The Sun.
London, England, 1866-08-28 00:00:00

TILE CHOLERA.

MANSION HOUSE RELIEF COMMITTEE.

Yesterday the Mansion-house Committee was
specially convened, at the request of the Lord
Mayor, to consider a proposition, of which he gave
notice a few days ago, to set aside the sum of £5,000
of the fund now at their disposal for the mainte-
nance of a -certain number of children who have
been made orphans in the infected districts.
The Lord Mayor having taken the chair,
Sir M. WELLS, late Judge of the High Court of
Judicature, and a member of the Legislative Coun-
cil of India, said the fund placed at the disposal of
and up to that time they pan imspetistra
wards the relief of the distress about one-third
of the amount. If, therefore, they should de-
termine to set aside £5,000 for the special pur-
pose of providing for a certain number of the or-
phans until they were of an age to provide for
themselves, they would still have a third of the fund
to dispense in the succour of the poor sick and con-
valescent patients. He moved, in the spirit of the
conversation which took place in the committee a
few days ago, that £5,000 be specially set aside for
the present towards the maintenance of orphans of
persons who had died of cholera, leaving it to the
committee to determine afterwards the manner in
which the money should be expended in detail.

The LORD MAYOR said he never saw such destitu-
tion in his life as that which he witnessed on Satur-
day evening on a cursory visit he made to a district
in the east of London which had been ravaged by
the epidemic. There the cholera was now a secondary
consideration, and hundreds of people who had suf-
fered from it wanted something to sustain life, and
air, and light, for now where thedisease was subsid-
ing typhus fever was following on its heels in many
places.
Mr. Alderman CurroN submitted that their first
duty was to relieve the present suffering occasioned
by cholera. The wiser course, he thought, would
be to apply to such a purpose any surplus that
might remain after relieving the current distress,
and he moved an amendment to that effect.
The amendment was seconded by Mr. MAXWELL.
Mr. WADE was disposed to agree in setting aside
this particular sum for orphans. _ _

The Rev. F. G. BLO3LFIELD took a similar view.
The Rev. War. ROGERS, who had seconded the
motion of Sir Mordaunt Wells, said, replying to a
remark of Mr. Alderman Cotton, that the article
which appeared in the newspapers was not directed
against the duty of providing for orphans at such a
time, but against the erection of fresh "orphanages,"
so called, when so many existing institutions of the
kind had the means of accommodating additional
numbers with a little aid to their funds.

The LORD MAYOR said, if it was well for them
to vote the sum of £5,000, it was well that they
should do it at once. The only thing he desired
to guard against was their attempting to provide for
orphans whose maintenance ought properly to fall
upon the parishes to which they were chargeable.
(Hear, hear.)
Mr. JORN ABEL S3IITII, M.P., and others, con-
tinued the discussion, and eventually (Mr. Alderman
Cotton's amendment having been negatived on a
show of hands), the Committee resolved, by a ma-
jority of 13 to 2, to set aside £5,000 for the special
purpose indicated, but that they would not entertain
any application for assistance from that particular
fund until they had matured a scheme for its proper
distribution.
A large deputation from Mile-end Old-town,
forming a local committee, waited upon the Com-
mittee and gave a painfully interesting narrative of
the ravages of the disease in that part of London.
They drew the Lord Mayor's attention to the fact
that as yet they had only relieved one-third of the
widows and orphans rendered desolate and destitute
by the visitation, and that to succour the remaining
two-thirds, to say nothing of the probable additions,
they required large assistance.
The Committee made them a grant of £250 and
18 gallons of wine. They also granted other sums,
amounting in the whole to £125, with quantities of
port wine where they tho'ight it was needed—viz.,
to St. John's parish, Battersea-rise, £5O ;to the
Rev. Charles Stovell and a local committee for the
'relief of poor Germansin the East of London suf-
fering from the epidemic, £25 ; to the parish of St.
Matthew and St. John, Southwark, £25 ; and to the
district of Saffron-hill, for distribution among the
poor Roman Catholics suffering from the disease.
Yesterday Mr. Tite, M.P., and Mr. Arthur Helps
were, on the motion of the Lord Mayor, added to
the committee.

