The Sun.
London, England, 1866-10-19 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

TIMES.—Mr. Bright, in his inflammatory speeches
at Glasgow, addresses himself to a special theme—
the benefit which the country would gain by sub-
stituting a House of Commons elected by a greatly
larger number of voters—he himself speaks of
another million—who should belong solely or chiefly
to the class of working men, or, at least, to a poorer
class than already have the franchise. When such
a Revolution takes place, and, furthermore, the
constituencies are more equally arranged, so that
the House becomes a more direct representation of
the great mass of the people, Mr. Bright believes
that inestimable blessings will follow—that the
nation will be changed, the structure of English
society remodelled for the better, the obstacles to
civilisation, morality, and religion removed, and a
brighter and nobler day dawn on the country. The
measure of the advantages which are to be gained
by such a Reform Bill is, of course, the measure of
the inefficiency of the present House of Commons.
If blessings so incalculable as to be only dimly
viewed in the future, and to be best figured by the
comparison of Eden to a barren waste, are to spring
from an electoral system which approaches nearly
to universal suffrage and the equality of electoral
districts, it must be that the present House of Com-
mons does really exercise a malign influence on the
country, hinder the spread of intelligence, impede
the production or distribution of wealth, condemn
the mass of the people to poverty and ignorance,
waste its funds on the maintenance of needless
armaments or useless placemen, and, in short, fail
in all the duties which a Legislative Assembly in-
vested with almost sovereign power should perform.
This is the position which Mr. Bright thinks it
necessary to establish, and which he is bound to
prove before he can stir a step on his road to Paradise.
When we come to the definite grievances com-
plained of, we find how much at a loss the Radical
party is for a case against the existing Legislature.
After racking their brains to find something to say
they can only dwell upon two or three well-worn
topics, and charge upon Parliament evils which re-
flecting men know to arise from other causes. First,
there is the expenditure on national armaments. It
is the dominant class which keeps up the army and
navy, of course to provide for younger sons. Now,
if there be anything clearly established it is that this
gigantic evil is not one peculiar to England, nor one
for which England is primarily responsible. The
greatest armaments in Europe are maintained by
nations whose Legislatures are essentially demo-
cratic---France and Italy. We have always said,
and we repeat it, that the chief offenders, the real
support of thispernicious system in Western Europe,
are our gifted but ambitious and restless neighbours,
the French. As long as the traditions of conquest
cherished by that people remain, so long will it be
impossible for this country to dispense with a strong
army and navy. Does Mr. Bright call to mind that
this year the French Emperor has been almost
forced by public clamour into a war with people
who were strictly settling their own internal ques-
tions, and had given France not the slightest ground
of offence ? Is not Europe at the present moment
full of menaces and alarms? With what fairness,
then, can Mr. Bright sneer at the man who is re-
sponsible for the British navy as " the great recon-
structor" and contrast his zeal for armaments with
his love of liberty ? Then there is the question of
education. But one testimony is borne by all
acquainted with the subject, and that education
is hindered, not by want of schools and teachers,
but by the children being taken away from school
to work. We can only see one remedy, one sys-
tem by which ignorance could be exterminated.
The State might make education compulsory, and
forbid any child to be set to work before a cer-
tain age. But can it be said that the. country has
demanded any such legislation,
or would have
supported the House of Commons in it? Would not
the most strenuous opposition have come from mem-
bers of Mr. Bright's own class, and probably from
the working men themselves? We hear, then, of
the great grievance that the land is being concen-
trated into too few hands, and this also a new House
of Commons is to remedy. The real reason of this,
however, undoubtedly is the high price which land
brings in the market, and consequently the small
interest which it yields. Enormous fortunes are
made in commerce, and the rich men offer prices
which make it worth the yeoman's while to sell.
The land of England in many counties is becoming
a sort of pleasure ground for those who are accumu-
lating wealth in the great towns, and if it were
divided to-morrow among all the adult males who
dwell upon it, the process of agglomeration would
begin again in a week. It is not the duty of the
Legislature to resist what is evidently an inevitable
tenency of our social state. All that it can do is
to set land as much as possible free by rendering its
transfer, easy, and that it has taken care for this
Lord Westbury's Act bears witness. When we look
at these accusations one by one we thus see how
groundless they are. A good Reform Bill will cer-
tainly be a wise and truly conservative measure,
but Mr. Bright ought not to lead his followers to
suppose either that the present Legislature is selfish
and unjust or that a Golden Age is to commence on
its ruins.

