The Sun.
London, England, 1848-07-07 00:00:00

when in Yorkshire only York and S carb;otheigeher returned
one one Member? Why, in the reignTtte
wars of • the Roses
there were only 28 boroughs.
Honourable Friend wish
destroyed them. Did his
to go back to the time when the Crown nominated
all the Members to that House ?—(Hear, hear.) And
when his Honourable Friend talked rallying
of round pro-
perty, he would ask, what traditionary ionar)
influences there
were in connexion with it? V it not' well known the+
that great writer, the late Mr. Disraeli— (Cliee•s)— said it
was the boast of the cavaliers who fought at Edge Hill, that
one troop of their guard possessed more )
B property
in than the
whole House of Commons ?—(Hear, hear.ut. spite ot
all their property, they were defeated by the middle classes
of the day.—( Hear, hear.)
And when his lion. Friend said
they were not a collective
tPaar, as in Sir William Wynd-
hem's day, did he imagine that his oaws,, had any feeling. inn Honourable Friends,
Newdegate and Sibthorp of this d
common with the Wyndhams of that day 1 lie was sure
the Honourable Members for Lincoln and Warwickshire
would forgive him for bringing their nausea
e
cusaion—
" The knights are dust, their good swords rust—
Their.souls are with the saitrites.'country gentlemen, and I trust"
—(Hear, hear.) Then there were h
a good deal was made of them. byof county}
Honourable
grieenhd:
Now he (Mr. Osborne) respected by
thiells class
tlemen, but he had not been able to
ofinTdaktehatH. tahnet}p.dhsand. ever
o
been the leaders of public opinion.
He
was cut by the gentlemen of his day; he positively would
not have been asked out to dinner.—
war?laug We they).elriadth:
country gentleman resisted the American
not opposed to Catholic emancipation and to the Reform Bill?
Take the gentry of the present day. As a class they had
been occupied in another place with throwing out a measure
which had for its object tli
edest
off the chains imposed byruction of the last rusty link
of persecution, arid the striking
bigotry and intolerance upon a long injured race.—( Hear.
hear.) In conclusion, he would say that he was no true
friend to the institutions of this country who looked down
either upon' the middle classes or the working classes.—
(Hear, hear.) He believed that the perpetuation of our Go-
vernment, and the real safeguards to our liberty, consisted
in the removal of all shackles upon thought, education, and
religion ; and, entertaining these-sentiments, he should give
his firm support to the resolutions moved by his Hon. Friend
the Member for Montrose.—(Hear, hear.)
Mr. Sergeant TALFOURD said that having on former
occasions sympathised, with and aided in the cause of re-
form, he felt bound on the present occasion to state why
he was not guilty of inconsistency in opposing the motion
of his Hon. Friend. And when he looked back at what
had passed during the last thirty years, when he first en.
tered upon public life, and took an ardent interest in the
cause of progres—when he saw how the power of
the aristo-
cracy had been diminished—what great additions had
been made to the popular strength—when he remembered
how the stability of a paper currency had at that time been
maintained by the sanguinary execution of blood-shedding
laws, and how the power or the press had in those days
been visited by the cruel oppressions of bigotry and fear,
and when he saw how immensely the direct influence of
the aristocracy had beenlscurtailed by the Act of 1832—how
every municipal corporation had been popularised—how free
was the press in these' days, not
when he recalled allot merely from prosecu-
tions, but even from annoyance
theSe things to mind, he could not think that he
was inconsistent in declining to proceed further
in agitating for organic change, believing that he
should act more wisely by striving to consolidate our exist-
ing institutions, and to impart to the people that knowledge
which was essential to the exercise of public duties, and that
piety without which knowledge was rather a bane than a
benefit.—(Ministerial cheers.) Proceeding to examine the
motion before them, he was struck, in the first place, by its
Miscellaneous character. It appeared to be a small attempt
to emulate a larger and infinitely nobler scheme. The
People's Charter was a bold plan : this lesser charter seemed
formed upon its model, only to induce the more timid politi-
cians to prefer it. It was developed, a 3 it was arranged, with
little caution. In the original plan there were four proposals;
but the Hon. Member for Montrose had since offered them
a fifth point; as if to show with how little discretion the
whole plan had been arranged, and how little judgment had
been exercised in introducing mighty changes of the whole
scheme of the British Constitution. The Honourable Mem-
ber's first point was the ballot. In his (the Learned Ser-
jeant s) view, there could be little objection to any change in
the moue of voting, which could save the humble elector
from the coercion of power and the temptation of gold.
