The Sun.
London, England, 1849-01-09 00:00:00

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LONDON, TUESDAY, JANUARY 9, 1849.

Within a few short weeks the Imperial Parliament
will assemble for the dispatch of divers urgent and
weighty matters affecting the welfare of the realm.
The representatives of the people will arrive recruited
and refreshed from their past labours. With renewed
strength and vigour they will enter upon their
arduous duties. Many questions of the deepest im-
portance will be submitted for their consideration.
The dropped measures of the past session will of course
be revived, and with, we trust, more fortunate
results than attended the efforts of their promoters
during the past session. The nation will no longer
sanction a system under which but 85,262 persons are
entitled to the legislative franchise out of a population
exceeding 8,000,000, or, in other words, under which
99-100ths of the people are wholly unrepresented.
The law of landlord and tenant in Ireland must be
revised, and very material alterations effected therein.
The Ministerial faith is pledged to the country, that
these matters will be attended to without the slightest
delay. The working of the Irish Poor-law must be
investigated, and measures for its amendment speedily
introduCed. There are many otherremedial enactments
for the sister kingdom relating to the reclamation of
waste lands, and the improvement of the fisheries, that
cannot be postponed or neglected—in fact, everything
by which the industrial resources of the nation can
be developed, and the social condition of the people
ameliorated, must be brought into operation.
The claims of Great Britain on the Legislative
attention are no less urgent. The important investi-
gation into the causes of the commercial distress,
which occupied Committees of both 'louses, cannot
be permitted to remain barren and unproductive.
Important alterations must take place in our mone-
tary code. The mischievous restrictions imposed by
the Act of 1844 must be abolished, and a currency
provided adequate to the wants and exigencies of the
country. The entire scheme of taxation must be
revised, free-trade doctrines also extended.
The impolitic and iniquitous system of indirect
imposts must gradually be set aside and replaced by
direct taxation on an equitable foundation. Hard-
working professional men, enterprising merchants,
and industrious and upright tradesmen, must no
longer be called upon to contribute as largely
from their scanty and precarious earnings
as the possessors of accumulated and realised pro-
perty. The demand for economy and retrenchment
can no longer be slighted. As the Lord Provost of
Edinburgh stated at the recentmeeting in the Scottish
metropolis, " the nation has been seized with a fit of
thrift." Useless and unnecessary expenditure will
no longer be tolerated, jobs will be hunted out with
the moat persevering determination, and abuses ex_
posed in all their naked enormity. Sanitary roes.
cures must be passed. The harrowing revelations
male by Mr. GEORG 2 IVALrieu in his able lectures,
to which we recently alluded, have limited the days
of intermural interments. " Our dead must be
buried out of our sight," and the desecration of their
remains can no longer be permitted to rend the hearts
of their surviving friends and relatives, or to scatter
disease and death among the overcrowded populations
residing in the neighbourhood of the civic church-
yards. _Neither can educational matters be neglected.
The reproach of ignorance must be removed from the
people.
We do not profess to recapitulate the various mat-
ters that must be brought under the Legislative
notice. The list could not be contained within
the limits of a single article. We have merely I
suggested .a very few of the many important

matters that will unquestionably be submitted to
Parliament during the approaching session. At the
close of the past session, we had to lament a " grievous
catalogue of unperformed promises, of Bills altogether
withdrawn and postponed to a future session, or so
mutilated in their progress through the Legislature
as to be rendered comparatively useless." And yet the
session was one of unexampled duration, exceeding by
23 days the longest previously known. It was "a
laborious and protracted" session. There had
been no less than 44 public Commissions
of Inquiry, consisting of 15 Members
each ; 28 Election Committees, of 5 Members each ;
14 Committees on Railway Groups, and 17 on Groups
of other Private Bills, each of 5 Members and up-
wards ; and 112 other Committees on Private Bills,
of 3 Members each. Some of the Public Committees
continued their sittings throughout the session—that
on commercial distress sat 39 days; sugar and coffee
planting, 39 days ; navy, army, and ordnance expendi-
ture, 40 days ; miscellaneous expenditure, 37 days.
One Election Committee sat 72 days, two others
nearly 20_days each, and many of the Committees of
Railway and other Private Bills sat for a considerable
time.*

When so much has been done, so many and such
complicated questions investigated—when the session
itself lasted for no less than 293 days, of which the
House sat 170 days, and when the average duration of
each sitting was 8 hours 164 minutes, we cannot im-
pute idleness or neglect of duty to its Members. To
what, then, are the deficiencies and backslidings of
the past session to be ascribed ? Clearly to the
erroneous system that prevailed—to the interminable
harangues of the ANSTEYS, URQIIHARTS, et hoe
genus onane to the abuses of the forms of
the House—to the constant motions for adjournments
and the., opportunities thereby afforded for intro-
ducing matters perfectly irrelevant to the subject
under discussion—to the countings out of the House,
when hours of the utmost importance were absolutely
lost to the country from the temporary absence of
Members--and to the number of unnecessary divisions
and useless debates that were introduced on the
questions, " that the' Speaker do leave the chair,"
" that the report be now received," &c., &c. It is
to these abuses that have gradually arisen
that all the evils may be traced, and
unless some adequate remedies be introduced
we shall again have to lament a grievous waste of
time, neglected opportunities, and unperformed pro-
mises, at the close of the session of 1849.
The Committee appointed last session "to consider
the best means of promoting the dispatch of public
business," offered some valuable suggestions in their
report, although we do not conceive that they fully
met the exigencies of the case, or struck at the root of
the evil. A very valuable pamphlet has now appeared
from the pen of Mr. THOMAS ERSKINE MAY,t
a gentleman who has shown himself tho-
roughly acquainted with all the details of basineEs,
and fully alive to the extent of the nuisance that must
be abated. The period of publication is peculiarly
well chosen. The time that must elapse before the
meeting of Parliament will amply suffice for the.
most mature and attentive consideration of the re-
commendations contained therein ; while it will not
be so long as to permit the several matters to be
forgotten.

