The Sun.
London, England, 1849-06-11 00:00:00

SPIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS,.
CHRONICLE.—The puelte are highly indebeei to
Mr. John O'Ceneeil ter the persevereece wi h which he
pressss up 411 their tti_ere n the teceesity of giving to
the genet ',mortal !it'd:en re in whose 'eearirg the pro
ceedinge of Parliament are ordinarily conducted I, gni-
mete eeee,s to the privilege which they now elijoy
by sutheance. know of few itestances in which the
tetitservetive instincts of the English character hive
in ,re coespicuously shown themselves then ill the toed
eel-it-rime, 4,f our legislators to this venerable anachro-
eiste. That a casette exists is, in the epionin of every
tree Et gliehleate a eet, d prima facie teas:on why it
erieue continue to exist; at d it. is eely by inakine eon
it to be a practical i
eiconveeience that you eta) per
uade bins to entertain the question at all. We don't
throw aside the shoe till it actually pinches us. Mr.
O'Connell goes to work in the tight way. By availine
himself of the innocent figment of an imaginary quarrel
with the newspaper press, he has succeeded in depriving'
the public of two very interesting debates; and we
cannot too much admire the disinterested zeal
with a Inch he exposes the absurdity of an ob-
,olete usage, by liberally exposieg himself. After
.to interruptions to the public business of the coun-
try—tor tweedy poet( ills that Pa-item-et is per-
,rating its proper Inections while elebstieg with
teos4el doers—atter two such interruptions to public
business, there can be no doutit whatever that the tem-
tiler>. of ‘• seeing a stranger" must. lie summarily get
,id of ; acid the only question is, whether any and a hat
power of excluding the public shall be retained, and in
whom it shall be vested. Ti give such a privilege to a
minority, whether large or small, would introduce a new
principle into our Parliamentary practice, which it
would require some solid argument to justify. What
.s there in this, mare than in ether cases, to oust the
general rule which constitutes the majority the judge,
and which allows no appeal from its eh cision ? In.
deed, we are somewhat puzzled to understand what that
class of questions can be which are proper to be made
the subject of a Perliarnenty discussion, and not proper
.0 be divulged through the ordinary channels of the
press. We do not understand a secret conclave of 600
4e-ntlennen, all of whom habiruelly mix in general society.
end meat of whom never kept a secret in the course of
heir lives. It is conceivable, and barely conceit/Ale,
het cases may arise in which it would be advisable
:hat the House should proceed with closed doors ;
eat such an instance could scarcely occur more than
once or twice in a , entury ; and when it dip, the ques-
tion might be safely left to the discretion and good feel.
tug ut the, majority. Publicity is an essential elementin
he usefulness of our Legislature. and an inseparable in
tedent so its coustitutioe. The proceedings of Parliament
,re public property. We have a right to know what:
goes on within St. Stephen's Chapel. To use a word
-xpressive of an idea net the less real for being somewhat
:1 defined, it is "uncenstitutittnal "—in the highest de-
gree unconstitutional—to shut us out. It is not as a
nachine ter transacting public business, which it does
cut indifferently, nor as a bulwark against those royal
xeregetivee that we real about in " Blackstone," vita
rerlitanetit deserves the attachment with which we
regard our representative institutions—institutions ne-
-essay te us as the light we enjoy and the air we breathe.
It is because every question, which any class of people
eutnerous enough to have a voice in the House think
?roper to raise, is there debated on an open and elevated
pletform, in the sight and hearing of the whole public of
Great Britain. If Mr. O'Connell is to be made the Cer•
oerus of the House of Commons, we must return to the
period when newspapers did not exist. Had Mr.
O'Connell " seen strangers " at an earlier period
of the evening we should have been deprived
of the very good speeches delivered by Mr.
Napie r and Mr. Bernal Osborne on the
teismanagtment of incumbered estates in Chancery—
perches containing, perhaps, the strongest argument
4shich the House has yet heard for a root-and-branch
1-,lnsilition of that system of nominal proprietorship
.vhich keeps a great part of Ireland in a state of chronic
,nd hopeless pauperism. We should have missed the
eratification of being informed by Mr. Grattan that
Ireland asks fur nothing but to be let alone. We should
save lost the cony, rsation on Irish evictions ; and the
amiable purpose for which Sir Robert Peel drew the
attention of the House to some painful passages in Cap-
,ain Kennedy's report must have been altogether frus-
trated. He was aware, he said, of the difficulty of ap-
plying a legal remedy to such cases, but the mention of
he facts might, he thought, have some effect in check-
eig these evictions, more especially if it were known
that the recitals were heard with an expression of the
deepest abhorrence by the House of Commons. But it
Mr. John O'Connell had caught sight of a strang• r
before the Right Honourable Baronet had made his
statement, we should have had no opportunity of
knowing anything at all about it. After the gallery
was cleared the debate dropped into a tone of languid
gossip, and the two hours that followed might have been
almost as profitably employed if the house had adjourned
tor the; night to the parquet of Drury-lane Theatre.
