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London, England, 1841-02-27 00:00:00

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Ventriloquist since the days of Monsieur Alexandre. Tha
Trick, surpass all that have been introduced by the Wizards or
Magicians who have preceded him ; and the Exsemporaneous
Song, on subjects proposed by the audience, elicits thunders of
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HIGH WATER AT LONDON BRIDGE THIS -'AI.
Writing 12 minutes after 5 Evening 31 minutes after 5

LONDON:
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 1841.

The Bishop of LONDON presented petitions in
the House of Lords last night against grants to
Maynooth, &c.
The Destruction of Property (Ireland) Bill was
read a second time.

A brief conversation took place about the mail
packet station, and Lord ASHBURTON characterised
the Government plan as absurd. Their Lord-
ships then adjourned till Monday.
The Commons read the Severn Navigation
Bill a second time, after a brief discussion.
Mr. HINDLEY presented an excellent petition
from Ashton for a revision of the tariff. Several
other petitions were presented.
In answer to Mr. liumE, Mr. MAimn stated
that an account of the expense of Lord C
ARDI-
GAN'S trial might be laid before the House.
Lord STANLEY'S Registration 13i11 was post.
poned till Monday, when the Government Bill
stands to be committed, and when Lord JOHN
RUSSELL is to explain what he proposes to do.
The House went into Committee on Lord
IinANE'S Annuity Bill.
r. ART moveto omit
In the Committee
Mth e E
it ant to the two next
the words extending gr
heirs, so as to confine to Lord KEANE for his
life.
Captain HAMILTON,
he be
who has before exhibited
symptoms of an independent
mind, though
gretted
a Tory, supported Mr. EIVART.
that the people out of doors should suppose that
the go• rantin of a peerage and a pension must go
hand in hand.
Sir JOHN HOBHOUSE supported the original
motion.
After a short debate the Committee divided,
and the original motion was carried by 177 to
74. The Bill went through the Committee
unaltered.

The East India Ittim Duties Bill also went
through a Committee. •
The Railways Bill was committed pro forma,
to enable Mr. LABOUCHERE to introduce some
amendment in it.

irotion for a Bill to enable Municipa:
Councils to borrow money on annuities was with•
drawn.
The House Adjourned.

The late &bate has two very distinct fea-
tures, like most debates, namely, per-
sonalities and the public bearings of the sub-
ject in hand. The former we are disposed to
leave to Members of the House of
Commons; it is a mere party weapon unworthy
of public attention; on the latter we shall beg
leave to offer a few remarks. On the former we

A Y. 'to -il'e,...emball however observe that Sir ROBERT PEEL ell-
-- • (IN, ,
,'..0.:4 4.1W-"r'irs':c, +1 cured to win support by referring to the
i.t"..r.,,,...,L;\ Wtliliea contract between the Ministry of 1829
7 .A., t:3 ,a+' 4zertain Itigh-flyino• Tories] who assented to
tits 4:
,_,,,4?i, icAN.—;,:;,,e.assinis of the emancipation Act on con_
1.
. ~. ~t,____,,, ..:, 4,, 1 of extinguishile2;
\-.--' 1:'31 r.,—. 41
' '77 10111 C r:4, expecting therebtylleto ii.tin
, ,1----- ----, %,.i. : Rtlt3t4FLL in e-arrying riit)y--SehiLlloilli.dg
.:1.... a S -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 sotne years, has now the astonishing
assurance to hold up to the representatives of the
people, as a 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-
ing 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
of the 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 Toriee
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
he 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 Cburch—degrades this great law,
this model of policy and wisdom, to ii huckster-
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 Lora
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 outrageous pro-
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
cirry 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-
cussed this important part of the question was
Sir ROBERT PEEL; and his arguments, assuming
that 5/. 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 Right lion.
Baronet quite -fbrgot 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 understanding its bearing.
Mr. THESIGER 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 deterinination to set aside for
their own purposes the laws they themselves
make, was in an unfortunate 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-
litical power; because it clearly appeared from the report
cf their own Commissioners that small holdings let at
much higher rents than large ones, and that there was
greater competition for a 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 rat', was rated at a quarter or one-fifth that
being paid. TLia, 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 fa;r that po-
litical influence should be attached to such improper and
corrupt use of land? A man would make freeholds, who
founsi by so doing he could exercise great power in the
country. This measure had a tendency in an evil direc-
tion—namely, to the subdivision of the land, A an...
the progress of improvement.to arrest
The sum, then, of Sir R. PEEL'S argument,
borrowed from ill.. THESIGER, though elabo-
rated in his own way, and repaid by frequent
cheers, was, that as the landlords had perverted
the old law by creating 40s. freeholders, so they
would pervert the new law by making a great
number of small leaseholders for more than 14
years, reserving a power to turn them out of their
holdings. How well he knows the landlords,
how admirably he depicts them. We demur not
to the character he gives of his friends, the truth
of which they admitted by their cheers, but he
has jumped to a hasty conclusion ; and even at
the risk of making the landlords less black than,
he has painted them, we must point out the in-
consistencies of which his factious opposition
made him guilty.
When the landlowrasds
nmade o
omr
-ullatli
vt u
idne sI
roefl
a4nOds
..
freeholders, there
starve at their p
compel them, if they mult ot
tl
idi
gn gt sh,
eti or
They could then doloemasuthree.ir uTnhheapppoyotre-a
provide for the people.
a heavy burden on their
Bi
estates they will impose pylynsomwasllphli n
income, and we will answer for the Protestant
landlords not now destroying their estates to
create a large Roman4os Cfraetehhoehicdeic.sonswetirteuesenrcfys;
and they were abolished because they threw off
The latter
their dependence on the landlords:
have profited by experience, and w
will not repeat
.
l th
e
the errors they committed prior to 18s2i.b9i.
Sir ROBERT was at one momentsen
HBiellsatoidexthteant
dthteheMfirnainsetehrisseh, had
and
thenbrought h u
e
proved e-
eof this.
by the present conduct of the landlords refusing
p
to grant leases, that it would not extend the
franchise. But that was only a momentary
gleam of good sense. Mr. THESIGER domineered
' over him, and he went on to prove, with mar-
vellous inconsistency, that the landlords wopld
grant almost innumerable leases, and make a
worse constituency than the 40s. freeholders. It
is now admitted on both sides that the landlords,

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