Mr. MAr has ably illustrated the extraordinary
amount of business transacted in every session,
the legislative activity of Parliament during the last
twenty years, and the excessive labour bestowed upon
the business of the country. He explains
the causes which contribute to the difficulties of
passing measures. He lays down the true principle
" that all regulations for the dispatch of business
must be consistent with ample freedom of dis-
cussion." However great the inconveniences which
may occasionally arise from abuses of speech, every
law must be the result of the freest deliberation.
The public confidence cannot otherwise be retained.
Mr. MAY does not by any of his suggestions contem •
plate any abridgment of that right—it is only the
vexatious and annoying privileges that have been
grossly abused, and perverted from the objects for
which they were originally sanctioned, that he would
alter.
We shall not now enter into the nature of these
suggestions. We can, however, heartily commend his
useful publication to public notice. It will be found
in every respect well worthy of perusal.

Embarrassments have not failed to spring up with
the rapidity of mushrooms round the august
personage who has been recently installed in the
Elysee Nationale. He has already experienced the
bitterness of the anxiety which invariably accrues to
those*who undertake the labours and the responaibi-
lities of Government. He has scarcely constructed
his inaugural Cabinet before the members of the
Administration are transformed from friends into
belligerents, from the suavity of colleagues into the
asperity of antagonists. The gorgeous couch of the
Presidentship is strewed, like those of PERICLES and
AUGUSTUS, with thorns as well as with roses. Far
from exulting over these misfortunes—as too many
of our Contemporaries appear disposed to do—
we cannot but regard the position of Lours
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE as one eminently en-
titled to excite our sympathies. Carried to his
present magnificent elevation by the sponta.
neous votes of nearly seven millions of electors, he
is invested by the highest and most legitimate of all
authorities—the authority of the people—with the
powers and prerogatives of his illustrious office.
For this reason he possesses the loftiest of
all claims upon the respect of Christendom. He
is the visible emanation from the popular will. He
has been consecrated by the chrism of the multitude—
their almost unanimous enthusiasm. He has been
proclaimed the Chief Magistrate of the French Re
public by the Ballot and by Universal Suffrage. In
offering the indignity of ungenerous derision, there-
fore, to the President BONAPARTE, we are
directly insulting the majesty of the millions of
France. In paying due regard to the power reposed
in the hands of that democratic administrator, we
are proffering the worthiest homage to the intellects
of thirty-six millions of human beings. It is well
that these reflections should not be overlooked ; or,
otherwise, we may inadvertently degrade our na-
tional character by a repetition of those brutalities
and puerilities which cast an indelible slur upon the
last generation. Blinded by an ignorant animosity,
England, instead of recognizing in the Emperor
NAPOLEON one of the most legitimate Sovereigns
that ever wielded a sceptre, treated him only as a
subject for obscene calumny, for petulant lampoons,
for insolent and brutal vituperations. The result of
this was, in 1804, the rupture of a treaty of peace
which might otherwise have been permanent. It
plunged the whole of Europe into a war which lasted
for ten years, without cessation, leaving the English
to groan over the frightful extension of their national
debt, and the French to exclaim with mingled re-
morse and indignation—
" Lui qui un Pape a couronnee
st mart dans une Isle deserte !"
Since then France and England have equally ex-
piated their shortcomings, their sins of omission and
commission. And now, as a sublime tribute of re-
pentance and admiration to the manes of the great
hero who reposes in his imperial tomb on the
banks of the Seine, the exiled KING of
the Westphalians has come in his old
age to watch over the ashes of the Immortal Dead,
while the representative of her Britannic MAJESTY is
ranked the second amongst the foreign ambassadors
to the Presidential Court of a BONAPARTE.
At such a time as this—when history speaks to us
in a voice so eloquent—telling us of the miseries and
the ignominies which emanated from the rancorous
ignorance of the last generation, let us not, in the
name of everything that is just and rational, resume a
course which has proved to be so marvellously
debasing and disastrous ! Let us reap the harvests
and gather in
and (to employ the vintagesan
elegant egaof experience,
and phrasec:)rfientcbe;
poet KEATs) let that experience be productive to
ourselves and to our neighbours of
" The bread of friendship and the wine of love."
Previous to his election by the French nation as their
First President, Louis NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
possessed, doubtless, but small claims to the attention
of the world beyond that arising from the accident of

* Report of Committee on Public Business.
" f Remarks and Suggestions,
with a view to facilitate
the Dispatch of Public Business in PtirliamQnt. By
Thomas Erskine May." Ridgway : London, 1849. Pp. 36.