The Sun.
London, England, 1840-05-21 00:00:00

universally admitted, and that wes shown by the Bills that
had L2CII over and over anain brought into the House to
remedy the e'i!, and Le would ask how it was that at the
repteation cf the short period that had elapsed since the
close of the last year the views of gentlemen on the
oppesite side had uncle:gene so extrar.rdin. ry a change?
—( Hear, hear, hear. ) It la ked as if they had s'ece
discavered that the removal of those abuses would operate
to the Frojedice of some party interest in Ireland, and as
if they were of opinion that slthougli the maintee sTice of
abuses was a hal thing, yet that the loss of office and the
loss of power was worse. The old hacknied argument
had been repeated that the Bill was a Bill of Disfran-
chisement, and the Hon. and Learned Member for Kil-
kenny (Mr. Hume) had stated it was a Bill of Pains and
Penlies. He had looked with very great care into the
Bill, for having had the honour of sitting upon a Com-
mittee appointed to inquire into fictitious votes, the sub-
ject had interested him, and he must say he could not
understand what Hon. Gentlemen opposite meant by such
an argument. The Bill did not touch the franchise. Wes
it seriously meant to he said that a Bill which merely went
to remove from the register fictitious votes was a Bill of
Disfranchisement? Iu one sense it certainly might he;
but did Hon. Gentleman opposite mean to say that. the
number of fraudulent voters on the Irish register seas s)
great that the removal of their names from the register
would materially affect the present right of voting in Ire-
land ?—( Cheers.) If they did, that furnished an unan-
swerable argument in favour of going into Committee. It'
the franchise was too high, let it be lowered; but he could
not believe it was the wish or desire of any Gentleman in
that House that fictitious votes should remain on the re-
gister. He highly approved of the Noble Lord's
will, and should give it his cordial suppert.--( Cheers. )
Mr. E. B. ROCHE believed the Bill wool I be ir-
jurious to the best interests of his country, and that was
suflicient argument fur him to oppase it. It had been said
that the present wes not a disfranchising Bill, but he con-
tended the very first clause disfranchised the great majority
of the voters of Ireland, by throwing almost insuperable ob-
stacles in the way of their registering their votes. He
contended tire constituency, as it at present stood, was
too limited, and the object of the present Bill was to re-
duce
it still further. In Cork, with a population of
00,000 the constituency was only 3 926. No one would
say that that was too large a proportion. In Wales, on
the contrary, which was as poor a country as Ireland, that
constituency was 43.026. Why, if there was fraud in
Cork there must be much greater fraud in Wales.
Hon. Gentlemen might smile at that observation, but
he would remind them that honesty, like charity, should
begin at home.—( Hear, hear.) He did not intend to
trouble the House at any length, but coming as he did
from one of the largest constituencies in Ireland, he felt
himself called upon to record -his moat decided opposition
to the measure. The great majority of the Irish people
and the great bulk of their representatives bad already
declared their objections to the measure to be insuper-
able. He would remind Hon. Members that the people of
Ireland regarded the present contest with the greatest
anxiety—their rights and privileges depended on it, and
they might rest assured that if by passing the Bill they
disfranchised the people of Ireland, they would have then
no resource b it that which no body of men who had the
welfare and tranquillity of the empire at heart could regard
without dismay. —( Hear. )
No other Member having presented himself there were
cries of " Divide," from both sides of the House, which
at that time contained only about fifty Members. Strang-
ers were ordered to withdraw, but before the galleries
were cleared,
Mr. D. CALLAGHAN rose and said that it had not
been Iris intention to address the House on the present
question, but seeing that they were abandoned by the
Treasury—( Hear, hear)—seeing that they were abandoned
by the Noble Lord the mover of the Bill—and seeing that
they were abandoned by many Hon. Members who bad
expressed their intention of taking part in the debate, he
was anxious to give them an opportunity of corning back
and offering their sentiments to the House.—( Hear, and a
laugh. ) It had been alleged that grave abuses existed in
the present system of registration in Ireland, but he denied
it, and he called upon the parties who made them to come
forward and prove them. The Hon. and Learned Member
for Bendon had asserted that at the Cork elections dead
men had been polled, but he believed that statement was
utterly unfounded. He hall attended many registries, and
he had never known an instance of an individual coming
forward and endeavouring to obtain the franchise by fraudu-
lent means. fie would remind the House and Honourable
Members opposite, that when the Reform Bill was
brought forward by the Governmenn, a clause for the par
pose of providing an annual revision of the lists of voters
was inserted. He (Mr. C.) had never offered any ob-
jection to that clause, and he believed it had received the
support of the Hon. and Learned Member for Dublin.
What he wished to see established was a system of annual
revision, which would give no trouble or expense to the
bona fide voter, while it would exclude the fictitious and
fraudulent ones, That clause, however, had been opposed
by the Noble Lord the mover of the present Bill, and it
had been struck out.--( Hear, hear.) Before the Reform
Bill, the system of registration in Ireland was simple and
effective, but when that Bill was passed an experiment was
made there respecting it, but it was never expected that
that was to be permanent. It had been stated this was
not a Bill of pains and penalties, or disfranchise-
ment, but the first clause disproved the asser-
tion, fur by it all the constituency were at once
disfranchised. But if the Irish submitted to
the loss of the franchise without taking up arms, and
contending for it to the death, they would be unworthy of
its possession. This was, he knew, the general opinion
of the country, and he was not afraid of expressing it in
the House. While, however, he opposed this Bill he
trusted the Government would introduce a measure that
would obviate the evils of the present system.
Mr. SOME RS looked upon the Bill as one of those
periodical devices which were resorted to by the Noble
Lord to exasperate the people of Ireland. Was this n
illiberal or unjust conclusion ? Was it not proved by the
constant practice of the Noble Lord and Iris party ? Oa
what grounds was the morality and capacity for the exer-
cise of political privileges of the people of Ireland esti-
mated below that of the people of England ? 'When
had there been a disclosure of such practices
in Ireland as had lately been made as existing
at Ludlow and Cambridge ?—( Hear, hear, hear.) He
had the most earnest dcsira of union with England, but
would not purchase it at the expense of their just rights
and privileges. So long as equal justice was done to both
countries, he should desire their union ; but when this
was refused, it was the duty of Ireland to do justice to her-
self.—(dlear, hear.).. _ _

