The Sun.
London, England, 1867-03-22 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

TIMES.—The Liberal members of the House of
Commons met yesterday, and it has been decided
that the second reading of the Ministerial Reform
Bill shall not be opposed. Twohundred and seventy-
eight supporters of the party mec at Mr. Gladstone's
house in Carlton-gardens, and after a very short dis-
cussion—if that can be called discussion which con-
sisted principally of but one speech—resolved that
the great battle of the Session, if fought at all, should
not be fought at the second stage. We are informed
that the meeting was unanimous in supporting this
conclusion, although it is suflieiently evident that its
unanimity of feeling was not unbroken. The more
fiery spirits of the party declared their preference
for immediate war. Mr. Gladstone himself, as we
understand, expressed his own belief that it would
be vain to
,discuss the Government Bill. Mr. Bright
pronounced the same opinion with even greater
energy. Wiser counsels, however, we are glad to
say, prevailed. While Mr. Gladstone avowed his
personal impatience of further forbearance, he con-
fessed that a large section of the party thought a
good bill might yet be made out of the materials
laid before them by the Ministry. The ultimate
decision was in favour of waiting till the Chancellor
of the Exchequer had declared on the second
reading of the bill what portions of it the Ministry
were willing to relinquish and what parts they
held to be vital. If his statement next Monday
should in that respect prove unsatisfactory,_
and it was arranged that another meeting of the
party should be held to consider it,—a division
would then be taken on the subsequent motion that
the Speaker do leave the chair. To this counsel Mr.
Gladstone declared himself ready to defer, and Mr.
Bright was ready on all questions of strategy
to be guided by the leader of the Opposition.
We can have no doubt of the wisdom of the decision
arrived at. That the Reform Bill in its present
shape is altogether inadmissible--that it has the
gravest sins of omission and of commission, we
have always declared. But we have never allowed
that it cannot be transformed into a measure which
may be satisfactory both to the Parliament and the
nation. On the contrary, we believe it is easy to
point out the amendments by which it can be con-
verted into a very consider.iLle, if not into a per-
fectly satisfactory scheme of Reform. So much has,
indeed, been admitted by Mr. Gladstone in the House,
of Commons, and the admissiJn ought to settle the
question. If we have a chance—and by hypothe-
sis we have a chance--of obtaining a complete bill
from the present Ministry, let us by all means secure
it. It is quite certaiu that if they were defeated on
the motion that their bill be read a second time, no
Reform Bill would be possible this year, and there
would be no such certainty as we at present pos-
sess lof passing one in another session. Whatever
else might happen, we should at once convert allies,
even if somewhat unwilling allies, into active oppo-
nents. With such a prospect, it would be manifestly
unwise to relinquish a single present advantage. At
the same time, the conditions of further peace must
not be misunderstood. If the Liberal party is to
practise forbearance, it is for the purpose of co-ope-
rating with the Government in obtaining a satisfac-

tory measure of Reform, and directly the possibility
of co-operation fails the reason for forbearance
ceases. The most pressing amendments required in
the Ministerial Bill were stated at yesterday's meet-
ing by Mr. Gladstone, and, without following him
in every particular, we concur in most of what he is
understood to have said. The dual vote must, of
course, go ; but we hold this to be gone already.
On the other hand, some enfranchisement of lodgers
is absolutely essential, and we need only refer to
Mr. Disraeli's own speech in 1859 to show that no
one understands this more completely than the pre-
sent Chancellor of the Exchequer. We are at a loss
to know why a lodger franchise was omitted from
the Ministerial bill, and we cannot conceive that
there should be any difficulty in supplying the omis-
sion. As an Administration practically the same as
the present proposed to enfranchise lodgers paying
a certain rental eight years ago, they cannot he
allowed to declare now that such a proposal involves
any danger to the Constitution. Some light was
thrown on the question of compound householders
by the reply of the Chancellor of the Exchequer to
Mr. Gladstone's string of inquiries last night, and we
believe the more this part of the bill is considered
the more will it appear that the objections to it can
be perfectly well met in committee. The Govern-
ment bill proposes that all householders in boroughs
rated to the poor, and paying their rates, shall vote.