THE CHOLERA ON THE RIVER.—It is satisfactory
to be enabled to continue a favourable report as to
the sanitary condition of the shipping in the river

TlMES.—Before any man forms an opinion on the
expediency, prospects, or nature' of Parliamentary
Reform, let him study the story of Great Yarmouth
as contained in the reports of the election commis-
sion now sitting. If it is desirable to understand a
disease before devising a remedy, here is the requi-
site intelligence presented to us, we may almost say,
for the first time. Certainly never was there a pic-
ture of electoral life exhibited to the public with
such completeness or on so extensive a scale. First
of all, however, be it observed that Yarmouth is a
large, populous, and busy town, with 35,000 inha-
bitants and 1500 registered electors. It has a staple
industry of its own, requiring considerable intelli-
gence, courage, and energy of character. The people
themselves are of that true Anglian stock which has
been held superior to the true Saxon lineage of the
South and West. The borough is under no aristo-
cratic influence; no territoriallord can dictate to the
constituency ; nor is there any person more formid-
able in the town itself than a wealthy brewer. To
the south of the town, on an elevated ridge above
the river, stretches for nearly a couple of miles the
suburb of Gorleston, concerning which we must
premise that it is no pauperised or squalid district,
but a remarkably pleasant and cheerful hamlet, ten-
anted by inhabitants far removed from destitution or
want. In the summer of last year there was an elec-
tion at Yarmouth, and this is the manner in which
it was conducted : —Sir E. Lacon, the opulent brewer
of whom we have spoken, stood on the Conservative
side ' • and Mr. James Goodson, the chairman of the
Great Eastern Railway Company, stood with him,
both being well known in the town. Against them
appeared, on the Liberal side, two gentlemen from
London, Mr. Brogden and Mr. Marshman ; but
four days before the election Mr. Marshman retired,
and his place was immediately occupied by Mr.
Vanderbyl, also from London, who, as well as Mr.
Brogden, was a stranger to the borough. After the
preliminary canvas the preparations for the actual
contest-were as follows :—Mr. Nightingale, Sir Ed-
mund Lacon's partner, took £4,000 in sovereigns,
with which he had previously provided himself, and
sent £2,500 to a man named Cooper, and £5OO to
another man, named Shuckford. Cooper, thus ap-
pointed to the chief agency, forthwith employed
nine sub-agents, two of whom again had subordi-
nates of their own. Shuckford had three agents un-
der him, making in all 16 Conservative agents fur-
nished with
ho ney for the expresLpsnweae7a,bnyinz
tp Bi)
to pro-
duce £6,000, of w itaYabbut £4,000 was given to
an agent named Jones, and £2,000 to a second
agent, named Edwards. Under Jones and Edwards
again were subaltern " operators ;" so that altoge-
ther some 30 or 40 persons probably were engaged
as actively as possible in the administration of bribes
to the electors of the borough. Nor did these offi-
cers do their work negligently. They bought up
voters by the hundred--it is hard to say how many
in the whole. 'At £2O a vote, which is rather above
the average price paid, the £lO,OOO expended on the
two sides ought to have purchased 500 electors, bat
some of these persons took money from both sides;
and so the calculation becomes uncertain. One wit-
ness reckoned that the Tories had certainly bought
400 votes, and the Liberals only 100: but then he
confessed that he had looked into the statistics on
the former side only, and had rather shut his eyes to
the doings on his own. Mr. Marshman, one of the
candidates, thought the " doubtful" voters were
about 300 in number ; a more experienced witness
put them at 600. Probably we shall not be far
wrong in.assuming that between 400 and 500 elec-
