The Sun.
London, England, 1849-05-15 00:00:00

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LONDON, TUESDAY,-MAY 15, 1849.

Our veteran Reformer JOSEPH Timm this evening
brings forward his long-prepared and long-anticipated
motion for leave to introduce a measure securing to
the people reforms of a very wholesale character.
Although it is anything but difficult to predict the
negligent rejection of an un-Ministerial project so
directly interfering with the present provisions of the
Constitution, it is very far from being an idle endea-
vour on the part of the Honourable Gentleman the
Member for Montrose. However apparently ineffec-
tual these efforts at improvement may be, an incalcu-
lable advantage invariably results even from the most
unpropitious. Each additional struggle prepares the
way for the ultimate victory. Each supplementary dis-
cussion, though negatived, it may even be sometimes
without the courtesy of a division, tends imperceptibly
to the maturing and to the dissemination of doctrines
destined in the end to prove triumphant. So it must
indubitably be with this comprehensive scheme of
Mr. HuxE's—a scheme derided now-a-days as im-
practicable, and extravagant, and utopian, but one
that, sooner or later, will belie the vaticinations of its
antagonists.
Those who are in the smallest particular interested
in the cause of the general advancement need not,
at this late moment, be informed of the precise
nature of the Bill proposed by the Honourable
Representative of Montrose. They have fami-
liarized themselves long since with the principles
and aspirations of that consistent advocate of reform,
whose most conspicuous colleague is the Hon. Mem-
ber for the West Riding of Yorkshire. They know
perfectly well that among those aspirations the most
prominent of all have reference to the immediate ex-
tension of the elective franchise, so as to include all
householders—to the enactment that henceforth all
votes shall be taken by ballot [an incidental anticipa-
tion of the project due on Thursday, the 24th instant,
by the Hon. Gentleman the Representative of the
city of Bristol]—to the diminution to three years of
the duration of Parliaments—and to the more just and
accurate apportionment of the number of representa-
tives to the number of the population. Certainly,
upon all these points we may say with perfect truth-
fulness, they manage these things better in France
Thanks to the glorious Revolution of February, the
inhabitants of the Republic have obtained all that we
have so long, and that we are still so ineffectually,
striving to obtain. They have, moreover, carried
into effect during no less than fifteen months those
arrangements which, even to the present moment,
are laughed to scorn by the obtuse spirit
of Conservatism as monstrously impracticable,
and as even ridiculously chimerical. They have se-
cured to themselves, not an extension of the elective
franchise, but universal suffrage. They have syste-
matically employed the plan of voting by ballot in
the election of two great representative chambers—
the National Assembly and the Representative As-
sembly. They have decided that their democratic Par-
liaments shall not continue in existence under any cir-
cumstance longer than three or four years ; and, with
a view to the better adjustment of the popular scheme
of Government, they have chalked out the whole of the
metropolitan and provincial departments into well
proportioned and rationally populous electoral dis-
tricts. When, therefore, in Westminster, it is de-
clared that the proposed measure submitted to the
Imperial Parliament by the Member for Montrose is
preposterous from its utter impracticability—France,
in her " Republican institutions," gives that insolent
assertion the lie. France shows that even universal
suffrage, with a merely partially educated multitude,
is not by any means so perilous an experiment as
was and is predicated by its opponents. France
proves, in the intelligence of her great representa-
tive Assembly, that the simultaneous working of
universal suffrage and the ballot tends
only to impart an additional strength to the Govern-
ment. France has, through the intervention of the
great men of February, obtained those boons for
which we are still yearning, and (to all appearance)
as hopelessly as the child crying for the moon. There
is, consequently, no lack of a stimulus to incite our
reformers to the reiteration of their endeavours.
There is, on the contrary, everything within reach
that could tend to excite a laudable spirit of emu-
lation.