The Sun.
London, England, 1866-03-22 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

TIMES.—After the first surprise that Lord Russell,
the leading exponent of the very comprehensive
Reform Bill of 1831, should have brought himself
to propose a measure so utterly unlike it in all re-
spects as that of the present session, the next ques-
tion asked was how he could possibly have obtained
the consent of his colleagues, and expected the sup-
port of the chiefs of his party. The secrets of his
Cabinet we have nothing to do with. But it now
appears there was not the least occasion to be sur-
prised at the acquiescence of the great Whig houses,
as no such acquiescence existed. Lord Grosvenor
is a name of power and a noun of multitude in the
House of Commons ; but it is evident that he has
been left quite as free to form an opinion on the
bill as ourselves or any other outsiders. This liberty
has had the natural result, and his lordship very
composedly announces a motion inviting the house
to reject this or any other incomplete measure.
Lord Grosvenor had scarcely sat down, however,
when Sir William Hutt, a Privy Councillor, and
lately a member of the Administration, from which
on his retirement he accepted the Knighthood of
the Bath, rose to give notice of a motion to much
the same purport, but rather more clinching. The
first motion was that Parliament should be put in
possession of the whole Ministerial mind, intention,
and plan before it was asked to proceed further on
the first instalment. The second was that the said
first instalment, even if passed, should be considered
waste paper, and continue waste paper, till the
enactment of the supplementary measures necessary
to make an entire and final reform. Either of these
casualties is an event in Parliamentary history and
a portent of dire significance. Their concurrence
is inexplicable, unless on the supposition that the
whole ground is sapped under the bill, and that a
universal antipathy is ready to break out at any
opening in that outer crust of silence and per-
plexity maintained by the Liberal party. It is no
exaggeration to say that nobody likes the bill, or
takes it otherwise than upon trust. The Minister
must be accepted as its interpreter, and it is only
when his interpretation is found to be erroneous
and defective that partisans take the liberty of
judging for themselves. But if there ever was any-
thing to which .the least exercise of private judgment
must be fatal, it is the bill before us. While these
intimations of a coming storm of discontent are
dropping fast around us it so happens that various
boroughs are presenting themselves to public notice
in a way to explain what would be the operation of
the bill. On Tuesday there was a very sharp con-
test for Tewkesbury. This town, with a decreasing
population under 6,000 and a constituency of 325,
including five dead men, and some fifteen described
as neutral, returns two members. There was a
vacancy, and the successful candidate would repre-
sent 150 men. At 1 o'clock the winning man had
polled 142, and his rival was fast gaining ground on
him. The sick were brought up in their beds, and
" strong inducements" were applied. As it appears
by the result there remained only 20 men to be
polled, and for three hours these 20 men held the
key of the borough of Tewkesbury. As things go,
their votes were worth £lOO apiece till 2 o'clock,
£2OO till 3 o'clock, while the four that in the last
hour turned the scale in favour of the Conservative
candidate managed very ill if they did not get £5OO
apiece. In this town there are 413 male occupiers
at £lO ; and a £7 franchise would add 65. We con-
clude that the repeal of the ratepaying and com-
pound householder restrictions would admit some
more. The number of working men now on the
register is stated to be 84, and, under the proposed
measure, either as £7 householders or as non-rate-
paying freemen, a good many more working men
would come in. But what matters it whether in
a place like that there are a hundred working men
or two hundred ? The result is simply and solely
a pecuniary question ; and the hundred men or so
whom Lord Russell proposes to enfranchise would
just do neither more nor less than add £l,OOO to the
expenditure of the unhappy candidates. If it is
hoped that the lower franchise will rescue the
borough from Conservative hands, that is a specu-
lation not worth entering into. The Conservatives
will always rise on the Liberal bidders, and they
certainly will find the lower class of working men
quite as open to "strong inducements" as the higher
class of working men, some of whom may possibly
have a scruple against selling their votes to the
highest bidder. But if Parliament is to touch this
borough at all, it must be either to disfranchise it
altogether, and throw it into the country, or put it
in a group with three or four towns of the same
class. Even in that case the whole would be amply
represented by one member. Five other towns en-
joyed an unenviable prominence in our columns
yesterday—Nottingham, Great Yarmouth, Totnes,
Bridgnorth, and Boston. They present some va-
riety of circumstances, but in none of them can we
discover that a large admission of a lower class
would do much good. At the last election for Not-
tingham it is too clear there was violence as well as
bribery. The population has increased since 1831 by
about 50 per cent. ; the registered electors by £lO
occupation have increased by 100 per cent. The
male occupiers at £lO and over are now 4,910 ; be-
tween £7 and £lO they are 4,018. There are nearly
2,000 freemen, including a good many of the men
who would come in at the lower franchise. How
does the present state of things work? The borough
is divided between Liberal and Conservative, and
would probably be divided still under the proposed
alteration, but we very much doubt whether the
chiefs of either party in the town would like to en-
large the constituency in the downward direction.
