The Sun.
London, England, 1859-04-21 00:00:00

VOTE BY BALLOT.

On Monday evening a large and enthusiastic
public meeting, in connection with the Society for
,]Promoting the Adoption of Vote by Ballot,was held
at the Wellington Hall, Dover, E. C. Whitehurst,
Esq., vice-chairman of the society, and a gentleman
named Hayes, from Australia, attended to repre-
sent the society. E. R. Rice, Esq., formerly mem-
ber for the borough, had been invited to preside,
but owing to his being absent from home in a
distant part of the country, was unable to attend;
and Mr. Bernal Osborne, M.P., and Mr. Knatchbull
Hugessen, M.P., were also prevented by their
engagements from being present. John Briggs,
Esq., was called to the chair, and opened the meet-
ing with a few appropriate remarks.
Mr. WHITEBURST rose, and in his opening re-
marks, asked the question, What do we want the
ballot for ? Well, he would answer that question
in one short sentence—to bring back the House of
Commons to its original state, and to make it fulfil
its original intentions, viz., the representation of
the common people in that house. (Applause.) In
spite of aristocratic notions, his idea of the House
of Commons was a house in which the great majo-
rity of the middle and working classes, who are not
connected with the aristocracy of birth, the aristo-
cracy of property, or the aristocracy of money, were
fairly represented. (Applause.) The original inten-
tion and the original condition of the House of
Commons was one in which the representative
body was composed entirely and exclusively of
the representatives of the class to which he
had just alluded. When our forefathers set to work
to make a House of Commons, which should be
separate and distinct from the House of Lords, they
never went about accomplishing the representation
of different interests, which for two mortal hours
the Chancellor of the Exchequer laboured in that
House to impress upon Parliament was their inten-
tion the House of Commons should be ; but what
they did was, they took the counties of England,
and the more important towns of England, and
they gave them the privilege of returning members
to Parliament, and the great body of the house-
holders had the privilege of exercising the fran-
chise. Therefore when Mr. Bright proposed, that
every municipal burgess shall have the right of
sending members to Parliament, he is proposing no
"revolutionary" scheme, as was sought to be made
out by a few gentlemen in that town the other
day ; but lie was proposing the old municipal fran-
chise, and the right of voting for the burgesses of
the boroughs. Our forefathers never dreamt that
young noblemen should make the House of Com-
mons the stepping stone to the House of Lords—
they never dreamt that the House of Commons
should be a sort of club for the younger members
of the aristocracy to delight themselves in—(a
laugh)—bu, they said in the good old Saxon
phraseology, we comrr and you to send good and
sound burgesses to Parliament. And when Mr.
Bright expressed a wish to the effect that he
should like to see the representatives of the
people as firmly seated in the House of Com-
mons as the Queen was seated upon.her throne, he
was only setting forth the principle upon which
that house was originally based, and wishing to
bring back things to their original purpose and
intention. (Hear, hear.) Alluding to intimida-
tion at elections, he said that one of the earliest
statutes which regulated the right of representing
the people in the House of Commons, provided
that no great or powerful man should by threats or
malice, hinder any to make free elections. Our
forefathers did not think about the Ballot as a
means of voting, and for want • of this secret the
freedom of election bad been greatly impaired in
this country. The whole state of things was
changed; the House of Commons was no longer a
body summoned by the king for the mere purpose
of voting money and supplies for carrying on the
government of the country; but it had become the
centre of all political power, and to obtain a seat in
it is to have a great share in carrying on the go-
vernment of these important realms. Who could
wonder, then, that the obtaining of such a seat was
an object of ambition to which the great and power-
ful directed their energies ; and that they should
succeed in making it, not the House of Commons
of the masses of the whole people, but the represen-
tative body of the aristocracy of land, money and
rank. Now that_ was what we complained of, and
what we desired to see remedied, which could only
be effected by the Ballot. As it at present exists,
no man of the middle classes, who had obtained a
seat in that house, unless he were a man of such
transcendent talent as Mr. Bright, or as Mr.
Cobden, would be listened to. What did such a
man find ? He (the speaker) had witnessed
in the House of Commons that man, sent
by the largest constituencies—men of the,
middle classes, shrewd, sound, honest men—men
much sounder politicians than those of higher birth,
don't obtain a hearing—the Speaker does not see
them. As an instance of the way in which such
men were treated by the aristocratic members of
the house, Mr. Whitohurst said that shortly after
the election of the present Parliament about two
years ago, a noble lord, lately a member of the
Derby Government, and who represented a city in
the south of England, but whom he should better
describe if he said that he represented his ducal
father--(a laugh)—approached the door of th,n.
