The Sun.
London, England, 1860-05-31 00:00:00

MANUEL.

Mr. BRIGHT has tried his hand unsuccessfully
on the Peers, he will now see what he can do wit h
the Government. Lord PALMERSTON's Cabinet of
1859-60 must soon become matter of history; even
should it survive political convulsions, its head
must, in the course of nature yield in no long
time to what we all must bow to. All of us, indeed,
whatever our view of his policy, wish that period
to be yet remote; as a great political antagonist
said, " we are all proud of him," and when we
look at the vigour of his Cabinet colleague, who
presides over the House of Lords, we may well
hope that Lord PALMERSTON may yet be able for
some years to retain a leading place in -the councils
of his county. Still his good name and fame are soon
to be the property of survivors, and to them the
noble lord must feel, more than hitherto, respon-
sible. To history, therefore, Mr. BRIGHT points
the head of the Cabinet and his colleagues:and
asks whether they wish to be handed down as the
Cabinet that held office under the reign of Vic
ToRTA, who resigned without a struggle into the
hands of the House of Lords a right which their
forefathers had contended for, even to.the sacrifice
of their lives, and which they believed to be, and

truly believed to be, at the very foundation of the
liberties of the people of England ? Dark and
piteous, he tells them, will be the page of history
for the year 1860 which should record that they
placed themselves and the House of Commons in
this position.

Mr. BRIGHT can make out as strong a case as
any man if he has but one side to consider. He is
in this the orator not the judge, or the statesman.
To weigh conflicting statements with the impar-
tiality of the former, or to select the practicable
from conflicting claims, is not his gift, To no man
should we more readily confide the setting forth
of any case in sach a way as to elicit cheers even
from opponents, and to produce the momentary im-
pression that he is right. His own force of convic-
tion, partly due to his incapacity for anticipating
objections, and his ready flow of telling language
and illustration, will always render him an attractive
speaker. He is never likely to want an audience in a
house bored with commonplace, or in the town-
halls of vast populations to whose comprehension
and taste he can adopt himself with such wonder-
ful facility. It is said of him that while he " roars
like a lion at Birmingham, in the house, he coos
like a sucking dove." To be sure he does. It is
a part of the oratorical temperament of the man,
that he sympathises without effort with the tastes
of his diverse audiences. It is hardly designed with
him ; the presence of different assemblies gene-
rates spontaneously in minds like his, the style
appropriate to each.

Mr. BRIGHT is a member of the Committee of
Precedent-hunters. He will certainly enter on
his task with a foregone conclusion. The Lords
must be in the wrong. They have unquestion-
ably furnished him with just the very text to
suit him, and he has already preached from it
two sermons sufficiently long in all conscience—
not, however, to drowsy or weary audiences. He
told the Reformers of Lancashire—" That at this
moment we are not asked that the frontiers of
the ancient realm of English freedom shall be
pushed forward in advance, but we are driven to
a most unusual proceeding—that is, to make a
fight for liberties which our fathers gained,
and:which we, in our simplicity, had thought
to be so firmly established that nobody in
this country could, for a single moment,
threaten to assail them." He affirmed that
the Lords had no more constitutional right to
exercise their technical right of a veto on a bill of
supply than the Crown has on all bills--that to be
at the mercy of 400 hereditary representatives of
as many families was far worse than to be at the
mercy of the Crown, inasmuch as an individual
would often shrink from acts which a corporation
would readily perpetrate. He pointed to America,
as an instance in which the attempt to tax
without representation had lost us an immense
empire, and that all now agreed that the
colonists were right in their main principle.
The QUEEN never either asks the Lords for sup-
plies nor thanks them for those which have been
voted by Parliament ; never directs the estimates
to be laid before them ; and the House of Com-
mons has never consented to let the Lords have
copies of the estimates ; they have, therefore, no
official knowledge of the wants of her MAJESTY'S
Governments. The Chancellor of the Exchequer
is always in the House of Commons, and, in fact,
the most important Minister there ; and he
sums up this part of his argument thus :—" The
principle, I believe, upon which the most able
lawyers—the mode in which they would state
the oase, is this : that the House of Commons has
the sole right of granting to the Crown what the
Crown requires. If there was an inexhaustible
chest under the floor of the house, from which
money could be drawn and handed to the Crown,
without the necessity of an Act of Parliament taking
it from the people, the vote of the House of Com-
mons could apply that money and could hand it
over to the Crown." But, if so, why send the bills
relating to supply to the House of Lords at all ?
Mr. BRIGHT answers—" The reason why a bill
goes up to the House of Lords is this, that you
went what is called statutory machinery to esta-
blish a mode by which the sums granted by the
Commons can be raised from the people. But the
soul of the matter is in the grant of the House of
Commons. No other power can grant than the
Commons ; no other power can accept a suply than
the Crown ; and the Lords being one of the three
estates of the realm, give their assent to the ma-
chinery which is enacted in the various clauses of
the Acts which pass, for the purpose of establishing
the mode in which the grant which the Commons
have given shall be raised from the people who are

to pay it."
To us it certainly appears that the Lords have
violated no form or letter of the constitution. They
are technically right. We do not see how the mere
form of assent required of them should not be, in
itself, a standing memorial of their right to dissent.
The mere form of amendment, in regard to taxa-
sion, they have altogether renounced—their not
having renounced the form of saying " content,"
must imply that they retain the right as
well as the power to say " non-content."
At the same time the Commons can never consent
to the recent act of the Lords becoming a prece-
dent and a usage. The business of finance
cannot be carried on by two boards; the people
would soon grow restive indeed, if they found that
the repeal of taxes was prevented by the Lords.
The Precedent Committee will, we believe, find
no case exactly like the present one during the last
2GO years, and the House of Commons, if it should
prove to be, in point of form, a new case, yet one
in which an old principle is violated, will soon take
care that their business shall be so transacted as
to neutralise any attempt of the Lords to interfere
with taxation—with either the imposition or repeal
of taxes.

How wonderfully to be sure M. ACHILLE
FOULD'S assurances as to the pacific and chival-
rous character of his Imperial master's Government
have been corroborated ! Never was there any-
thing, certainly, more oddly or ridiculously mel
apropos than the manner in which before the echo
of those words of M. FOULD have well died away
there came flashing to us yesterday, through Mr.
REUTER'S office, in the City of London, that no-
table telegram (dated Tunis, Tuesday Evening,
May 19th) which announced that the Chamber of
Deputies had approved, by a clear majority of 196
out of a house of 262 members, the formal cession
by treaty of Savoy and Nice to the French EMPE-
ROR, the absorption of those fair provinces into his
Imperial Majesty's dominions, the formal transfer-
ence of the allegiance of from 600,000 to 1,000,000
Nizzards and Savoyards, from a constitutional to a
despotic Sovereign ! Beholding this deliberate
cession, absorption, and transference, we cannot
but understand at once how perfectly reassurt d
the Belgians, and the Prussians inhabiting the
Rhenish provinces, must feel that (as M. FOULD
generously avows to them) they have no cause
whatever to regard the future policy of France, in
their regard, with solicitude and discomposure.
Why—far beyond any good natured remarks of a
mere Minister of State like M. FOULD—had not
Europe the solemn pledge of the French
EMPEROR himself at the commencement of