The Sun.
London, England, 1869-03-13 00:00:00

bfill,ls: OF THE 2IIBLIC JOURNALU.

The Saturday Review is busy discussing what is the
proper legislative office of tile Lords, and what scope
remains for their superfluous energies. The Lords may
be regarded as an initiating and as a revising legislative
body, and it must be considered what they can properly
initiate, and how they can properly revise. Lord Russell
said that the initiating functions of the Lords lay properly
in matters ecclesiastical, diplomatic, and legal. As tc
ecclesiastical queseions, the attribution to the Lords of a
constitutional aptitude for dealing with them probably
suggested itself to Lord Russell as a compliment to the
bishops. But this was clearly a mistake. The bishop.
are not meant to legislate for the Church, but to defend
it. They initiate nothing ; they remain passive, and see
as far as possible that things are not changed to their
detriment. The repeal of the Test Act, Catholic Rman•
cipation, the suppression of half the Irish bishops, disen•
dowment and disestablishment of the Irish Church, are
the sort of ecclesiastical measures carried by modern
English Parliaments ; and the rustic who waited till
bishops initiated them would gaze a long while at the
river of time. In diplomacy, PArliament does not so
much legislate as express opinions for the guidance of the
Secretaryof State ; and here it is quite true that the Lords
can, and often do, take the initiative with much success ;
and a debate in the Lords on any international or diplomatic

question generally commands great attention and respect.
But one evening every other session is about all that falls to
the lot of the Lords as an opportunity of shewing their
excellence in this department of public affairs. Diplo-
matic discussions, to he valuable,!must be very rare. There
remains the law ; and here it must be owned that there is,
as matters now stand, a lamentable waste of very valuable
legislative power. The experience and the knowledge and
the leisure of the Law Lords are not nearly enough uti-
lised for the reform of those portions of the law which
everyone knows ought to be reformed, but which it is no
one's business to reform. The main duty of the House of
Lords must, however, necessarily be that of revising the
legislation of the Commons, and the Lords are fully jus-
tified in asking that they should have every possible
facility given them for discharging this duty properly.
Lord Russell suggests that the best method of securing
this time would be to alter the time of year up to
which the estimates are framed, so that the discussion in
the House of Commons of these estimates should be
thrown later than it is now, and be put after the mass of
their legislative work for the sessionwas d em. Then the
Commons would be discharging the complex and lengthy
financial duties which belong exclusively to them, while
the Lords were revising the bills sent up to them. This
suggestion deserves consideration, as also does that of Lord
Granville, that many bills might be permitted to begin in
the Lords which must now begin in the Commons, because
they have some faint and remote tinge of a money bill
about them. The extreme jealousy of the Lords with
which the Commons used to be animated in all money
matters may perhaps be mitigated now that the supremacy
of 'the Commons has been estaonshed.

The Spectator, referring to Lord Salisbury's remarks on
the spread of education having nothing to do with the
diminution of . crime, says : For our parts, much as we
respect the group of administrative statesmen of both
parties, there is not one of them whom we cannot easily
conceive, if born under less propitious circumstances, and
brought up without education, as being nanie, like all the
rest of us, to fall into positive crime. Lord Salisbury,
strong and able as he is, is undoubtedly a strong partisan,
liable to very narrow views—witness this utterance about
education and crime—and not indisposed to be arrogant
and overbearing in asserting them. Suppose he had had
no education, no means of living, and no social rank to
widen and soften him, does anybody doubt but that he
might have been one of the dangerous classes—the very
dangerous classes himself ? His slight hardness in defence
of property rights might just as well have been excessive
hardness in assaulting them--they come from the same
root at bottom.—and if he had taken to burglary, none of
the crew would have been so violent against the " peelers,"
or a bitterer stickler for his share of the " swag." His old
opponent in the Commons, on the other hand, Mr. Forster,
the Vice-President of the Council, had he been brought up
outside the worldof education and social amenities, though
he would have been quite as formidable as Lord Salisbury,
would have beenterrible in a different way. He, it may be,
might have been drawn into a trade union, and on behalf
of such a brotherhood have become a desperate character—a
terrible picket against the "knobsticks," an enthusiastic
rattener, a stern executionerof the unlawful laws of such an
ignorant and tyrannical Vehmgericht. Nay, if we may let our
imagination dwell at all on so very delicate a field as the
possible affinities of illustrious and intellectual men for
different classes of transgression of the law, had they had
none of the advantages which Lord Salisbury thinks so
utterly without bearing on crime or " moral depravity," is
it so absolutely impossible to imagine that—in another and
very much worse world —some disreputable double of Lord
Derby, instead of taking a leap in the dark " to dish the
Whigs," might have made his enemy stand and deliver on
Hounslow Heath, on pain of receiving a couple of balls in
his head, and ridden to York in some incredibly short time
to prove an alibi? or that some unfortunate wretch with
a strange whiff in him of Lord Russell, might have been
charged with feloniously placing obstacles across the rail-
road with intent to throw the up-train off the rails, to
gratify a grudge against some of the passengers? Is there
absolutely no conceivable world in which Mr. Bright
might have been a prize-fighter, or Mr. Lowe a body-
snatcher, or Lord Westbury a devotee of vivisection
practised in open contravention of the law against cruelty
to inferior creatures, or Mr. Goschen an accomplished
coiner, or Lord Stanley a dangerous tramp and beggar?
Would Mr. Disraeli be quite unimaginable as a Leicester-
square conspirator against foreign Governments under the
guise of a melancholy pedlar of steel pens, or Mr. Gladstone
as a promoter of bubble companies, or the Bishop of
Oxford as a begging-letter writer? Is no conception more
inconceivable than that someatias of Mr. Walpole's should
have been taken up for singing doleful ditties about the
streets, with six starving children as his companions, and
without strict adherence to history in his lugubrious nar-
rative? or that same smiling bumpkin, resembling a village
Granville, should have been charged with turning his
bonhomie to bad purpose in some country fair, by acting
"bonnet" to the local dicer?