Looking at the ballot singly, and believing that the defect it
was to remedy existed, if it had been singly proposed he
should have been prepared to give it his support--(Hear,
hear)—believing at the same time that its importance was
greatly exaggerated both by friends and foes —(Cheer-
ing)—and entirely discrediting the notion that there was
efficiency in any mechanical contrivance which could prevent
the greatest act of a poor man's life from being known.—
(Renewed cheers.) But the Hon. Gentleman confessed that
if the constituency he proposed to create were left without
this protection, then that the franchise would be rather a
bane than a blessing to them. Why, surely, this was the
greatest condemnation of his scheme Could they be pre-
pared to unsettle the whole system of the nation to establish
scheme, the sole protection of which was a ballot-box?
.—(Hear, hear.) Was that the ark by which the new-
born voters were to be saved from the waters of revolution
which were seeking to engulf them ? Why, he wanted
no better confession of the inefficiency of the plan—of its
utter uselessness for the purposes it sought to realise.—
(Much cheering.) But then came the next point—triennial
Parliaments. Triennial Parliaments would produce so little
practical change that he saw little solid argument either for
or against them. The Charter gave annual Parliaments
and this plan followed at a humble distance. Whether,
like the earth-born giant of old, who, every time he fell in
the struggle, acquired fresh strength for the contact, they
were to derive renewed energies from each repeated refer-
ence to their constituents, he did not know, but that was
about the only argument that could be used in favour of this
branch of the proposition. But then came the substance of
the Honourable Member's scheme—the extension of the
franchise and the new distribution ( f the constituencies.
And here he must admit that if the scheme was, as it was
intended to be, a scheme for new electoral districts, then
there would be a terrible consis•ency between the distresses
of the time arid this attempt to tear asunder the oldest
political ties and local associations. But having evolved
a cloud of " family petitions" in favour of the plan
the Member for Montrose started back as if at the
sound himself had made, and cried "God forbid that I should
propose anything of the sort. I have no wish to cut the
Country up into parallelograms." But tire constituencies
understood this to be a parallelogram project; and thatestudied being
so, what must they not think on the one hand of h
disguise of the projector, and on the other of the ltalueottt
r,
petitions 2—(Crieere.) Some of the petitioning ionin' g
earnestly prayed for " Mr. Hume's motion, which was safe
enough ; others asked for electoral districts in particular.
W hat must these worthy families think when they heard of
Mr. Hume having got up to declare that he did not want
electoral districts at all?—(Cheering.) The Hon. Member's
treatment of the suffrage question was scarcely any better.
His resolution, as set out to the world, was framed to include
introduction
of He passed over the subsequent
of the word " all."
Mr. lIUME—That was a mere error.
Mr. Sergeant TALFOURD quite believed so. But the
public understood the Hon. Member to go for " household
suffrage." if there had been a dinner, though he would
not insinuate that any such festivity had taken place, the
toast would clearly have been " Hume and Household Suf-
frage:' Ihe universal cry was " Hume and Household
Suffrage." The babbling gossip of the air repeated " Hume
and Household suffrage." But when the Hon. Member
came to explain his plan he introduced an interpretation
clause; and, accustomed as he (Sergeant Talfourd) was to
interpretation clauses, lie confe.ssed that this was the strangest
he had ever seen. Some of them directed that every singu-
lar should include all the plurals; others that every mascu-
line was to include all the feminines ; but this interpretation
clause narras still more curious, for (said the Learned Ser
geaut ) it explained the denomination "household suffrage"
to mean, not every man that holds a house, lint every house
that holds a man.—(Loud laughter.) Household suffrage
was, no doubt, an endearing term. It was especially so at
the tea-tables of the family petitioners, but this plan of
household suffrage included not householders alone, but every
man alive in this country, except those who slept under
gipsy tents. It was universal suffrage in another shape—
less plain and undisguised ; and so the family petitions a
second time had evidently prayed for something the Hon.