House of Commons, and inquired of an officer, who
was then speaking ? The doorkeeper named a
gentleman who was known to them as Mr. Ayrton,
the useful member for the Tower Hamlets, who was
sent to the house by the free and unbought votes
of some 10,000 electors, while the noble lord pro-
fessed to represent not more than 700 or 800 elec-
tors in a cathedral city. " Mr. Ayrton is addressing
the house, my lord," was the doorkeeper's answer.
" Oh," replied his lordship, "another snob. Upon
my word it is dreadful to think of the number of
snobs who are in t!ie house now. I think we shall
be obliged to give up the Government of the country
to them, and we shall then see what they can do
without us." He (the speaker), for one, should be
very happy to accept the responsibility of these
" snobs"—(laughter)—and if they retired, and were
to let the majority of the representatives of the
people enter the house and take their places, he
had no doubt that they would carry on the Go-
vernment quite as well, if not better, than they
did. Having alluded to this aristocratic monopoly,
and asked who could wonder, when all the influence
of wealth and unfair dependance were brought to
bear at the last election, and also within a few
days ago, that men should grow up with their hearts
one way and their votes another way, and be called
liars before God and man, he next showed them
how this monopoly affected their representation, and
gave an instance in the question of church-rater.
The principality of Wales, he said, sent from its
boroughs and counties, 32 members to Parliament.
According to the last census the proportion of
Churchmen to Dissenters was one of the former to
two of the latter. Well, if the people were fairly
represented, they would have thought that the 32
members were in the same proportion, viz., two
Dissenters and one Churchman. This was not the
case, for in the division on the Church-rate Bill,
12 of those 32 members voted for the Bill, 11 voted
against it, and the remaining nine did not vote at
all. Take the question of the 'ballot. He believed
there was no question which was regarded,not only
amongst its enemies, but amongst its supporters,
with so much loathing as the ballot ; and if its
merits were to be brought before the house to-mor-
row night, he would venture to say that as soon as
Mr. Berkeley had risen to speak upon it, the
house would begin to talk and to groan, and
there would be cries of " Divide, divide,"
and all the other hellish noises, if he might so
use the expresSion, that a majorlf of more
lungs than brains could raise against it. Any
man, therefore, who desired to speak upon this
question was completely dumbfbundered, and there
wuld be a probability, in such a case, of the question
ioing to a division, with only a speech on one side,
and perhaps not an answer to that one. But the
ballot reckened sonTe of the most able men among
its supporters. Take Sir James Graham; he came
from the North of England, and was as shrewd a
man as one would find in or out of the House of
Commons. He had told them that no one question
met with so favoui able a reception, and made such
progress in his own constituency, and out of it, as
the
did question
ighoft
sayt he
aboutballo t?ti.(Hear, hea. What
Why that all the
great public meetings he had addressed, since last
-September, on the subject of reform, there was not
one question that demanded so much unanimity and
support as the qnestion of the ballot. (Cheers.)
Now, he (the speaker) would, with their permission,
call himself as a witness. He had spent four or five
years in advocating this question, and he had spoken.
to public meetings in all paitsofEngland, from
Penzance,
that the feiiennlitntgbe- extreme -
Southof England to
Newcastle,
the North; and he could corroborate
was strong and unanimous in
favour of the ballot. This being the case, he drew
from it three conclusion, the first one was, that the
House of Commons on this question of the ballot, as
well as on other questions, did not really represent
the people of this country ; secondly, that the ballot
is not un-English, for lie could not believe that any
thing which was so desired by the people was un
English—(hear, hear)—and, thirdly, that the great
mass of them, he hoped, were not candidate tfo: a
lunatic asylum. (Cheers and laughter.) The bal-
lot was-something they all wanted; they wanted
freedom of election, and our instincts drove us to
the ballot as the means of securing that freedom of
election. (Hear, hear.) On the opposite side he
had encountered two very distinguished persons,
one, a Mr. John Stuart Mill—and the was said to
be a very great philosopher—had declared that the
ballot was wanted 30 years ago, but It was not