tors out of the 1,432 who went to the poll had re-
ceived bribes from one side or the other. In
other words, a number of voters equal to the
entire constituency of one of our smaller boroughs
took bribes at the Yarmouth election. We
must now proceed to remark, by the light of
the evidence, that neither iu these numbers nor in
these doings was there anything at all extraordi-
nary or exceptional. It was all in the natural course
of things at Yarmouth—a course of things which has
prevailed for we cannot say how long: One depo-
nent thought the system of paying the electors for
votes was first regularly established at the election
of Lushington and Harbor(' in 1806, but another,
well acquainted with local history, traced it to the
year 1754. It was stated in evidence that the late
Mr. Rumbold, a man of perfect respectability, who
represented the borough from 1818 to 1857, ex-
pended £72,000 in retaining the affections of his
constituents, andiSir Edmund Lacon himself, who
had been Mr. Rumbold's colleague, considered that
he must have allotted £l,OOO a-year to the inevit-
able charges of his seat. As to the general
.charac-
ter of the constituency thus treated, when we say
that nearly one-half of it was venal, we have said
enough to show that bribe-taking could not be con-
fined to the necessitous alone. That the people
who received £2O a-piece were generally people to
whom £2O would be an object is probable enough,
but they were neither destitute nor ignorant, nor
otherwise ill-conducted citizens. We have said
that Gorleston, in particular, represents no mean or
impoverished suburb : and yet at Gorleston, we are
told, fully half—one witness said two-thirds—of the
electors expect to be paid for their votes. Not the
least secret is made, in this respect, of the
general principles or practices of the constitu-
ency. Although, as might naturally be expected,
each party is anxious to throw on the other the re-
sponsibility of the expenditure on the last occasion,
the Conservatives affirm boldly that they did not
begin to bribe until they believed that the Liberals
were going to buy them out with money brought
from London. Mr. Brogden declares with equal con-
fidence that, though he had certainly lodged
his
money at Yarmouth a week before the
contingences,
and was only as a reserve against possible coi
and that it was never intended to empfftibleriobtehreyr,
nor was bribery actually employed ufnstetilf_defence.
side had rendered the operation one of
to conclude
An impartial witness would be.
that a resident brewer of constclio
large connexions, standing
bc agiirnmwa
with
hof b
eat
treari Ipwranyi etabillleatoipounlewnicteh and
success—undue oec
nststbl_ee
mut town,
oimn RtUh woulde-
ence excluded—tbv.i
l,tehgaanetdd thattha
t
gale, in fact, who was
Reform Club.
it had
eoc s t rksge
piarevent any such
Conservative,
determination
nt-toe n
the
supported borough b • as severalessentiallyl\ hother
fbuyture that the Conservative fundswere
tricki been boughtforoe
provided..twa s fr o
m
Oan eare
nmcl
other hand, it was explained on
behalf of Mr. Brogden that the railway interest was
expected to be neutralized by the shipping interest,
which was opposed to it, and that real Liberal prin-
ciples were powerful enough in Yarmouth to secure
the return of at least one Liberal if the election were
pure. We imagine that Mr. Aldred, the Mayor,
told about the truth on the political part of the
question when he said that Conservatism was cer-
tainly uppermostin the person of Sir Edmund Lacon,
a well-known resident, but that itwas uncertain how
it might fare in the person of an unknown candi-
date. As to the bribery, from the history given of
the constituency, we suspect it was simply inevitable
in the event of a contest. The only way of avoid-
ing it was by compromise, which was actually
proposed. It signifies little which side began. nut