Everybody knows that a large body of poor freemen
Is invariably a nucleus of corruption infecting the
whole constituency. The next town, Yarmouth, has
been delivered from the incubus of freemen. They
overdid the thing, and were disfranchised some years
ago; but money still flies about Yarmouth on the eve
of an election : the electors still know where to go for
it, or how' they may expect to and £lO or £l5
lying on their tables. There are now 2,080 male
occupiers at £lO and over, and 997 between that
and £7. But the other relaxations in the bill would
add still more. The only conclusion we can come
to is that Lord Russell's bill would add seriously to
the expenses of the two Conservative members for
this rather notorious borough. Then comes Tot-
nes. Its population is on the decrease, and is now
computed at 3,807. It has 382 electors, who return
two members. The male occupiers at £lO are 516,
and between that and £7 are 38. The bill there-
fore would not make much difference. The borough
is as purely a marketable commodity as fish and
vegetables are. A witness swore yesterday that he
did not believe there were 50 electors who were not
paid at the last election. To add 38 voters of a still
lower class would be to add about £3BO to the ex-
penses of the candidates. There is only one thing
to be done with Totnes, unless, indeed, it be coupled
with Dartmouth, to return one member between
them. Even he, however, would find himself burn-
ing his candle at both ends. Bridgenorth is a
borough much of the same class, and also returns
two members. It has 614 electors, of whom 277
are freemen. There are only 410 male occupiers at
£lO, and 107 between that and £7. These last will
be only some of the abovementioned freemen. The
scale of bribery appears to be moderate at Bridg-
north, but what must be said of a Reform Bill which
proposes to prop up such a pillar of the British Con-
stitution? To be dealt with at all it must share the
inevitable fate of Totnes. Boston, again, has free-
men, and by their aid has 1,021 electors. It has,
however, only 874 occupiers at £lO, and only 301
between that and £7. The presumption is that the
bill would not make much difference here, and
would certainly do nothing to stop the bribery ine-
vitable in a small port with a small population re-
turning two members. How such a place should be
dealt with is not an easy question, but this bill
would do it no good whatever, and only give it
another lease of a not very good life.
DAILY NEWS.—The public, or at least that con-
siderable portion of the public who at some time or
other are passengers at sea, or are interested in the
fate of others in that predicament, will feel in-
debted to Sir John Pakington for calling the atten-
tion of the House of Commons to the causes and
circumstances of the loss of the London, and the
conditions of the inquiry into that calamity, insti-
tituted, according to the act of Parliament, by the
Board of Trade, at the Greenwich Police Court.
There are few questions of public interest at this
time that more deserve or demand attention than
the operation of the Merchant Shipping Acts, as
illustrated by the Board of Trade inquiries.
Nothing could be more ludicrously and painfully
unsatisfactory than the conduct and conclusion of
that last sad inquest. Day after day a heap of idle
and irrelevant talk, scraps of survivors' gossip, re-
lieved only by the too ready testimonials of official
inspectors to the perfect seaworthiness of the lost
ship, was thrown before an impatient and anxious
public, and the upshot of all this confused and con-
tradictory evidence was a report which added abso-
lutely nothing to the common information, and
nothing to the public safety, since it found no fault,
and discovered no cause of the disaster, except the
proximate and patent one of the flooding of an en-
gine-room through a broken hatchway. No doubt
the inquiry was satisfactory enough to the owners
of the ship ; but it was a case in which the interest
of the shipowners and the interest of the passenger
public were not precisely identical. For the owners
of the London it was sufficient that all the inspec-
tors of every degree had pronounced the ship per-
fectly constructed, neither overweighted, nor ill-
ordered, incapable of foundering, except by some
incalculable and uncontrollable " visitation."
Some evidence, it is true, was offered to the Court,
and accepted, of a very different complexion.
—tht evidence of a retired shipbuilder, who thought
so ill of the seagoing qualities of the London, that