The Sun.
London, England, 1867-07-17 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

TlMES.—History does not record whether Cas-
sandra upon the capture of Troy recapitulated all
her former vaticinations in one final prediction of
common ruin to Greeks and Trojans alike. If she
did, however, she could scarcely have employed lan-
guage more eloquent with indignation and despair
than is embodied in Mr. Lowe's speech on the third
reading of the Reform Bill. No one, it must be
admitted, has so well earned the right to acquit his
own soul of the evil that he apprehends. Whether
any good object is served by denouncing that which
has become inevitable, and whether it was well to
mar by reproaches, however just, the effect of so
great a measure, passing without a division, are
questions into which it is needless to enter. At all
events, Mr. Lowe is the only eminent member of
Parliament who could have done so with any ap-
proach to consistency. His fears are certainly not
the fears of passing vexation and resentment, but
the result of a deliberate conviction avowed on many
occasions during the past two years. When he tells
us that "we are now closing an era of permanent
stability and mutual confidence," that we shall soon
" be surrounded by a perpetual whirl of change and
revolution," and that we have embraced a principle
which " contains the germs of endless agitation,"
he does but reiterate in other phrases the warning
of last Session that, by abandoning the £lO line, we
launch ourselves on that fatal slope which leads to
the abyss of democracy. Now, if all this should
come to pass, the counsels of Mr. Lowe will
assuredly be quoted hereafter, as the protests of
Burke and others against the taxation of America
are now quoted, in condemnation of the Parliament
and people by whom they were unheeded. We are
bound, therefore, to ask ourselves why these coun-
sels have been rejected by statesmen of all parties,
and whether, upon a calm review of the struggle,
we are prepared to abide by the issue. The
first and strongest reason's for rejecting Mr.
Lowe's counsels is, that, if closely examined, they
are found to repose on more than one fallacy. It
is a fallacy to say that such a bill as bas now
passed the House of Commons " regards all citizens,
however different they may be in other respects, as
in the main alike." It would be more accurate to
say that it is grounded on, and justified by, the
very contrary presumption—the presumption that
equality of voting power does not constitute, and
cannot produce, equality of political influence. All
representative systems, and not only all representa-
tive sy stems, but all Governments, are dependent
for their very existence on the natural advantages of
property and education over poverty and ignorance.
Those advantages are vastly enhanced in this
country by historical tradition, by natural charac-
ter, and by the political capacity as well as by the
unbounded leisure of our highest classes. No con-
trivance whatever could place an educated and an
uneducated man on the same level for the purpose
of swaying opinion, or throw our schools and our
press into the hands of persons like Jack Cade ; still
less could it choke the legitimate power of our natural
aristocracy. The enfranchisement of some hundred
thousand artisans and labourers does not, then, affirm
or establish their equality in respect of "weight in
the State" with great landowners and merchants ; it
only gives them equality at tl.e polling booth, where
experience shows the ascendancy of wealth to be
only too potent. Such an extension of the suffrage
may be supported either by considerations of justice
or by considerations of expediency. It has actually
been supported upon both these grounds, and Mr.
Lowe is not entitled to contend that it repre-
sents " the principle of a right existing in the in-
dividual as opposed to general expediency." No
one on either side of the house has advocated this
Reform Bill on principles of abstract right. On
the other hand, all have recognised, what no one
but Mr. Lowe denies, the moral claim of some
classes heretofore excluded to a share in representa-
tion, and have at least professed to believe that a
satisfaction of this claim would conduce to "general
expediency." Mr. Lowe may fairly challenge
the opinion of his opponents on this last point, but
he cannot fairly charge them with ignoring it.
There are few Reformers, however earnest and
however
sanguine, who affect to regard so great a
change without a measure of anxiety. We are
about to call a powerful force into existence, and we
know that misdirected force, whether physical or
moral, is a destructive agency. Those who aspire
to lead the thought and guide the action of this
nation must, and doubtless will, realise a new sense
of responsibility ; nor will questions hitherto
neglected fail to force themselves upon public atten-
tion. We cannot read the future, but we have
faith enough in the patriotism and wisdom of our
countrymen to smile at the dismal horoscope of
national destiny which Mr. Lowe has cast for us.
Mr. Disraeli's comment upon it was not wholly
undeserved, for Mr. Lowe hints, not very obscurely,
that, when the revolution is once accomplished, it
may be the duty of those who have most strenuously
resisted it to become " revolutionistes du lendemain,"
and hurry on a revolutionary policy. " You com-
pel us," he says, " from the necessity we must feel
to do the best for our country, in the great peril to
which you have brought us, to adopt principles
which, while our Constitution remained as it was,
we should have shrunk from." The substitution of
a "second elected Chamber" for the House of
Lords, the abridgment of the period for which Par-
liament is elected, the appointment of an elective
Prime Minister not responsible to the House of
Commons, the subdivision of legislative power by
the creation of "local bodies," the introduction of
the elective principle into the army—are described
by him as compensatory innovations which, though
in themselves mischievous, will then become rela-
tively expedient. " The example of America will
become of necessity our model.* Yet no one has
exposed more eloquently or forcibly than Mr. Lowe
himself the absurdity of any mysterious necessity
decreed "by the fates and the destinies in some
dark tribunal in which they sit together to regulate
the future of nations." He cannot mean that such
consequences as he forebodes will be developed from
Household Suffrage by the operation of any im-
mutable law, and he does not attempt to show in
what manner the good of the Commonwealth
would be 'promoted by them. Then, why should
he apparently sanction them beforehand as the just
Nemesis of Reform ?

THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE" ON MEXICO AND
SHEFFlELD.—Barbarism and Civilization, as repre-
sented respectively in Mexico and Sheffield, are at
this moment arraigned before God and man. On
both alike blood-guiltiness lies. The murder of
Maximilian and assassination on system as pursued
at Sheffield are types of the crimes committed by
barbarous nations living under no law, human or
divine, and by nations where material civilization
is practically divorced from religion. We do not
mean to say that Mexico, though guilty of a na-
tional crime which has attached an indelible dis•
grace to the country, has thrown off every law,
human and divine, or that civilization in England,
on account of the Sheffield outrages, is a civilization
without God. But we do believe that vindictive-
ness, blood-thirstiness, disregard of the sanctity of
human life, are types of barbaric nature, not dimly
shadowed, but too visibly traced in the course of
recent events in Mexico. And we believe, not in
Sheffield only, nor in England, but in the whole of
Christendom, modern civilization is tending towards
that state of things in which the world was before
the introduction of Christianity—civilization with-
out God. Broadhead is the result of that modern
civilization which, in the interests of society itself,
Pius IX. has so often and so emphatically con-
demned, as Juarez is the product of a society in
which first Divine, and then human laws have long
been trampled under foot. Juarez, let Victor Em-
manuel remember, began a career which has already
resulted in a crime that has outraged the moral
sense of the world by periecuting the Church, plun-
dering its property, and defying the Pope. If
Mexico, which must henceforth be accounted, as
far as it is represented by the revolutionary party,
as a semi-barbarous nation, has sinned in Juarez,
modern civilization has sinned in Broadhead.
Broadhead is more than a type of a class—he is
the embodiment of the idea which lies at the bot-
tom of modern civilization. Material interests,
progress in arts and knowledge which advance the
temporal welfare of man—the purely human side
or aspect of life—this world, in a word, and not the
next are the objects which men live for, labour for,
and which, under one form or another, they worship.
The object of such a worship is to them a reality.
which God is not. The end of such a life is tan-
gible ; it stirs the blood, it lights the imagination,
it nerves the will to endure labour, disappointment
and self-denial with a patience bordering on the
heroic—often an earthly martyrdom for an earthly
object. The deliberate and wholesale murders which
have just been committed in Sheffield, in the in-
terest of the trade unions, are an illustration, in its
most exaggerated form, it is true, of this spirit of
the age this absorption of all interests in one
paramount pursuit. It is not so much the merging
of higher interests and ideas in lower; the sacrifice,
under stress of temptation, of principle to passion,
which is common to every age, as the utter oblite-
ration of higher principles of action, and the com-
plete, not subordination even, but substitution of
one end of life for another. The Sheffield outrages
reveal a most complete unconsciousness in their
perpetrators of moral guilt. In their minds another
sense has taken the place of the moral sense, and
not in the minds of the perpetrators only, for the
manner in which the details of these awful crimes