As a matter of fact, however, in the towns where
the Small Tenements Act has been applied, house-
holders rated at and under £6 a year do not pay
any their rates, except indirectly, in the way of in-
creased rental to their landlords, who pay the rates
to the overseers under a composition with them. In
order to admit these compound householders to the
vote, a subsequent clause enables them to claim to
be rated in their own names; in which case, how-
ever, as Mr. Disraeli explained last night, they will
have to pay the same rates as their neighbours, and
not the reduced rate their landlords may now pay
under the composition. The difference cannot be
very material, yet it would be worth attention as a
fine on the privilege of voting, were we assured that
the increased rental the tenant pays to his landlord
is no more than the rates the landlord pays. We
may, however, be satisfied that the landlord gets his
commission, so to speak, on the composition to
compensate him for his trouble and the risk he runs
of not being repaid, so that the apparent increase of
rating paid by the tenant would prove on examina-
tion to:be unreal. If the tenant always paid his own
rates, he would secure an equivalent reduction in
his rental. The evidence taken before Lord Grey's
Committee on the effect of the Small Tenements
Act on municipal elections shows the impolicy of
separating the obligation of ratepaying from the
privilege of the franchise, and it is open to debate
whether the best solution of a difficulty which is
felt on both sides of the house may not lie in a re-
duction of the limit of £6 fixed by the Small Tene-
ments Act to whatjs practically found to be the
limit of the personal responsibility of the house-
holder, and in making the Small Tenements Act,
thus modified, one of universal application. The
other questions which arose on Mr. Gladstone's " in-
terpeliation"last night were eminently such as should
be considered in committee. It is, for instance, pro-
vided under the bill that the occupation franchise
shall depend upon the occupation of a house—that is,
of a dwelling-house—and two years' residence is re-
quired before registration, while under the act of
1832 one year's residence is sufficient, and the occu-
pation may be that of a house, warehouse, counting
house, shop, or other building. This diversity would
be very undesirable ; nor are Mr. Disraeli's reasons
for it altogether satisfactory. Persons who are on
the register must of course remain there, but there
does not seem sufficient reason for attempting to
maintain a distinction between the householders
above and below the £lO limit which might be easily
compromised. A still more curious point started by
Mr. Gladstone was apparently imperfectly under-
stood by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. There
have been many decisions in the Court of Common
Pleas on the existing law as to the meaning of " a
house," and we believe it may be roughly said that
a separate door key had been recognized as the great
criterion, so that any number of flats in a house
having a common open staircase may qualify as
many tenants to become voters. There can be no
doubt that, in the absence of some special interpre-
tation clause, " a house" in the Ministerial Bill must
mean the same thing as " a house" in the act of
1832 ; anal it is evident that it should be distinctly
understood whether this is intended, so that there
may be no way opened to the manufacture of votes
not contemplated by Parliament. The considera-
tion of the Ministerial Bill in committee must in any
case be a matter of difficulty, but it need not be au
impossible task. Difficulties are inherent in the
very nature of Reform. The examination of any
bill in detail must provoke a large number of ques-
tions, and it depends upon the Government whether
the measure now before the house shall be more
fruitful of disputes than the schemes of other Mi-
nistries. It is the peculiar difficulty of Reform in
this country that it has to be considered by a body
which is at once the Constituent and the Legislative
Assembly, which is called upon to determine its own
fate, and many of whose members are asked to suffer
self-sacrifice, perhaps to terminate a career of
honourable ambition. This is, of course, most felt in
the part of the bill dealing with Redistribution, and
it is, therefore, most desirable that there the Go-
vernment and the Opposition should as far as
possible work in harmony. Notices of amendments
to the redistribution scheme have already begun to
pour in, and may be expected to multiply. The
announcement of the Chancellor of the Exchequer
that the Government proposes to increase the num-
ber of the Scotch representatives coining as it does
after a scheme which leaves the number of English
members untouched, opens up a process which ought
to be jealously guarded. There is no invincible
reason why the number of members of the House of
Commons should not be increased ; but it is ex-
tremely undesirable, and should not be assented to
unless it be clearly necessary. Sir George Bowyer's
motion to omit altogether the disfranchisement
clauses must be peremptorily rejected. Even if there
were no populous towns and increasing counties re-
quiring representation, the fact that so many small
and decaying boroughs return members to the
House is an anomaly which should be corrected.
The proposal of Mr. Sergeant Gaselee to disfran-
chise absolutely those boroughs having a population
under 5,000, and to deprive of one member those
boroughs under 10,00 u and returning two, is a
crude suggestion of a better course. The conside-
ration of such questions may, however, be deferred
to the time when the House enters into committee
on the bill, a time which now ought not to be far
distant. The Opposition show their willingness to
help the Government, if the Government be dis-
posed to meet them in turn. Past offences have
been amnestied, past errors may be amended. The
Ministry have still an opportunity, but if they are
wise they will not permit the forbearance which has
so far been shown to betray them into confidence.
Their bill may pass a second reading and perish on
the motion to go into committee. Every mistake
the Ministers have made has weakened themselves
and strengthened their adversaries, and, while it is
still possible to keep back the attack, a repetition of
past errors would remove the last bond of restraint,
and a united Opposition would sweep them from
place and power.
THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE ON " FENIANISM IN
IRELAND, AND FENIANISM ON TILE CONTINENT."—
The spirit that animates the Fenians in Ireland
would appear on investigation to be almost
identical with that which governs the wide-
spread secret society on the Continent, whose
well-known object is the overthrow of the throne
and the altar, and the subversion of all author-
ity, civil and religious. Apart from the name
the end and intentions of the conspirators appear
to be the same as in Italy, France, Spain, and Por-
tugal. With a subtlety and pliability, character-
istic of its certainly not celestial origin, the spirit
of this conspiracy adapts itself wonderfully to
the peculiarities of race and of circumstances ; it
leans for support on the existence of local wrongs
and national grievances, and under the most capti-
vating of all disguises—that of liberty and nation-
ality—gradually insinuates into the masses of its
misguided victims a poison subversive of all social,
religious, and political health and happiness, and
totally destructive of all personal freedom. In
Ireland, whether the society of Fenians be in real-
ity but a ramification of the parent body that de-
vastates the Continent, or whether it be only mo-
delled on that frame, its object avowedly is the
overthrow of the British Government in that
country. With a people like the Irish, at all
times so remarkable for the desperate tenacity
with which they have clung through all vicissi-
tudes to the faith of their fathers and the obser-
vances of their religion, and so conspicuous for
devotion arid attachment to its ministers, the
sudden introduction of infidel doctrines would
prove a hopeless, if not a dangerous task. To re-
present, however, their Church and its teachings in
the odious light of standing in opposition to the
welfare of the people and to the long-cherished
national hope of liberty and freedom from the
hated oppression of England, and to undermine
the authority of their pastors by proclaiming
them as friends of the oppressor and abettors
of national slavery, such seem to be the tactics
employed by the Fenian leaders, and the first
seeds of rebellion to ecclesiastical authority des-
tined to produce bitter fruit. On the Continent
of Europe, in countries and against Governments
and Sovereigns most renowned for traditional and
personal attachment to the Catholic Church,
secret societies appear to have been most deeply
planted, and their ravages to be most disastrous
and visible. As Freemasons, or as Carbonari,

they envelope, as it were, in a network the entire
social body ; they surround the throne, have
their representatives at the council board, their
influence in the Senate, their agencies in the camp,
and everywhere, by dark and mysterious machin-
ations, promote the work of irreligion, revolution,
and disorder. Strange to say, the seat of the go-
verning body, .and of that dread chief whose
orders admit of no dispute, whether it be in that
celebrated palace of Paris—whose walls, if history
speaks truth, are not innocent of the concealment
of conspirators—or on some remote island of the
Mediterranean, or amongst the splendours of Flo-
rence, or in the purlieus of London, the home of
the refugee is totally unknown even to affiliated
members. The late pastoral of that most en-
lightened and eminent prelate, Monsigneur Du-
panloup, Bishop of Orleans, throws considerable
lighton the rules and proceedings of this notorious
body. It is but a few months since, at a banquet
given at Havre to a French prince distinguished
amongst his fellow soldiers by a soubriquet not
complimentary to personal valour, it was openly
declared that Catholicism must be crushed, and
that Austria, as its chief supporter in Europe,
should be trampled under foot. Within the last
few days a fresh proclamation of the notorious
Garibaldi again declares war against the Pope,
the clergy, and their friends and supporters;
it requires no stretch of memory to recall the
numerous letters and proclamations of Mazzini
in the same sense and to the same effect. In addi-
tion to words spoken and written, deeds of sterner
reality are not wanting to supply convincing evi-
dence of the object and intent of this society.
Wherever it—that is, the revolutionary party in
Spain, Portugal, and most recently in Italy-
-has triumphed, has not the Church immediately
been attacked, its property confiscated, its minis-
ters exiled or imprisoned, the religious orders
dispersed, places of education under their con-
trol proscribed, convents broken into, rifled and
pillaged, publications of the most immoral ten-
dency diffused, and doctrines of infidelity, subver-
sive of all faith and morals, openly propagated ;
all, under the sacred name of liberty, by men
who, in swearing allegiance to a secret chief and
a secret society, had already sold themselves into
the most abject of all slavery. That such should
be the effect, or at least the immediate effect, of
Fenianism in Ireland is not to be apprehended.
The intimacy of certain amongst the Fenian
leaders with well known individuals in Paris, the
constant residence of some of them in that city,
where their correspondence from time to time
appears to be dated, coupled with a similarity of
objects and secret means employed, may, perhaps,
point rather to Continental Europe than to
America as the birth-place of Fenianism and its
unholy doctrines. The statesmen and the people
of England who welcomed Garibaldi to these shores
and worshipped him almost as a demigod, and
who patronized and supported Mazzini, must not
be surprised that the fruits of their own sowing
shall be reaped by nations as well as individuals,
and that the principles which they applauded and.
applied to Italy may recoil upon themselves, that
the doctrine of nationalities they approved of
and upheld, and the proeeedings of men when)
they encouraged may be reproduced at home by
the very same agency as in Italy, and under the
same auspices. So long as there exist in Ireland
unredressed grievances of the extent and import-
ance now universally acknowledged, Fenianism
will obtain more than ample food for existence ann,
support. The nation that has been once instructed
in the catechism of conspiracy will not be slow in
communicating knowledge to its neighbours. Irish
Fenians spread over the face of this country inal
erect new lodges and enrol new members, and in-
itiate their fellow-workmen in every town and city
into those dark mysteries by which henceforth
others as well as Italians may be taught to un-
dermine Parliaments and Governments, to corrupt
armies, and even to overthrow dynasties and
thrones.