HERALD. —No one who has had any practical ac-
quaintance with the typal English working :man
will care to deny for one moment that he has noble
stuff in him. Ile is the strongest, the most indus-
trious, and the most intelligent worker to be found
all the world over. But he has his faults ; and, con-
sidering the demoralising influences which unhap-
pily surround him, it is a wonder that they are not
far more numerous and far more conspicuous than
we 'find them to be. He is sadly credulous and
easily worked upon. He, the comfortable, well-
to-do working man, earning wages which curates
and City clerks would regard as magnificent, will
applaud to the echo the fluent mouther who tells
him that he is " down-trodden." Having within
himself the consciousness that he is as independent
a man as any upon the face of the earth, he never-
theless gives his entire acquiescence to the propo-
sition that he is nothing better than "a serf," and
that he is "trampled underthe hoof of a tyrannous
oligarchy." A body of men who would " strike"
at a moment's notice if their employers offended
against any of the canons of their trades unions,
will listen with frantic delight while a demagogue
of the Mason Jones or ddger or Mantle stamp
paints them to their faces as the writhing victims of
tyranny and oppression. An English working man
tyrannised over by an English master would be a
singularly rare phenomenon, although we imagine
that it would not be very difficult t 3 adduceex-
amples of masters despotically ruled and dictated
to by their men. This pitiable weakness in the
direction of credulity renders him sadly accessible
to flattery. We question if any class of men in
modern society has been so persistently or so ful-
somely bepraised as the working man. Mr. Horace
Greeley has certainly gone great lengths in his
efforts to convince the negroes that they are the
se
tqruuacltso
rs of t
the worst
Mr. Beales—go far beyond gr. Greeley, for, not
ohfe wthheiteswOrkßinugt man-111x. ainnd-
satisfied with teaching` On the doctrine of
universal equality, they encourage him to
believe that he is better than anybody
else. In the face of the ascription of all the
virtues to the• working man, it requires a painful
effort to realise one's own respectability. Being
taught to believe that he is exceptionally "honest,"
the working man may be pardoned for doubting if
anybody else is. Ile is eulogised on the special
ground that he is " horny-handed," and, of course,
regards a smooth palm in others as the badge of
mental and moral obligation. A man may get
through a serious amount of work—Lord Pal-
merston did, for instance—and yet preserve a soft
white hand and a clear complexion ; but the artisan
who is instructed to admire in himself " the swarthy
son of toil," looks upon such workers and their
work as humbug. Thus petted and fawned over,
he comes to regard himself as the crystallisation of
human perfection and every other grade in the social
scale becomes ticketed with the badge of his com-
placent depreciation. If titled, you are the haughty
scion of an effete aristocracy ; if wealthy, you aro
purse-proud ; if a Tory, you are treacherous and
tyrannical ; if a bishop, you are bloated ; if a parson,
you ate fat ; if a middle-class man, you are selfish ;
if Mr. Walpole, you are bloodthirsty ; if a police-
man, you are a brutal ruffian. That is how we are
all ticketed, and why ? Because the working man
hears the•abuse of all other classes blended with
the adulations of his own, and feels too much
flattered to be inclined to discriminate. lle takes