Member never meant. But the reason he gave was still more
edifying than the interpretation. " I did not put the words
household suffrage in my resolution," said the Hon. Gentle-
man, "because, although the Committee on whose part I
Ming forward these resolutions, agreed to the words house-
hold suffrage, they did not agree as to their meaning." A
curious result of the combined deliberations of the Com-
mittee. The lion. Member had done well, however, in
omitting the words, for the notion of household suffrage
under the existing circumstances of the popular mind, and
the variety of conceptions formed of it, was, of all notions,
the most fantastic and delusive. Having thus touched upon
his Hon. Friend's principal propositions, he now came to
the question—was the contemplated measure intended as a
settlement of the question, or merely as an instalment ? If
it were put forth as a settlement, it was wholly untenable in
argument. His lion. Friends must know that the more defi-
nite the suffrage was made, the more you extended it within
certain limits, the more agitation did you excite among those
who still remained without those limits. The very infini-
tude of the tenures upon which the elective franchise was
held lessened the effect of their exclusion with those who
did not exercise it, but once draw the line between a cer-
tain degree of poverty and the lower degree beyond it, and
you would find those lower degrees assailing this definite
line with the fiercest determination, and keeping up, until
they gained their point, an agitation altogether destruc-
tive of the well-being of the State.—(Hear, hear.) Let
him not be taken as advocating the principle that, with
a people prepared for the exercise of their political rights,
property should be the sole ground on which political
power should rest. lie well knew that there was a nobler
wealth than what consists in acres or gold ; he well knew
that a deep attachment to country, a lofty patriotism,
a generous pride in the institutions and ancient glories
of his native land, held their existence among the very
humblest classes of Englishmen, beneath the modest ml'
of the peasant as within the palace of the Peer; but
he could not derive hence the conclusion that these
bumbler classes, in their present condition of knowledge,
were fitted to take part in the legislation of this country, or
to be admitted even in the wholesale way proposed, to the
election of its legislators. To such a proposition the educa-
tion returns said No; the returns of crime, increasing not
much in number, but in the atrocious character of the crimes
reported, said No; the terrible outbreaks which had so dis-
turbed the country, said No; the conscience thehstattatetos;
states-
man, who felt how little had 3
of the people,
'et
beendo r
by
done
the spiritual and secular educationemphati-
cally said No.—( Hear, hear.) Could he
ia tany corre-
sponding increase had taken place in the intellectualt aggran-
disement of the country since 1832, he would assent not
to this motion merely, but the addission to the fran-
chise of all his fellow-countrymen without distinction:a to their having or bolding houses or simply living in
them ; but he found that no such extension of intellec-
tualn
power had taken place. I-Ps Hon. Friend the Member
for Oldham had eloquently cited, in proof of the ad-
vancement of knowledge among us, the vast diffusion of
cheap literature, and the names of several men, such as
Thomas Cooper and Ebenezer Elliott, who, men of the
humblest class of life, had distinguished themselves by their
glowing and powerful writings. The facts stated by his lion.
Friend not merely proved nothing—they indicated nothing
as to the existence of mental power among the masses. Li
all ages it had pleased the Creator to bestow the gifts of
genius upon the humblest among men as upon the highest.
It had been so in the Dark Ages—it was so now; but this
Proved nothing as to the general mind of the people, from
among whom these meteors of genius arose. It could scarcely
be said that the mind of Greece, after the Trojan war, was in
a state of intellectual elevation, yet it was that age which pro-
duced these rhapsodies which had vivified, and embalmed the
truths they narrated, and whose sublime diction had ever
since been the rule of their art to critics—their inspiration to
Poets. The Hon. Member for Oldham had cited the author
of, the " Purgatory of Suicides" as a man, fitted by Iris
meritshing verse, to adorn the Legislature of this country. The
of Mr. Thomas Cooper, as a poet, no man better ap-
Prevismd thau
he (W. Sergeant Talfeurd) • did ; bat be