier days, and
frankly owns that he haz wavor shared the fears oithose
who absurdly imagine that the ciasse. -who live by
labour would swamp all Athezir.wtre they enfran-
chised. The avowal certainly comes rather late, but
we take it for what it is worth, and are thankfu-

Suggestions, good, bad, and indifferent, crop up on
every side. There are seldom wanting creeping
weeds and glaring poppy heads among the growing
corn. All must grow together till the harvest, for
sake of the good that is to come ; but that does
not hinder us from distinguishing betimes the tares
from the wheat. One of the late Tory candidates
for Wiltshire has been trying to show genius
for legislation since his defeat, by informing his
disappointed friends and the public what he would
have proposed had he got in. The excessive
expense of elections is the evil of evils in Sir
George Jenkinson'i mind, a very natural sentiment
in a baffled baronet with an emptied purse. And
although he says it is a shame and scandal, we ad-
mit that it is so, and that if possible some means
ought to be devised in the nature of a check or cure.
But we can give no toleration to the stark-naked
class selfishness of the remedy Sir George propounds.
Mistaking through inexperience the cost for agency
and canvassers as an incident of large polling dis-
tricts, he takes up the matter in a merely topogra-
phical point of view, and fancies he could cut down
the charge by setting up a separate booth in every
parish, and introducing a system of voting whereby
electors should be called on to write their names
opposite those of the candidates they supported, in
presence of the nearest magistrate who might live
hard by. Why not say at once that the vassal
should be bound to vote in the steward's
office on the estate " where he was raised,"
and not otherwise or elsewhere, the proprietor
receiving his rent and his vote at the same time ?
or, to save trouble, why not make a pro-
vision that on taking possession of the farm the
tenant should give a power of attorney to my lord's
bailiff to sign these voting papers for him on all
future occasions without going through the farcical
form of consulting him ? This is what some persons
say would be the result of giving the coloured
people the franchise in the Southern States
of America ; and if Englishmen were blacks,
it is possible that we should have negro-
head suffrage, as well as negro-head tobacco.
But considering that our planter policians
have lost the non-intellectual aid in the new House
of Commons of Major Beresford, Mr. Morritt, and
Sir Baldwin Leighton, and that the said loss re-
mains uncompensated even by the acquisition of
Sir George Jenkiuson, we may hope to be spared
next session a debate on such a proposal. The ex-
cessive size of constituencies is no doubt one cause,
though not the only one, of exorbitant expenditure
at elections.; but the multiplication of polling places
would certainly tend to increase, not to diminish, the
evil of extravagant charge for agency. When Lord
Liverpool's nephew has had the benefit of being
beaten at two or three more contested elections in
other places, an opportunity of salutary experience
we should be far from deprecating, he will discover
that political attorneys, if you are fool enough to
get into their hands, can always find out ways and
means whereby to draw the golden ichor out of a
candidate's veins.

THE " SPECTATOR" ON "GOOD MRS. BROWN".
It appears from evidence taken before the magis-
trates of Plymouth• that a married man, named
James Brown, apparently a workman of some kind,
had been for some time suffering from dropsy to
such an extent as to be unable to move. His wife,
who kept a stall in the market, maintained herself,
and some assistance was afforded him by the parish.
He was, moreover, insured in an office to the
amount of £l4, so that, one thing with another,
there was neither actual want nor fear of want in
the house. The market-woman, however, wearied
of her sickly husband, who could never get better,
and who was such a burden, she began to long for
the £l4, doubtless wealth in her eyes, and at
last she tried to accelerate the arrival of her
good fortune. Some feeling unexplained, pro-
bably terror either of the law or of hell, made her
avoid violent murder, but she commenced a system
of leaving him all day untended, unable to move,
and without food or drink. A neighbour heard her
as she returned ask her husband in angry surprise,
" What, bain't you dead yet ?" and when she one
day carried him broth was roughly threatened ; on
another, when she triad to prop him up in bed, his
breathing being difficult, the wife expostulated
gravely upon her unreasonable officiousness. "As
you keep propping
long," said Mrs. Brown, "as
him up, you keep rallying him," interfering, as it
were with the natural and fitting order of things,
which would bring him death and her the insur-
ance fee. Thus far Mrs. Brown's conduct might
be explained on the theory of simple brutality, or
of a wish to kill her husband without risk, but her
next step indicated a different feeling at work.
She still abstained from killing him, but she resolved
that once dead no time should be lost in 4etting rid