The Sun.
London, England, 1836-04-29 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS

If anything were wanting to show the mere
,ry
of Tory professions, it would be amply supplied by the
exhibitions of the Tory orators in the House of Peers
on Tuesday night. When the English Municipal
Reform Bill was undergoing the process of mutilation-
in their Lordships' House, loud was the cry of those
noble abettors of corruption against any interference
with Corporations. They were heard appealing to the
sanctity of ancient institutions, the sacredness of Cor-
poration property, and the desecrated rights of privi-
leged freemen, in defence of those last strongholds of
abuse on which the tottering fortunes of their party
depended for a disgraceful prolongation of exist-
ence. Then it was warmly urged that the country
could be saved from ruin only by preserving to it intact
those inunicipal institutions which time had rendered
either uncongenial with the advanced intelligene3
of the people, or had so loaded with abuses, that
they became a nuisance in the land. The al-
most universal possession of these Corporations
by the Tory party, and their careful exclusion
from them of all upon whom glimmered the faintest
ray of liberal intelligence, was held not to be the un-
fair supremacy of a mere fraction of the population—
though a most insignificant one --in point of number,
and excepting the power conferred by their exclusive
privileges and corporate property, utterly without in-
fluence and consideration even in their immediate com-
munities. It was nothing then that property en-
trusted to these Corporations foe the benefit of the
towns over which they domineered, had been di-
verted by grasping administrators from its proper
use to merely corporate or individual purposes—
nothing that these towns had been unmercifully
mulcted' in tolls which their governing bodies un-
sparingly levied, to meet, for the most part, charges
which their own wasteful mismanagement had oc-
casioned, and which, in too many instances, had
over-laid and well nigh ruined the . trade of the
towns whereon they were enforced. No—in the
boundless regard of the Tories for these strong-
holds of their power, their crying evils were even ex-
tolled as excellences to be tenderly cherished and de-
fended. Such was the conduct of the Tories, and
especially of their chiefs in the House of Lords, whilst
the faintest hope remained to them of preserving the
English Corporations from the dreaded infliction of
reform. But the determination of the people no longer
to endure the injurious domination of a party, arrogant
whilst feeble, and steeped to the lips in corruption, con-
vinced the Lords that the entire preservation of the
Corporations was impossible ; and nothing was left for
them but by trick and subterfuge to render the inevit-
able reform as inefficient as possible. But they had at
length roused a spirit too potent to be baffled by mere
" tricks of fence ;" and notwithstanding the dex-
trous mutilations by which they imagined they had
fairly emasculated the Bill, when the hour of battle
came, though called for at the instance of fory
leaders, and fought, as far as possible, on Tory grounds,
they suffered a signal and ruinous defeat—a defeat
rendered gallingly evident by the very means they
had taken to strengthen themselves before they pro-
voked the combat. Taught a lesson by this (but an
unavailing one) they now shift their ground, and fear-
ful in Ireland, as in England and Scotland, of being
driven from the Corporations, they unblushingly, in
the presence of the whole people, unsay all they for-
merly said. Their old pretences are thrown aside :
municipal Corporations are no longer the nursing places
of freedom—no longer points of local centralization, by
which the country retains an influence in, and power
over, the general Government. The freemen are no

longer defended, their property (property obtained by
usurpation) is no longer proclaimed sacred, no coun-
sel is summoned to the bar of their House to mystify
the nation with a jargon of bombast and special plead-
ing, which a Dogberry would have listened to with
contempt. No : the town-clerks even, those cherished
agents of Tory domination, forcibly retained in the
remodelled Corporations of England, in the hope
that they might infect the new bodies with some
portion of the corrupt leaven of the old—even the
town-clerks arc unnamed. Not a fragment of their
humble servitors will the lordly Tories condescend
to retain all, from mayor to beadle, are to be
dismissed at one fell swoop! And what now are the
pretences of the Tory Lords for proceedings so utterly
at. variance with their former ones ? Why, that to
throw open the Corporations of Ireland to the mass of
the Irish people will be to throw the Tory portion of
them out of the Corporations altogether ! Or, as their
Lordships' phrase it, simply to take power from one
party and confer it on another, and so to perpetuate
the rule of party in Ireland, which they now discover
to be a most unsafe, injurious, and discreditable mode
of governing that as yet unfortunate country ! Party,
indeed ! do their Lordships conceal from themselves,
or hope to conceal from others, that the transfer of

power which this measure will effect is a transfer from
what is indeed a party, and a most corrupt and over-
bearing one—from a miserable minority, a mere frac-
tion, to the great mass of the Irish community ? But
among other arguments in defence of their new posi-
tion, our hereditary legislators—(happy condition I
where the estate and the wisdom descend toge-
ther)—refer to Manchester and Birmingham, and
other flourishing unincorporated tcwns, to show
show that a community may increase and be-
come prosperous without the existence of a Cor-
poration amongst them. Did they discover this
when they endeavoured to secure the continuance of
the English Corporations in all their disreputable in-
efficiency ? Truly, their model Corporation of Bristol
might have offered them a hint' upon this subject ; a
Corporation which—whilst Manchester and Birming-
ham were growing in wealth and population—by its
exactions, ruined to the full extent that it was able the
city whose prosperity it was its duty to promote, whilst
it gave an impetus to the trade of Liverpool, and raised
up Gloucester and Newport rival ports in its own
neighbourhood I 'Well, indeed, mi,-11t such effects be
expected to result from such a cause ; and if it were
now proposed to create or perpetuate in Ireland a
similar class of Corporations, not only might the
Lords, but every man in the three kingdoms, be dis-
mayed at such an intention. But because Man-
chester and Birmingham have escaped the evils
which Bristol has suffered from its Corporation,
does it follow that the former towns would not have

greatly benefited by Corporations of a more enlightened
description ? What has been asserted of the mo-
tives of the different Sovereigns by whom the Irish
Charters of Incorporation were granted, has been

_ .........
so much waste of time and breath. —Whether the Cor-

potations were intended to promote good government,
or simply -to maintain English and Protestant ascen-
dancy, is now nothing to the purpose. That they are
so corrupt, so exclusive, so overbearing, as to be inde-
fensible even by those who would gladly retain them if
best evidences what they have become.
they knew how,
But it hardly follows that because a certain description
of institutions are .'proved to be to the last. degree
injurious, that another class, altogether different in
character, must be injurious also. Ireland, more al-
most than any other country, requires municipal insti-
tutions. Not the institutions under which she has
been suffering ; but institutions subject to popular
control, and open to all who. by' talent or character or
station may have influence with their fellow-towns-
men. She requires them`as a means of practising
her people in habits of self-uovernment, out of
which m the spring deference to the laws and a love
of order ; she requires them as a means of promot-
ing- a fcelincr of self-dependence, which will preserve
them equally from a slavish deference to " Castle
authority in matters not necessarily binding on_them
as good subjects, and from moblike subserviency to
plausible demagogues, who, to gratify their own vanity
or ambition, may drag them through the mire of party