The Saturday Review is dissatisfied with Mr. Bright's
language respecting the matter of false weights and
measures and adulteration, to which Lord Eustace Cecil
the other evening called his attention. How comes it that
in the parish of St. Pancras the inspectors state that the
crying evil of the day is that the parish authorities screen
and conceal the numerous cases of deficient weights and
measures brought under their notice ? Why is not the
supervision of weights and measures made a matter of
police, and not of municipal regulation? and why should
not the magistrates be compelled to publish these lists?
The whole thing ought to be taken out of the hands of
these wretched vestries. No, says Mr. Bright; trade
would be impossible if we interfered. They interfere in
France, they interfere in Prussia, they interfere every-
where where it is admitted to be one of the first duties of
Government to protect the poor and ignorant and starv-
ing ; and even where lawis halting, and it is difficult
to reach offenders in a thinly populated country such as
America, the law of Lynch supplements the statutes. But
in England the British tradesman ought not to stand this.
Better shut up his shutters than submit to the degradation
of honest dealing. Mr. Bright at the Fishmongers' Hall
said that, in his own person, he had in the public interests
so far neglected business that he was almost in the condi-
tion of Mr. Shell, who was, according to his own account,
sent to the Board of Trade because he knew less
about trade than any other man in Parliament. We
make Mr. Bright a present of this extenuation of the
character which he is pleased to give of the British
retailer. We trust that Mr. Bright is, as he seems to
suggest, ignorant of the real character of his clients. His
picture of them is scarcely engaging. Pope talks of the
"tradesman meek and much a liar." Mr. Bright describes
him as much a liar, and bound to be so by the stress of
competition, but anything but meek. Mr. Bright's
retailer not only cheats, but must cheat, and must not be
interfered with in his cheating. We regret to say that
there is much truth in this. The lower you descend in
trade, the less economical and the more unsound is its
working, The small retail tradesman has no capital, or
only such as he borrows at an extravagant price ; the
retail publican is much in the same condition. They deal
in perishable articles ; they are bound to give credit ; they
are open to competition ; the money that they have is not
enough to pay interest, to remunerate their own labour,
and to keep their families ; and adulteration and false
weights are their only resource. Humanitarians will say
that, if you throw additional difficulties on the small
retailer, you are suppressing a useful element in society.
This is just what we deny. We believe that the public
good, and the true interests of trade, would be advanced
by diminishing retail trade as it is now carried on in poor
neighbourhoods, and that both vendors and consumers
would be benefited by improving a good many retailers
from off the face of the town.

The John Bull, in reviewing the achievements of the
members of the Government, declares that the good
buys have said their lessons very well, and been sent back
to their seats with a pat on the back. The Premier has
put up Mr. Childers and Mr. Cardwell as his pet pupils,
and their easy translation will, on the whole, do credit to
the Liberal establishment. But we must not be dazzled
by the kind of plodding work which passes occasionally
for brilliant scholarship. Mr. Childers and Mr. Cardwell
are the industrious boys, not the geniuses of Mr. Glad-
stone's school. The Ministry having committed itself to
economy, the heads of the great spending departtnents—
theAdmiralty and War Office— were forced to economise
as best they could, and it is only just to say they have
done their work, from the purely ispular point of view,
without much clumsiness. Mr. Childers had to save,
and his estimates appear nearly a million lighter than they
were before. Mr. Cardwell had to save, and he has
knocked off a clear million or more. Theseoarefacts—
great facts—dear to the British taxpayer, f whatever
politics he may be, and the encomium passed on the two
good boys from the Opposition benches was not altogether
undeserved. The credit of such of their retrenchments,
however, as are safe they cordially acknowledge to be due
to their predecessors in office ; and Mr. Corry and Sir
John Pakington will probably in detail criticise the weak
points of the Government schemes, while Lord Elcho on
Friday night gave notice of motion as to the formation of
an army of reserve. As to Mr. Childers's scheme for turret
ships, to draw twenty-six feet of water without masts, it
is simply absurd, the ships, as Mr. Corry, who knows
more probably about the navy than any one in the House,
says, being,
.ahli‘uu4llpr sea-o'li purposes and for coast
defence— ---' --"*""