The Sun.
London, England, 1856-10-04 00:00:00

soldiev now feels himself able to tale his. place with those
of his rani:, and condition in life, and if you will go into
any of our barrack-yards you will find them now with
school, of instruction, with reading-rooms for non-com-
tui,.sioned officers and soldiers, with plat as for recreation
an I exorcise, and yon will find them leading a life of
Christian usefulness, I am proud to say—for religion
has developed itself wonderfully in the ranks of the
,rrey---a life of which we may any of us be proud, and
in which we may not be ashamed or afraid to trust our own
little ones. But other matters of politics have of course
engaged my attention, of various descriptions. Upon these
I will not at present touch, but I may remark that
I have returned to find this county still, as over, repre-
sent -A by those whose object it is to advance constitutions
liberty and to go on increasing instead of diminishing the
political powers which are dissem:nated among the great
body of the people. (Cheers.) I hive always been one of
those who have never been afraid of trusting the people
with political power. I have always t; bought the more
confidence you put in a man or in a body of men the more
you will find them responding to that confidence, and
using the power with which you entrust them well. I
have lived to see changes lake place which I have heard
cried down as revolutionary, and which even now the most
squeamish Conservative has brought himself to call con-
stitutional. (Cheers.) I see in this county three gentle.
men representing it—my noble friend Lord Duncan, the
county member ; my friend Mr. George Duncan, the mem-
ber for Dundee ; and my friend Mr. George Baxter, the
member for the Montrose burghs. The records of the ses-
sion tell you how those gentlemen have attended to their
public duty, and I think we may congratulate ourselves
that for talent, for sterling honesty, for high public in-
tegrity, no county boasts of three better men than does
the county of Forfar. (Cheers.) But I confess I
have been somewhat surprised—and I take this oppor-
tunity, not principally of addressing your ears, but
of addressing those " chiels" who I see " are takin
notes, and faith they'll prent them"—(laughter)—upon a
point which my friend Mr. Baxter has alluded to very
much in some of his public orations in this county ; and
I do it not to quarrel with my excellent friend Mr. Bax-
ter, but rather to point out, as a member of her Majesty's
Government, and somewhat interested in the judgment
which is passed upon their measures, how a man may de-
cry and give a wrong colouring to the acts of the Govern-
ment, and so bring into discredit a Government which
otherwise it is his object to sustain. The point to which I
especially allude are the remarks which my friend Mr.
Baxter has made upon the English Police Act. The reason
why I am tender upon that subject—perhaps Mr. Baxter
does not know it—is because that happens to be a child of
my own. (Laughter.) If anybody is in fault for having
brought that measure forward—a measure full of all the
vices of centralisation—l am afraid I must plead guilty to
that fact, because in 1839 and 1810, when I was Under-
Secretary of State for the Home Department, I passed
that measure through the House of Commons. It was
then brought forward as a measure optional upon the
counties for which it was passed, in order to induce
these counties to look to their own interests in the
way of the restriction of crime, instead of doing
that which was the universal practice of these times to do
—making the British army the police of the country, a pur-
pose for which the British army was never intended. La
the year 1839 and 1840 we took the first steps to bettor
such a state of things, and that Police Bill enabled every
county to institute a police for itself. It was only per-
missive, but so far from considering it an unconstitutional
measure, rather more than one-half of all England and
Wales voluntarily adopted that which Mr. Baxter has
condemned. And this year, upon the principle that where
the half of England had undertaken to destroy all the
vicious vermin in the different counties—upon the prin-

ciple that these vermin all fled to the place where thezo
wore no police set up at all, those parts of England which

had adopted the Police Act loudly and very properly de:,

manded that the measure should be compulsory over all
England instead of being merely voluntary. Nothing

could be more reasonable than that ; but in what consists
the centralisation—for that is the point upon which my

friend Mr. Baxter is so very loud ? He says he voted
against it because of its centralising qualities. Now,
the only centralisation that exists in that act is this
—that if the police in a county is kept up in an efficient
state, and reported to be such by Government in-
spectors, one-fourth of the expenses of that police are to
be paid from the Treasury ; and in order to ascertain
that the payment of that one-fourth is merited, surely i t
is right that the Government, acting for the rate-payers of
this country, should be assured in the first instance that
they are paying for a good article, and not for a bad one.