The Sun.
London, England, 1841-02-27 00:00:00

of public attention; on the latter we shall beg
leave to offer a few remarks. On the former we
shall however observe that Sir ROBERT PEEL en-
deavoured to win support by referring to the
implied contract between the Ministry of 1829
and certain high-flying Tories) who assented to
the passing of the Emancipation Act on con-
dition of extinguishing the forty-shilling
freeholders, expecting thereby to impede Lord
JOHN RUSSELL in carrying the Bill, on the
ground that the Whigs of that day were a party
to the contract, and that Lord JOHN RUSSELL
would be personally degraded if he did not ad-
here to it. •
Independently of the personalities of such an
appeal, as if what Lord JOHN RUSSELL or any
other person might have thought and done in
1829 was now to be an insuperable bar to doing
justice to millions of people, the remark of Sir
ROBERT PEEL has both an historical and moral
interest. In 1829 we had a boroughmongering
Parliament. The people were then far worse
represented than now. The Peerage was
avowedly packed by the Tories, corrupt and bi-
goted. Sir R. PEEL and his friends were com-
pelled by the pressure of circumstances to
concede Catholic Emancipation ; they could
not help themselves, but consulting only
the two parties of the boroughmongering
Parliament, and excluding the Irish Ca-
tholics, who compelled them to grant emanci-
pation, they patched up a compromise. Sir R.
PEEL and the Duke of WELLINGTON sacrificed
the 40s. freeholders to their bigoted allies, and
this most corrupt and scandalous bargain Sir
R. PEEL in the year 1841, when the borough-
mongering Parliament with its authority has
ceased for some years, has now the astonishing
assurance to hold up to the representatives of the
people, as tt complete bar to all attempts to im-
prove the representation of Ireland, and to
doing justice to that part of the empire. The
nation went through almost the perils of a
revolution to put an end to the boroughmonger-
hag Parliament; and yet Sir R. PEEL, with the
simplicity of an aged matron, who never can for-
get that the mature man before her was once a
child, and who insists on treating him as a child,
preserves his affection and reverence for that
corrupt assembly, and, insists on this wiser gene-
ration being bound hand and foot by its scandalous
bargains. Sir R. PEEL, unable to lift himself out
ofthe political mire in which he has long grovelled,
would make his own bargain with the Tory
Lords of 1829—not the nation's bargain—the rule
of our present conduct. This seems to us the
historical interest of Sir ROBERT PEEL'S allusion.
The moral interest is still higher. We are
told to look on laws as the emanations of pure
intelligence. They are described by the Tories
as passionless justice. The Act of 1829 is some-
times spoken of as worthy of the great reputa-
tion of the Duke of WELLINGTON. It is de-
scribed as redeeming the character of Sir ROBERT
PEEL from the accusation of mere routine, and
stamping him a statesman. It is said to be a
great act of justice, and that policy and wis-
dom presided at its birth. But Sir ROBERT
PEEL'S description of the personal opposition
it encountered from GEORGE IV.—of the bargain
lie was obliged to strike with his ultra-Tory
friends in the House of Peers, sacrificing the 40s.
freeholders to their prejudices or the presumed
safety of the Church—degrades this great law,
this model of policy and wisdom, to ahuckster-
ing, immoral bargain; in making which neither
party cared a straw for justice, or even thought
of what was due to it; but both sought, when
they found they could no longer maintain a sys-
tem of gross oppression, to make as much profit
as they could, preserving place and power, out of
the compelled change. We never had a high
opinion of Tory statesmen and their motives, but
Sir R. PEEL'S description, on Thursday night, of
the process by which the Catholic Emancipation
Act was achieved, has increased our contempt
for their principles and their conduct.
Coming now to the public bearings of Lord
MORPETH'S Bill, we are free to confess that they
were not sufficiently explained by the Ministerial
party. Lord JOHN RUSSELL did, indeed, ex-
plicitly and plainly say that the Ministers were
compelled, by Lord STANLEY'S outrageousro-
ceedings, to look out for some test of the fran-
chise; but the Ministers did not do justice to all
the advantages of the rate-paying test. Saying
nothing of the amount, the test itself is simple
and easy of application. Those who will have to
carry it into operation are neighbours or resi-
dents, who can at once establish both the validity
of the claim and the identity of the claimant. It
will depend on no act of a man's own, but on the
impartial valuation of others. Perjury will be
annihilated by the annihilation of oaths. They
will no longer be taken. If there must be a test
at all of electoral capacity, we cannot imagine one
superior to being assessed to the poor-rates,
which is admirable for its simplicity, and will,
we hope, ere long, be universally adopted.
