The Sun.
London, England, 1860-04-27 00:00:00

PRICE 4D. STAMPED, 55.

the longest probable period. That question has been large]}
discussed by political reasoners for more than 2,000 years
(hear, hear)—but I think the substance of all that has been
said by their best authorities may lee found in this very
simple definition :—A free State will be thus best sustaincd
and advanced by securing to its legislative councils the
highest average degree of the common sense of the common
interest. (Hear, hear.) Thus, intelligence is requisite,
but not intelligence alone; you might have a legislative as-
sembly composed of men indisputably intelligent—nobles,
lawyers, priests, who might honestly believe they used their
intelligencefor the common interest, when in fact they used
it for their own. (Hear, hear.) Hence it follows that no
one class interest must predominate over all the others, or
the common interest is gone. (Cheers.) Gone if that class
be the great proprietors, gone if that class be the working
men. But there is this distinction between the working
class and every other, that, granting their intelligence to be
equal to that of others, granting that it is not more likely
to be misdirected, still when it is misdirected the conse-
quences are, if they are invested with the electoral power
that determines legislation, immeasurably more dangerous
both to the common interest and to their own. (Cheers.)
For they are the roots of society, and it is the roots of so

ciety that their errors will affect, while their numbers arc
so great that their votes could overpower the votes of all the
other classes put together. Where this happens, the in-
stinctive safeguard of the rich is corruption; and the in-
stinctive tendency of ambition, where it is not rich, is to-
wards those acts which give dictatorship to demagogues.
(Cheers.) The honourable and learned member for Mary-
lebone has done me the honour to quote expressions of
mine in praise of the labourer and mechanic. I neither
retract that praise, nor the qualification with which
it was accompanied. The working class have virtues
singularly noble and generous, but they are obviously
more exposed than the other classes to poverty and to
passions. Thus, in quiet times, their poverty subjects
them to the corruption of the rich, and in stormy times,
when the State requires the most sober judgment, their
passion subjects them to the ambition of the demagogue.
(Hear, hear.) To every man who has read history, these are
no unsupported propositions. The history of the old repub-
lics is uniform as to this truth, and as all those republics,
at least whore democracy was established, employed vote
by ballot, so the same history tells us that the vote by bal-
lot is no cure for the evils. (Hear, hear.) Hence it is that
those eminent writers on the Liberal side, who have lately
examined this very question of a new franchise for Eng-
land, with political courage as well as speculative acuteness,
have all specially dwelt on the extreme danger of basing
that new franchise widely and exclusively upon a principle
that, once conceded, must expand—a :principle that, by
avowedly reducing your borough franchise so as to admit
manual labour, 'without any equipoise, without any test or
condition beyond that of finding a way to cover it at 2s. 4d.

