The Sun.
London, England, 1859-01-29 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, SATURDAY EVENING, JANUARY. 29, .1859.

cab ; already has he shown his inability for the post of
command. The Liberal press, the skirmishers of his little
band, have mutinied, and deserted their chief ; and he is is
direct antagonism with his lieutenant, Roebuck.
If we seek to account for this, the answer is simple. The
reason is found in the character of the measure. The bill
is the offspring of the demagogue, not of the statesman ; of
the Birmingham orator, not of a far-seeing legislator. It
appeaV the passions and selfishness, ignorance and pre-
judices of a packed audience, not to the calm judgment 01
posterity, nor to the intelligence of the enlightened com-
munity, nor to the solid interests and high destinies of
Great Britain. Take the Birmingham speech, with its =-
candid suppression of all the good deeds and active philan-
thropy of our aristocracy and upper classes—conduct vir-
tually rebuked by the well-merited eulogium pronounced
upon them by Mr. Roebuck at Sheffield. Take the Brad-
ford ;address, with its ludicrous arguments against a fran-
chise of intelligence, property, and prudence, its wondrous,
fiction of the House of Lords representing the land, and
then compare the measure, with its partiality to one class;
its application of the population theory only just so far as
suits party purposes ; its ignoring of the educated in favour
of the uneducated classes • its flagrant favouritism to the
towns, to the exclusion of the counties,—and we must NO
of the bill and its demagogic author—
" The child is genuine; you may trace
Throughout the sire's transmitted face."
Nor is it to be wondered that the Bradford scheme so
constituted has, met with this fate. The Reform Bill of
1832 was. styled the child of aristocratic condescension.
It was a great deed," says Miss Martineau, "to see noble-
men and gentlemen of high family laying down heredifin9
possessions of their own, while requiring the same sacrifice
from others, to see the privileged classes divesting them-
selves of privilege for the sake of the people, for the honour
and integrity of the country. It was a great deed, and pos-
terity will declare it so. But where is the generosity or
even fairness of our modern Reformer? Can anything be
more unjust than the treatment of the landed interest, or
more palpably absurd than the excuse that they are repre-
sented in the Lords ? Is this the real representation which
Mr. Bright boasted he would *accomplish ? What is repro:
sentation but an exact reflection of the thing represented r
But is that a faithful copy of the body politic of England
which omits the chief interest of the realm ? When a aide
face is a true representation of the human countenance, and
a half-length portrait of the whole figure ; when Ireland
stands for Great Britain, or the United States for the whole
world, then will Mr. Bright's scheme be accepted. It
makes Birmingham, Bolton, and Manchester, and the whole
realms of Calicopolis ten thousand strong in the Commons,
but banishes the representatives of the agriculturists to
" another place." It were idle to waste words on such a
selfish attempt to take from the thirteen millions •of the
counties all political power, and to give to the eight millions
of the great towns a majority of members. And yet such
is the barefaced attempt to misrepresent the nation ; to give
the commission to govern to the Democracy, vice Aristocraci
cashiered.

Fair play has ever been the boast of Englishmen; truth
and fair play, even to a fallen adversary, the bright jewels
of the national character. Oppression raises a storm of
indignation everywhere. Now Mr. Bright, clever though
he is, has never understood this. He accordingly forfeited
his popularity by siding with the Russian bully against the
prostrate Turk. He opposed with terrible tenacity
Lord Ashley and Sir lir. Fielden's efforts to ease
the overworked children of the factories ; and nowt
too, he leads the many-headed monster, and by
bluster would frighten the community into a cow
pliance with his demands. To this end he thinks that
Manchester will take the sop of six members for it 5514.0043,
and then turns a deaf ear to the-remonstrances of Devon-
shire and Durham, complaining that with half a million
they shall have each but four I Is a dweller in Petticoat-
lane so superior to a denizen in Somersetshire or Wiltshire ?
Does living in the close streets of the Seven Dials constitute
a proper training for the electoral prerogative ? Is the ac-
cident of never seeing a green field to over-ride the inalieu"
able capacity of the citizen ? That Mr. Bright should dia.;
like a "fancy" franchise—a franchise of intelligence and
property—is natural enough. Quakers have an instinctive
antipathy to many colours, and friend John shows it to a
varied qualification. Numbers is the drab—numbers the
eternal drab of the Quaker Reform Bill. Talk to him of
intelligence—he would disfranchise Locke himself if he
lived on Salisbury-plain I Give scientific men votes I
a Lancashire weaver outweighs a whole legion of Newtons.
Unfairness, inconsistency, and party selfishness appear
in' each portion of the scheme, and Mr. Bright little under..
stands his own countrymen if he thinks they will tolerate
such injustice. His bill has failed, because it disregard°
truth, justice, and fair play ; and though Englishmen may
be carried away for a time by the passionate invective 4,
unscrupulous eloquence, yet their hearts are in the lie!:
place. Their ears are open to the truth, and they will visit
with unsparing condemnation the man who seeks to traffic'
upon narrow prejudices. Such has been the fate of the
Bradford measure; it has run its nine days' course, and
will soon be forgotten. Let it go • but its author may lean].
a_useful lesson from its short-lived existence.