Now, what disadvantage--what public injury
—what evil to the empire will accrue from adopt-
, ing it? The only Tory who deliberately dis-
i cussed this important part of the question was
Sir ROBERT PEEL; and his arguments, assuming
that Si. was to be the sum, all went to prove
that it would make a more extended suffrage
than household suffrage—that it ,would revive a
more dependent class of voters than the decried
and abolished 40s. freeholders, and would swamp
the independent constituency. The Ripilit Hon.
Baronet quite forgot to explain how it would
make a more extended class of voters than
household suffrage, seeing that in Ireland there
are multitudes of householders not rated to the
poor, and that Lord MORPETH proposes that the
householder must.be rated at 51., and must have
a fourteen years' lease. But he seems to have
founded the absurd assertion on an argument of
Mr. THESIGER, without understandingits bearing.
Mr. TH:USIGER explained that landlords might
let their land at a nominal rent, with a condition
that if the tenant did not perform the covenant
the landlord should have a right to enter and
take possession. Such a lease would be the same
as a lease for years, and the result would be that
the constituency might be multiplied at the plea-
sure of the landlords, and the independency of the
constituency destroyed. That argument, founded
altogether on the presumed roguery of the land-
lords, and their determination to set aside for
their own purposes the laws they themselves
make, was in an urtorturatte moment adopted by
Sir R. PEEL, and after proving that the landlords,
by their conduct in creating 40s. freeholders, are
capable of committing any sort of legal scoun-
drelism, he went on to prove, for more than a
quarter of an hour, that the landlords would per-
vert the rate-paying test to the creation of a
great body of dependent voters who would be
at their command. This argument, founded
wholly on the presumed roguery of the land-
lords, invented by the Nisi Prius lawyer, and
greedily adopted by the statesman, was
repeated ad nauseam to the landlords
behind him, and was as much cheered by them
as if he had convicted the "turbulent demo-
cracy" of all the vices the Tories lay to their
charge. To show what the Right Hon. Baronet
thinks and says of his friends the Irish land-
lords, and, how he expects they will pervert the
law, we must quote a short passage from his
speech :
Let Hon. Gentlemen observe the influence operating
Upon.. the landlords ; the double influence of gain and po-
' power; because it clearly appeared from the report
of their own Commissioners that small holdings let at
much higher rents than large ones, mad that there was
greater competition fora small quantity of land than for
a large quantity. There was evidence that the rent paid
in the county of Armagh, when it came to the test of
value by the rate, was rated at a quarter or one-fifth that
being paid. This, then, was a great inducement to divide
property into small holdings, the landlord gaining a great
increase ; but superadded to that was another motive—
, that of political influence. . . Was it fair that pc-
I litical influence should be attached to such improper and
corrupt use of land ? A man would make freeholds, who
found by so doing be could exercise .groat power in the
country. This measure had a tendency in an evil dire.-
tion—namely, to the subdivision of the land, and to arrest
the progress of improvement.
The sum, then, of Sir R. PEEL'S argument,
borrowed from Mr. THESIGER, t
by hOugh elabo-
rated in his own way, and repaid_
_frequent
cheers, was, that
creating
the
405./a freeholders,nd/ordsbadso they
perverted
the old law by
making
.sbyfo
rmore a
than
agroela4t
number
eorvt.
semr ta
ltlh the e
anseewboliadtevi
et
kt un iomwtsh etini
eo ul
atoodfl
ot Iride
depicts
yheoaldrisn,
them. We demur not
how admirably he
ir
grse.serHvitnigw a
well powerh
by their cheers, but lie
of which they admitted
to the character he gives of his friends, the truth
the risk of making the la,ndlords less
has jumped to a hasty conclusion ; abnldtteekvetnbaant
lie has painted them, we
hiswe niu
in-
consistencies offactipointous
out
opposition
ptolt
on
which
made him guilty.
When the landlords made multitudes of 40s.
freeholdeN, there was no Poor-law in Ireland.
They could then doom their unhappy tenants to
starve at their pleasure. The Poor-law will
compel them, if they multiply small holdings, to
provide for the people. By now splitting their
estates they will impose a heavy burden on their
income, and we will answer for the Protestant
landlords not now destroying their estates to
create a large Roman Catholic constituency.
Formerly, too, the 40s. freeholders were serfs,
and they were abolished because they threw off
their dependence on the landlords. The latter
have profited by experience, and will not repeat
the errors they committed prior to 1829.
Sir ROBERT was at one momentsensible of this.
He said that the Ministers had brought in the