POST.—To those who take an interest in the mari-
time affairs of the nation beyond what is summed up
in a ready belief of the superiority of the " British
sailor " to all created beings, and the efficacy of
" hearts of oak "• in overcoming all possible diffi-
culties, the approach of winter has a peculiar and
melancholy interest. To such it means the advent
of storm and tempest, and of the long succession of
disasters and shipwrecks which annually darkens
our wreck-chart and desolates the homes of our
seamen, and it cannot fail to lead also to the con-
sideration of the causes to which those disasters and
shipwrecks appear to be due, and to a desire to
seek for some means of _removing, at any rate,
those which are evidently removable. That there
should still exist so many sources of difficulty and
danger to the navigator which distinctly come under
this latter class is a curious commentary upon the
interest which Englishmen are popularly sup-
posed to take in all matters relating to the sea ;
and still more curious, as showing the small amount
of attention which even those more particularly in-
terested in such things give to the amelioration of
conditions which affect their very existence. This is
r r vaetd, i
at,n mattersif
we
have
probably in a great degree owing to the prevalent
and supremely ridiculous beliefaoarrived
t
seamanship, we have long ago
not passed, the ultimate point of perfection ; and
the only result usually arrived at from a review of
our present position is a hope that we may not be
falling away from our former excellence, rather than
a conviction that we ought to be reaching far be-
yond it. Old systems
new
and
improvementsold ideas are clung
rejected
with a tenacity, and
with an obstinacy, which induce a suspicion that the
to
4hearts of oak" which are the glory of the sailor
must be generally accompanied by heads of the same
material, or else that a too great reliance upon the
influence of the sweet little cherub wh) is supposed
to make them his special care has produced an indis-
position to any human improvement which might
interfere with his authority. At any rate it is passing
strange that, when the sea has so many dangers of
its own to daunt the sailor, it should yet have been
found necessary to invent some very ingeniously-
contrived artificial dangers to add to the category ;
and we cannot forbear from calling attention to one
which is but little known, but which will be recog-
nised by every sailor as having no small influence
in swelling the list of disasters by which our coasts
are every year distinguished. We allude to the pilot
system, than which one more fraught with abuse,
and less fitted to attain the objects for which it is
supposed.to exist, could scarcely have been devised.
In .the first place, pilotage is a strict monopoly. The
Trinity Board in England, the Northern Light Com-
missioners in Scotland, and the Ballast Board in
Ireland, have from time immemorial assumed the
power to. fix the exact number of pilots which each
place requires, and to decree that that number shall
not be exceeded. It is not pretended that many more
than the prescribed number of pilots—and equally'
good pilots—would not be forthcoming if they were
permitted ; quite the contrary. The reasons by which
the system is defended are precisely the same as
those which are put forward in support of all other
monopolies, viz., that if the trade were thrown open
such numbers would flock to it that they would not
be able to obtain sufficient work to maintain them-
selves and their families, and that the result would
be that whereas at first there would be far too many
pilots for the service, in the end there would be far
too few. If the same principle were applied to
butchers and bakers, or even to the captains of vessels
themselves, these reasons might at least be worth
examination, but in times when we have arrived at
such a confidence in the constant relation of supply
to demand as to have not only based all our own
legislation in every particular upon it, but to have
become apostles to the rest of the world, such an
argument cannot live for a moment. But pilotage
is not simply a monopoly, it is a monopoly, which is
aggravated by being accompanied by compulsory
adoption. It is bad enough to tell the consumer
that he must buy the goods he wants at one shop
alone, but to tell him that he must buy goods there
whether he wants them or not is to double the in-
justice, and in the present instance, from the pecu-
liarities of the case, to more than double it as re-
gards the small consumer. To the larger and
more valuable, and consequently more responsible
craft, compulsory pilotage is an actual boon, since
the fact of its being compulsory relieves them
from all responsibility for any damage they may
incur while in the pilot's charge ; and it acts,
therefore, as a kind of cheap insurance against
liability in dangerous places. The effect of the
whole system is, that as the pilots know they have