The Sun.
London, England, 1866-06-11 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

TIIE " SPECTATOR" MAKING THE WORST OF IT.—
The policy of the Opposition last week was one of
trickery and dishonest delay, of affected virtue, of
Pharisaic purity, of philanthropic pretension. By
this policy they produced a certain tendency to
reaction in the public mind, a proud aversion in Earl
Grosvenor to act any longer with a manoeuvring
party combination concerned not with the interests
of reform, but with the interests of a coalition party.
Hence the curious and picturesque collapse of Mon-
day night, when the Tories fled stricken from before
their foes without even trying to strike a blow, and
the anti--grouping faction of Liberals, led by the
gallant Captain Hayter, " beard a rumour and re-
turned to their own land," and Mr. Gladstone " put
a hook in their nose and a bridle in their lips, and '
turned them back by the way they came." But the
flight and rout of Monday were nothing to the double
rout of Thursday, and again, for the same reason—
that in the interval the Tories had been plotting to
remedy the defect of their former over-subtlety by
still deeper subtlety—to mend up the leaks in the old
craft by caulking it, as it were, not with sound
timber, but with sponge. Lord Stanley's sudden
motion on Thursday night to postpone the con-
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unanswerable, but that point had been conceded by
the Government ; and it will be of course always
in the power of the house, if it find it impossible to
pass the whole Bill, to decline on that very ground
to pass a mere disjointed fragment. That was
not therefore the real drift of Lord Stanley's pro-
position, which only contemplated inflicting a
damaging defeat upon the Government on a
matter of form upon which it was thought
feasible to rally together all the elements of
discontent. For such a party manoeuvre,
adopted without the usual fair notice to op-
ponents, there is no excuse, and Lord Stanley's
arrow entered into his own bosom, and his bow was
broken. The effect of his defeat by a majority of
27—much the most considerable yet obtained by the
Government on this question—will probably be to
crush the hopes he had begun to entertain of be-
coming the leader of a powerful coalition Govern-
ment. Lord Stanley, usually the most candid and
straightforward, if also one of the bluntest of foes,
has lowered his own influence. with the House by
the part he has taken in this discreditable little
ambush, and we shall probably hear of him as a
possible Prime Minister no more for the present.
But he did more than injure himself, he materially
improved the prospects of the Reform Bill. When
Mr. Walpole's amendment came before the House,
after this damaging defeat, the sense of humiliation
was strong upon the Tory strategists, while every true
Liberal was sensible of a deeper party impulse, a
stronger aversion to desert his own standard, even for
the sake of an amendment which some of them thought
wise, than has cemented the Liberal party for many
years back. Mr. Walpole's amendment for a rating
franchise of £2O really meant an occupying fran-
chise of £24, and that was held by many who would
have even preferred a £2O county franchise, decid-
edly too high. The difference was sufficient in-
tellectual justification for standing by the Govern-
, ment, and gratifying the impulse of resentment
which the previous Tory trick had excited. Hence
it happened that Mr. Gladstone gained in a house
of 580 a majority of exactly 14 for the £l4 county
franchise which he proposed, and that the prospect
of even getting the whole bill through in some
shapo or other looks far more . promising for
the Liberal leader than at any previous mo-
ment. The direct tendency of important victories
is to attract votes. There is a floating balance of
members always anxious to cast their votes with the
winning side, and more especially on a Reform Bill
—for the position of men going to a new constituency
who have opposed the measure which gave its rights
to that constituency is by no means agreeable. The
result should be a lesson to the Tories on the fatal
attempt to express insincerely the most sincere party
dislike. They were insincere last week in urging an
addition to the bill to prevent bribery; they were
insincere in supporting Mr. Clay's educational fran-
chise; they were only half sincere in their vague
condemnation of the grouping; quite insincere in
their motion to postpone the consideration of the
franchise clauses • till after the redistribution
clauses ; and totally at issue with their own policy
iu 1859, in voting for Mr. Walpole's motion
to establish a £24 county franchise when they
had themselves proposed a £lO franchise. Yet their
dislike to the bill has no doubt been sincere enough,
and probably the judgment of many of their leaders,
certainly Lord Stanley's, has been offended by some
of its provisions. But instead of attempting to set
down the intellectual grounds of their dissent from
special provisions, a course in which they had no
confidence that they could. get the whole party and
the dissatisfied Liberals to concur, they have been
devoting all their ingenuity to manufacturing those
party traps for doubtful votes which are almost sure
to repel and drive away a great many more than
they secure. We hope now, that, except, we
suppose, an inevitable contest about the borough
franchise—though no amendment has as yet, we
Ibelieve, been proposed raising the franchise
to £B,—and after the defeat which we trust
will be inflicted on the Conservative t par yin any