were listened to in the Sheffield courts betrays a
state of mind which constitutes in reality a com-
mon guilt. It is not the actual murderers only who
are guilty of murder. Broadhead is not an excep-
tional monster of cold-blooded cruelty and hypo-
crisy. He is, in a sense, the product of the place
and of the system. He represents ideas and prin-
ciples. He was not moved to blood-guiltiness so
much by individual passion as by a common prin-
ciple, recognised and accepted in the system under
which he acted. Ile is looked upon, in some sort,
as a martyr to the cause for the furtherance of
which he had no scruple to organize a system which
necessarily culminated in wholesale murder.,
Whence comes this state of mind—this way of
looking at murder, when, for the good of the trade
union, it was thought necessary to order secret as-
sassination'? It is clear that, consciously :or un-
consciously, Broadhead has taken counsel of modern
civilisation, and carried out its remotest sugges-
tions with relentless logic. To his mind the supreme
object of life was to further the interest of his trade
union. To attain this end nothing was criminal ;
everything that conflicted with this end in himself
or others was to be given up ; every obstacle that
stood in the way removed, no matter at what cost ;
and murder, at best, was a painful necessity—but
still a necessity. Thus he put in a concrete form
the principles of modern civilization, as he under-
stood them. His interpretation of these principles
may have been extreme, but, at any rate, his system
of morality has not shocked his fellow trade-
unionists in the degree that it must have done had
not they, also, put a like interpretation on public
principles of morality. How are such ideas en-
gendered in the minds of men like Broadhead and
the rest of the Sheffield murderers? Have they not
some foundation in the teaching of modern civilisa-
tion ? Is it notithe tendency of modern civilization
to teach, although perhaps not consciously, that the
chief object of man's life is to promote the material
welfare of mankind ; to spread knowledge so as to
remove as much as possible the obstacles which
stand in the way of more universal enjoyment ; and
to look, on the one hand, for a reward for such
labours in the consciousness cf such motives, and
to the self-satisfaction which they ought to inspire ;
and, on the other, to an increase in the comforts
and luxuries of life? But this'Ais to:make humanity-,
and not God, the object of life, and self-satisfaction
the motive of man's acts, and material enjoyment
his reward. But to put aside the supernatural
sanctions of morality and supernatural motives and
rewards, is at once to decline on a lower level of
morality, to substitute private judgment—the opi-
nion of the individual as to what constitutes crime
—in the place of the Divine Will—the Eternal
Goodness. The too possible result of such a civili-
zation would be the multiplication of men like
Broadhead and the Sheffield murderers—the rising
up of cities„ all over Christendom, like Sheffield.
Were the code of morality of the trade unionists to
spread, in the course of the next century, all over
Europe, the anarchy and barbarism of irreligious
and revolutionary Mexico would be the too certain.
result. How often has not Pius IX. warned Chris-
tendom of a civilization which, by severing itself
from Christian principles in all public acts of life,
has practically made religion a stranger and an out-
cast where it ought to have reigned a king and
priest? In witnessing the ill effects of such a code
of morality as obtains in Sheffield, and in listening
in horror to the details of the blood-thirsty vin-
dictiveness which revolutionary and barbaric Mexico
has exhibited, England, in spite of the fearful
strides which of late years it has been making to-
wards rationalism, would do well to ponder oil a
system, which, not in Mexico or in Sheffield only,
but in Italy, in France and in Austria makes in,
theory humanity and not God its object of worship ;
reason not revelation, its sole guide ; and not virtue
but material enjoyment its supreme aim.

COUNTRY MARKETS.

BRISTOL-TUESDAY.

Under the influence of broken weather our market was
more lively to-day. English wheat brought Gd and in sonic,
instances is per quarter advance on former prices. Bar-
ley Gd dearer. Other articles unchanged.