The Sun.
London, England, 1832-08-06 00:00:00

whether they be the present or any other, will,
we trust, make it their business to lay before
Parliament, for the future, earlier in the Session,
the most important business; and, on the other,
whether they do so or not, that Members of a
reformed House of Commons will look upon
the duties they have to perform there as paramount
to all others, and such as under no circum-
stances they will be entitled to abandon.—
Morning Herald.
The question has already practically arisen
whether the elections, the first elections under
the Whig Reform Bill, shall be decided by the
votes of the electors or by the influence of brick-
hats and bludgeons. Ministers, it must be ac-
knowledged, are, or affect to be, desirous that
the elections should be legally and peaceably con-
ducted ; but surely when we find their friends
and advocates, persons who are avowedly ready
at any time to swear that black is white in their
service, labouring to introduce the brickbat and
bludgeon system, the sincerity of Ministers them-
selves may reasonably be doubted. The Mi-
nisters, who have proved themselves such
simpletons that their friends who care any thing
about their own reputation for sagacity are
compelled to laugh at them—the Ministers,
at whose precautions to secure the female slaves
in the West Indies an ample and decorous supply
of petticoats the Ministerial organ, the Globe,
is compelled to sneer and scoff, in mere regard
to the principle of self-preservation—the Mi-
nisters, whose folly and ignorance even their
black and white advocate, Mr. Hume, is forced
to rebuke when they go so far as to compel the
West India planters, by an Order in Council, to
provide for each beardless negro forty times the
supply of razors which the stubborn beard of
the I-lon. Member for Middlesx has been found
by experience to require ;—such Ministers as
these may hope that the new constituencies they
have created by their Bill will vote without re-
straint or coercion in favour of their tools, but
their more sensible partisans know better ; they
know that violence is necessary to give them a
chance of success ; they know that without the
aid of those instruments of terror, which they be-
fore employed so successfully, the brickbats and
bludgeons, their cause is still hopeless. The
Ministerial party at Clithero have attempted by
the proper Ministerial means, that is by intimi-
dation first, and when that failed by murderous
violence, to prevent Mr. Irving, a Conservative
candidate, from canvassing the electors of that
place ; and would have succeeded in achieving a
Whig and Radical triumph, not by the free
suffrages of the electors—that they know to be
out of the question—but by annihilating the
elective rights of the voters altogether, had not
Mr. Irving been a gentleman of high spirit and
determined resolution. The candidate, however,
in this instance, and we hope his example will
be followed wherever the same brutal violence is
brought into play on the side of Ministers,
would not permit his rights, and the rights of
the electors, thus to be destroyed. He applied
to Magistrates for protection, and the latter did
their duty, by calling in such a force as was
required to suppress the riotous mob who
had presumed to set up their insolent and
illegal dictation in the place of the lawful ,
suffrages of their fellow-townsmen. This '
was just as it should be ; but the Ministerial
underlings know, although probably their mas-
ters do not, that this will by no means do for
them ; that even under the Bill they must not
expect to get such a House of Commons as will
suit their purpose, if they dissolve their alliance
with the brickbatters and bludgeon men, and re-
nounce the advantages they have hitherto derived
in their electioneering contests from this respect-
able and appropriate source. Hence the cla-
mour which the Ministerial Press, and the
most thoroughgoing and unprincipled advo-
cates
of Ministers in the House of Commons,
are striving to excite against Mr. Irving, and
the Magistrates who protected him and the
electors whose suffrages he sought, in the
enjoyment of their legal and unquestionable
rights, of which a lawless rabble, instigated
no doubt by some active Members of the
Ministerial party, were seeking to deprive
them. We should have thought that, hav-
ing got the Bill of Reform, for which they
were so anxious a month or two ago, the
Ministerial party might now have been wil-
hng to trust their fate to the free votes of
the constituency it has created. It is obvi-
ous, however, that this is not the case. Mi-
nisters, when they manufactured the Bill, did
not very well know what they were about, and
their friends, knowing the intention to be to
form a constituency which would secure the
return of a majority of Whig and Radical
Candidates, supposing, and naturally enough,
that the business would not be so egregiously
blundered, but that this object, the only object
for which they really cared, would be accom-
plished, gave themselves no other trouble than
that of clamouring in favour of the measure.
The practical operation of the measure, so far
as it has yet gone, has, we believe, considerably
disappointed them. The ten-pounders, upon
whom they chiefly relied, have, with few excep-
tions, relinquished or forfeited their franchise.
Thus the Ministerial party are thrown back
upon their old resource, the brickbats and blud-
geons, and cannot endure that their allies, the
wielders of these efficient electioneering instru-
ments, should anywhere be restrained or coerced.
The system will not, however, be so formidable
as it was before, unless, which we scarcely ex-
pect, Ministers should, before the prorogation,
throw upon the table of the House of Com-
mons another Reform Bill more exciting and
revolutionary than the last. At all events the
duty of the Conservative party is clear—to resist
with vigour and resolution violence wherever it
may be attempted, or by whomsoever it may be
saiictioned.—Morning Post.

NATIONAL EDUCATION.—The intelligent
Inhabitants of Belfast, of all religious persuasions, have
declared in favour of the Government system of education.
At a meeting of the subscribers to the Belfast Frederick-
street Lancaster:an School—a school which the Northern
IVhig states to he at the head of the charitable institutions
in Ulster—their approval of the national system was
unequivccally avowed. Such a testimony from such a
quarter is most valuable...—Dublin Times.
BLARNEY PETTY SESSIONS, TUESDAY.
INFORMATIONS FOR ASSAULL AND FALSE IMPRISON-
MENT AGAINST MAJOR GENERAL SIR G. BINGHAM.
—Mr. HODNETT, the circumstance of whose arrest on
Sunday week, by the General of this district, as reported
in our number of Tuesday, had created much interest
throughout our community, appeared this day, accompa-
nied by Couir•el, before a very numerous bench of Justices,
at Blarney, and exhibited informations against the Gallant
Officer of the charges indicated in the heading. After a
short conference between their Worships, they came to the
determination of taking the informations, and returning
them for trial at the coining Assizes for this county. It
was suggested on the part of the prosecutor, that the indict-
ment did not involve charges of that very important nature
that would warrant its return to the Assizes, and that the
case could, as far as the ends of justice were concerned, be
as wall disposed of at the Quarter Sessions. The Court,
however, thought proper to persist in their rule, and
Mr. HODNETT was bound to prosecute at the Assiz"s.
Corti Reporter.