Sir C. Win' said if Hon. Members thought by the
state of the House the debate was unnecessarily adjourned
last evening, he thought ;hey would find before it closed
there was vet much to be said. The absence of the Noble
Lord who introduced the Bill was the cause of their nut
coming to a division. The Noble Lord aed Honourable
Gentlemen were now, he presumed, more agreeably
occupied than on this debate, which, however, they
would return to when convenient to them. The
Hen, Member, having alluded to the unseemly termi-
nation of the Corn law debate, was intertupted by cries of '
" Question." He then said he would turn to the matter
before the House.—( Hear, hear, and laughter.) NAedy
could deny that abuses existed in the present system of
registration in Ireland, bu he hoped they would only be
temporary. The abolition of the 40s. freeholders might
have been necessary at the time, but the qualification with
the English and Irish voters should have been assimilated,
and if the Learned Member for Dublin hod confined his
efforts to obtaining that equalization; and had not linked it
with an extensio i, he would have gained a larger share of
support. The Noble Lord (Stanley) had last year ex-
pressed his desire for such an assimilation with Scotland.
If the Noble Lord had not departed from that opinion be
Was acting with great inconsistency in adopting a
different principle towards Ireland. That was his
(Sir C. Grey's) main objection to the principle of the
Bill—that it tended to strengthen and consolidate the
present unjust system of inequality in the Irish repre-
sentation. His second objection was, that there had been
a totally wrong construction put upon the Reform Act fix
Ireland, and there had been an endeavour to interpose
upon the decision of that question a tribunal unknown to
the law.—( Hear, hear.) He would not rivet, then, this
system on Ireland, with all its defects.—( Hear.) The
question turned entirely on the meaning of the word
"value" in reference to the beneficial interest required
in the premises of the voter. 'The difficulty arose out of
the forty-shilling freeholder qua ific.ition in England—the
question as to which remained unsettled—namely, whe-
ther it implied the value to the tenant, or the value the
tenant could get from another person for it, till 1758,
the Bedford case, when it was decided in the latter sense.
—( Hesr, hear, bear.) Now the question could
only concern the poorer of the voters. The de-
-1 cision was clearly erroneous in his opinion, but it
had been the root of the construction put oil the Irish
enactment. The Hon. Gentleman went rather minutely
into the legal points of this case. Subsequently, indeed,
several statutes had perpetuated the vicious decision of that
case. But it could never have been the intention of the
framers of the Irish Reform Bill. There were numerous
objections to details of the Bill, into which he would not,
however, enter. It was pretended that the measure would
not disfranchise the Irish constituencies ; but it amounted
to that, for it placed obstacles in their way which they
could not surmount. The Hon. Gentleman concluded by
expressing his decided opposition to the Bill of the No.:sic
Lord. -

Mr. TEE SIG ER said, that after the debate w'.ich had
now m
been carried on for three nights, after the full disc-
s ion which the principles of that most important measure
had undergone, after the manner in which the objections
brought forward against it had been so repeatedly answered,
he w...s rather astonished at hearing the speech of the lion.
and Learned Member who had just addressed the House,
and who had been speaking in opposition to the principle
of the Bill ; he appeared to have wholly misapprehended
what was the real principle of the question before the
Howe, if lie supposed that the reasons which he had de-
tailed to the House, hail ace thing to du with the principle
of the Bill at all ; in fact, they were totally irrelevant to
the question. What bad the question of the
inequality of the franchise between England
and Ireland to do with this c'ucstion, or the
extinction of the forty-shilling freeholders, or what had
that which had occupied so much of the attention of the
Hon. and Learned Gentleman, the beneficial interest and
the decisions of the Judges, to do with the question now
before the House ? It was not in the slightest degree
r
N
connected with the subject of the present inquil3ri)., Lord
no
did the Bill which had been introduced by the
yo Noble
least
lion. Members to invite the
profess to deal with it—it was inconvenient, to
of it, for
House to
because
rt,tters so foreign to the subject before them, beLaus,
it either induced other Memberst toof retToliye, to them,
or if no
which led to an unnecessary
it wasbee supposed by Me m_
answer were cffered to it might to the subject that
hers who had not paid greatd attentionainst the measure which
objections had been
answering. He would not
there was no possibility of
Learned Gentleman into that discus-
follow the Hon. anderdeave
ur to bring back the House
sion, bet
considerationwould.
of the only subject before it,
to the
hiniself strictly to the principle of the Bill,
ba}:d ctoonfitnnant7
alone ;
and Le would endeavour to consider
the objections i)
which had ecu urged on the other tide