.kb :fur Mr. John O'Connell, our readers will of course
4o us the justice to believe that we have no personal
quarrel with him. We have never said that the electors
Limerick were the most foolish or the least fortunate
ef all the constituencies in the United Kingdom. We
never hinted that their Member was the greatest bore
in the House of Commons. There may be two opinions
in the subject, but for our own part we really don't
pink so. We shall make no exception to our general
ractice, either in his favour or to his prejudice. We
hall report as much of what he says as we think proper,
rid no more. From others, it may be, he will meet with
ess forbearance. In picking a quarrel with the public
ress, he is tilting at rs quieten' from which the most
lstlful player never carried away anything but hard
.necks. That be may get what he does not wish is ex,
remely like]) ; but hate he a grain of common sense in
is compositiou, he would know that he will certain')
of get shat he does wish. Neither mend nor physical
tree, neither conciliation nor coercion, will ever induce
tie House to listen to his spec ches, nor us to recur,
hem, further than may be required by our own estimate
4f their public interest and importance.
A DVERTISER.—Recent exercises of the privilege o'
xcluding strangers from the debates in Parliament
ave occasioned much discussion as to its men. We
rave no doubt of its rise in the darker ages of our his-
ery, but, unfortunately for satisfaction on this point.
minutes of the proceedings of public bodies were not
•. corded with much exactness or regularity in feudal
mete The .Retuli Purliamenti, continued from Ed-
ard I. to Henry VII., contain no mention of privileges,
mud s et we believe that we can show reason for holding
,n eisittion, that the claim to exclude persons from the
atitmal councils, on the ground that they were not
Members, existed long before the first of the rolls in
,hat venerable collection of Parliamentary proceedings.
From the earliest assemblage of men to consult for the
ouituon weal, there must have existed, by concession or
,seureption, a perfect freedom of speech. In order that
,his may exist, it is essential that the assembly shall have
he nowt r of excluding all persons who do not belong to
,he Indy in council. In small communities, like the early
Germanic tribes, from whom we derive our Parliaments,
there would be nobody to exclude but the natives of
some other division of the great body. They were armed
confederacies, and their deliberations were held, like
councils of war, sword in hand. The chiefs and the
people having one common interest, could have no moe
iive for secrecy as regarded either class. Sir Francis
Palgrave, indeed, expresses an opinion, that the National
Ass, nablies of the Teutonic or German bodies might oc-
casionally have been overawed by powerful chiefs. That,
we may be assured, would have been a very sufficient
reason for time° enthusiasts of popular rights and free-
dom fur expelling such chiefs from their deliberations,
and deposing them from all authority. But there is no
warrant in history for the opinion. People who enter a
council with arms in their hands are ill prepared for
submission to class-legislation. History, which refuses
to exhibit facts in confirmation of Sir Francis Pan
grave's hypothesis, informs us that an attempt to
alter the ancient laws and constitution of Sweden,
by King Ingi, was so strongly resented by the
boors, and others assembled in the Log-thing, or
Legislative Council, that they violently ejected him,
end threw stones after him in his flight. There is another
instance, in which an attempt by a chief, with the title
of king, which was more common, and consequently less
honourable than at present, ended fatally to himself, for
the people in deliberation cut him down with their
swords, and afterwards offered him in public sacrifice.
We could enumerate other facts, of which the tendency
is to show that the national meetings, which are the
generators of our more formal Parliaments, were
jealously kept as free as they were instituted—councils
tor the general good, to which all but foreigners had
access, and in which the powerful who aimed at innova-
tion on the common right were coerced by the armed
councillors. When the Normans came into England,
there were two races of men to be ruled, and it was long
the custom, when it was deemed nec, ssary to hold a Par-
liament, to send royal writs of summons to select
persons, and thus both the owners of honours, as a
concentration of several baronies in an individuil
possessor was denominated, and the owners of single
4nanors, sat together in Parliament. It is more
than probable that, under this arrangement, in-
imida.i.)n might be used by the more powerful
Barons by tenure over the les; weighty Barons by writ.
sVe pass on from these rule times to the Parliament or
Oxford, in the reign of Henry 111., when the Barons,
:succeeded in diminishing the authority of the
s evereign, sought to increase and perpetuate the aristo
cratic power, by introducing persona into deliberatioti
with them from the general body of the people. By this
'top they partly revived the free spirit of the Teutonic
councils. The two classes certainly continued to sir
together in the same house for a long time, though
tantiquaries are unable to settle the date of their separae
tiro. A third step brought the Parliament into its pre-
sent form of c instil trion, and introduced the claiming of
privileges. We mean the origin of the right of boroughs
and cities to send representatives to deliberate with the
nobles and knights of shires on the welfare of the whole.
In such an assembly, the very first question of taxation, or
if public right, that arose, would occasion a distinction in
the business or Parliament, and convenience itself would
sue: est the dtvisien of classes, which took place and still
,üb.ists. At this stage of Parliamentary history the
power of the House of Commons was comparatively
small. On electing a Speaker, they were obliged to
send him with an humble supplication to the Sovereign
the: they might have liberty of speech in their necessary
consultations. It weal also be just at the separation
of the Parliament into two Houses, that the Ceminons
would discover that the presence of great barons and
courtiers might riff-ct the freedom of thought and lan-
guage, without which they would be mere tools. We
can easily imagine that now began a second time that
jealousy of the presence of strangers, which extsted in
the early councils of the Germans. We are riot pre-
pared to state the exact time when a record was made
in the journals that strangers were present and ordered
to withdraw, though probably something of the kind
may be found in Whitelocke or Rushworth. Iu
all probability is was simply an announcement of the
fact that was necessary to occasion expulsion, The