a-week, must end by giving to manual labour the political
power over the capital that employs and the mind that
should direct it. An hon. member in the course of this de-
bate referred to the opinions of Mr. John Mill, than whom
no severer reasoner adorns our age; but what are Mr.Mill'e
opinions ? Dead against every argumentlby which the pro-
posed franchise is defended. He. would give, it is true, a
vote to every man, but, in order to counteract the effect of
numbers so created, he would give to a man of superior edu-
cation or property, such as a farmer or a tradesman, four or
five votes, to a man of still higher education and property,
five or six votes. More lately Mr. Mill has declared 'in fa-
vour of the propositions by which Mr. Hare, in a very re-
markable pamphlet, would insure the representation even
of the smallest minorities. These ideas are so against the
taste of the house and the inclination of the public, that
their adoption is impossible, but I mention them to show
there are consummate reasoners whose doctrines of Gove rn-
mentbelong to the boldest school, and who are yet more
anxious than the highest Tory among us to secure to pro-
perty and intelligent poet er that shall not be overborne by
the influence of numbers. (Hear, hear.) The mem-
ber for Birmingham says there is no cause to fear
the influence of numbers or of the working class, in the bill
that is now before us. He says, first; that the proposed ad-
dition as regards the boroughs is not considerable ; second,
that the total constituency will still be very small in pros
portion to the adult population. (Hear.) But the member
for Birmingham fails to see or to grapple with the argument
of my right hon. friend the member for Buckinghamshire.
It is not with my right hon. friend a question of numbers
alone, but rather of fitness. In fact, though I accept the
opinion of the right hon. gentleman the Home Secretary,
that all possible pains were takento obtain accurate returns,
yet he must pardon me if I say that, without entering into
the dispute between him and the member for Marylebone,
these returns must seem incredible to any gentleman who
will use his own powers of inquiry and observation, fur a
£6 house is a house at 2s. 4d. a week, but if any gentleman
will inquire in the small rural towns or even the larger vil-
lages in his neighbourhood, he will find that there are
scarcely any houses in them that are let to the most ordi-
nary artisans at less than 2s. 6d. a week; 2s. 6d. a week is
generally the lowest rent paid by a journeyman labourer in
a small rural town. What must it be, then, in a large
borough? Just consider. Many gentlemen, no doubt,
have built plain cottages for their own day labourers ; those
cottages cannot cost them less than about £BO each ; they
would be contented with a small interest for their money,
because, as it is truly said by the Duke of Bedford, who
has conferred benefits on the working classes, the more
signal, because so nobly unostentatious, the country gen-
tleman does not build cottages for immediate remunera-
tion ; but in a borough town such houses are built by small
capitalists on speculation, who would not be satisfied with
less than 7} or 8 per cent. for their outlay—that is, more
than 2s. 4d. a week, more than £5 a year, for a house.
equal to the humblest cottage you build for your hum-
blest labourer. But, granting the returns to be correct
as to the present number of £6 householders, they can
afford no criterion of what the number of £6 voters
would be if this bill passed into a law, for the poorest
labourer who now pays 2s. a week for a house (and less
than that he could not pay for any hovel in a borough town),
would gladly pay 2s. 4d. to secure a vote as a good specula-
tion, which will give him a claim on the wealthier trades-
men of the town who take an interest in elections, should he
want a job of work or a 'charitable donation at Christmas—
those small gleanings of calculating benevolence which are
the perquisites of poor electors ; and, on the other hand, a
landlord who now lets houses at 2s. or 25.2d.a-week will screw
them up to 2s. 4d. in order to increase his political importance
by having a numerous tenantry at his command, in consti-
tutional proof of the legitimate influence of property. And
you must take with you the fact, which you seem to ignore
.--namely, that every year, us the prosperity and popula-
tion of the country increase, the £6 franchise will become
wider and wider as to numbers, lower and lower as to the
condition of the voter. The £lO occupation is now, in the
large towns, a very much lower franchise than it was 30
years ago. You are legislating for posterity in a direction
you can never retrace, and in less than 30 years a £6 fran-
chise must, in the larger towns, be equivalent to household
suffrage. We have, therefore, no fair criterion as to numbers;
but, in the meanwhile, we find, even by your returns, that
the addition proposed is quite enough to overbear the exist-
ing constituency in about half the present boroughs; it
must materially influence elections in moat of ,the other hall.
We then ask if that addition is composed of a variety of
classes ; we find that it is confined to a single class, and we
object to overbear the existing constituency by a single
clad, without any equipoise or relief. (Hear.) I shall make
our distinction more clear by proceeding at once to the second
assertion of the member for Birmingham. (Hear.) He says
that the entire constituency, which he estimates at 1,000,000,
will be very small compared to the adult male population,
which he estimates at 7,000,000. (Hoar.) But when he
would thus make manhood suffrage a standard by which to
compose a suffrage, that, if more limited, should fairly re-
present the diversified character and opinions of the whole
adult male population, he forgets to omit from his 7,000,000
not only about 700,000 paupers, but more than a million
and a half composed of soldiers, sailors, mercantile marine,
domestic servants,' and rural peasants, whose tendencies
might counteract the opinions of the special class this bill
selects for the franchise; and the right way to look at the
present suffrage, and at the proposed addition, is evidently
this :—The present suffrage is a selection, made less than
30 years ago, from those classes of the male population with
whom popular liberty is most safe, excluding rural peasants
as too much under the influence of landed aristocracy ; do-
mestic servants, as too much under the influence of mas-
ters ; soldiers and sailors, as too much under the influence
of the Crown. (Hear.) But if, while you continue to ex..
elude from your constituency large masses of the population
that represent Conservative elements, you admit a new ele •
meat which our common sense tells us must be exclulively
democratic, you destroy the fair equipoise of representation.
even by niimbers, and you do not impartially ente:nd the
area of a national franchise, but you pervert
tie national
franchise into the monopoly of a single cins. I close, then,
this part of my argument with these plain propositions :-
Ist, that it is not consulting the batmen sense of the com-
mon interest ; 2dly, that tt is not a fair application of the
doctrine of representation by numbers to introduce into a
constituency already so popular that in this vast metropolis
and in many of our great towns the richer classes are not
represented at 4.11, a tIQV selection from that special class of
artisans wb.o, ceowclod together in large towns, always have
been and always will be the most democratic and the most
exoitable part of the population, without any selection of an
opposite tendency ; so that the more some town has been
rendered populous and flourishing by expenditure of capital
and activity of educated intellect, the less capital and edu-
cated intellect will have a voice in the representation of the
place the prosperity of which they created and maintained.
(Cheers.) And now, sir, lot me observe that it was well said
by the hon. member for Leominster, in a speech which the
Home Secretary censures for being animated—(greet
laughter)—l cauuot retort the charge on the right bon.