~. ~ ~

such attempt to stultify the bill—the- mere party
fighting will be over, and the house may devote
itself honestly to improving what it will:no longer
hope to extinguish. If Lord GroSvenor, after
showing his reluctance to defeat the Government,
will use his influence to induce it to accept a few
practical amendments, there might still be reason to
indulge a certain moderate degree of satisfaction in
the prospect of a settlement. The grouping should
be either amended by the introduction of at least
one large non-parliamentary borough into each
group, or abandoned altogether, and the requisite
number of seats got by taking one seat from each
double-seated small borough up to some higher
limit of population than the proposed 8,000--perhaps
10,000 or 12,000 would give sufficient. But the
greatest amendment which could now be introduced
into the bill, and which, by Lord Grosvenor's in-
fluence if he would use it, probably would be adopted,
is one likely to be raised by Mr. Yorke,—to leave
the present £lO franchise untouched in all the srarli
boroughs, and descend to £7 only where there is.
the special sort of working population on account
of which the cry for this Reform Bill has arisen.
That would not be a party move. Mr. Gladstone
could well afford to yield it, if urged by leading
men of his own party who have yielded something
to him ; and it would certainly do more to prevent
the introduction of new evils compensating in some
measure the good of the proposed Reform than anY
other conceivable modification of the measure. .
THE TRUE HEAD CENTRE.—Yesterday week,,
says the Spectator, Mr. Whalley made a long spew'
to prove that Fenianism and Roman Catholicism
were " coincident," during the delivery of which
address the house kept un a perpetual roar of in-
terruption, little heeded by the intrepid member for
Peterborough, who probably believed the whole
House to be instigated by Roman Catholic influence.
There were Roman Catholics in the police, Roman
Catholics controlling the railways, Roman Catholics
at the telegraph, Roman Catholics in the artillery,
Roman Catholics everywhere, and all their influence
was used for disaffection. Mr. Whalley is an
imaginative being, and besides imagining Roman
Catholics in the earth, air, and sea, he ventured to
imagine that he had shown " shortly to the satis-
faction of the house,"—shortly, mind, as well as to
the satisfaction of the house—that Roman Catholic
übiquity and disaffection had resulted necessarily from
the Catholic Emancipation Act—an _. assumption
which drew forth a protest so noisy that the intel-
ligent Chinese in the gallery thought the house was
over-exerting itself to amuse them, and did not
know how to be grateful enough. At. last, 111 r.
Whalley stating that when he went to Ireland to
relieve the sufferers by the famine in 1847 he -OS
pointed out as a ' miscreant' by a priest at Galli'''.
civeeu, the house cheered the priest so much that
some one had to move that it be counted, and the
Speaker made an appeal to Mr. Whalley to sit down
which he did, with the remark that he had " dis",
charged his duty." Mr. Newdegate was much con-
firmed in his theory that Whalleyism and Romanisni
are " coincident," and if this be so, then, as Whal-
leyism and Romanism are coincident, and Romanis
and Fenianism are coincident, Whalleyisin
Fenianism are also coincident, and Mr. Whalley
probably the true Head Centre.—Q.E.D.