it all upon trust. lie listens to Mr. Bright and
Mr. Beales, and he •reads his Star and his Tele-
graph—the one possibly, as Mr. Matthew Arnold
suggests, for its wisdom and charity, and the other
for its taste and style. Ile believes, or affects to
believe, all he hears and all he reads, and the result
is that he becomes a discontented and excitable
Nau-bqvAarukicA.Tr—..A }Alia hrh2Ers us to another
duo he is tyrannised over, the working man of the
present day has actually become tyrannical. The ex-
orbitant aggressiveness against the Church- of the
"conscientious Dissenter " is more than paralleled by
the imperiousness of the down-trodden working man.
For years past he has made the country ring with his
complaint that he is absolutely excluded from poli-
tical power. The statistics produced at the com-
mencement of this year by those who urge his claims
prove to demonstration that he is represented to the
extent of one-fourth in the existing constituencies.
It was then urged in his behalf that he had a -right
to a preponderating influence in the franchise ; and
no sooner was the question postponed by the resig-
nation of the Whigs than it is declared in his behalf
that he will be satisfied with nothing less than man-
hood suffrage—the neat and simple expedient for
swamping the wealth and intelligence of the country.
A not less striking example of this arrogant temper
was shown in the demand that Hyde-park should
be given up for the purpose of a political meeting.
That is exactly one of the purposes for which the
park was expressly not intended, and it would have
been as fair and as just if the inhabitants of Bel-
gravia and Tyburnia had required that on a certain
day it shouldbegiveu up to them for croquet parties.
In the same spirit a Mr. D'Gruyther and his
friends insist that the Queen shall g?ant them an
audience to receive their petition requiring the dis-
missal of the present Government. It is vain to
point out, as Sir Thomas Biddulph does,
that the
proper course is to forward their petition through
the Home Secretary. They reiterate their demand
to the Queen in person, with a stern intimation that
if the refusal is persisted in they will look upon
gOfeocnosueqrsue,enocnese
the appalling mayherA
el
iatjheesrt y s
lams
dhdaevri nf
ogr abdicated.app a
which may ensue to the Crown and realm, or
laugh at the silly presumption which could have
preferred such a demand, and backed it
with such puerile menaces ; and we pre-
fer to laugh. But is it not pitiable to find
the working man, in whose name the Wat Tyler
of Bedford-street professes to act, committedto such
silly impudence, such contemptible braggadoccio ?
Other and equally distinguished agitators have
clamoured for the expulsion of the Tories, and their
demand has been endorsed by " great demonstra-
tions"—which is English for hole-and-corner meet-
ings—" orated" by local nobodies, reinforced by
professional demagogues from the clique in Adelph i-
terrace ; but can anything illustrate murne a
signifi-
cantly the overweening influence whichm man
swstlti
the meno
speak in his name, than the claim thate
bearing of those whom the workingi
elected representatives
direct action of the nation's
n throwdl?c down their trust
are to yield their placesreafraction of the community?
who are now the Ministers of the Crown by the
at the bidding of a mere
Hereto
cially pertains the working man. He imagines
and that whatever he asks
oeufosplpeolen,d,s asked for, said, and done in the
are"Amielsirfs.thueriTghortiesanci to
Bealesb e
places
andt h the
driven from office,
and Mason Jones installed in their and
reminditem tohfet
hweowrkhionlge
clnoTameeea: 406 tprogrammehepeople."
. of manhood
thato r, shawey esi s,
stumble
or does
government by roughs, it is because " the people"
wmill it ittbsaot.whlitleihseniescesasa
thery p toe
people magnificent
p
in a word, that
Lords, and
u'Commons,er
bheesdidoeess c
him tohnesrteituartetniung,
agricultural and manufacturing classes, the
t oe x
crleupsrievseelnytthe represents nation
itsexclusively
wealth,tasn y
middle class, the middle class, and the lower middle
class, and that in presence of these he cannot be said
intelligence, more t.l anho er
its respectability. Let the working man disabuse
himself of the silly notion that these arrogant pre-
tensions are recognised by any class of men out of
his own section. The claims of the working classes
always are and always will be respectfully listened
to when they are urged with justice, good sense, and
moderation; it may be worth their while to con-
sider whether they would not stand abetter chance
of obtaining a fair hearing if they were to disen-
tangle themselves from such spokesmen as Messrs.
Bright and Beaks, and the minor spouters by whom
they are surrounded.

CHOLERA.—It is important that the public should
be acquainted with the best means for preventing
the spread of this pestilence. The leading medical autho-
rities recommend the use of McDotroALL's DISINFECTANTS
as the cheapest and most efficient. They combine the
good effects of Carbolic and Sulphurous Acids, the disin-
fection being permanent, and not temporary only, as is tho
;
case with mere deodorisers, such as Chloride of Lime, &e.
Messrs. McDounALL will forward "Suggestions for the
Prevention of Cholera " on application at their depots •
London, 11, Arthur-street West, London-bridge Man:
chaster, Riga-street, Shudehill.

LA TEST INTELLIGENCE.—
Mr. CHAPMAN, of the White Hart, Acton, Middle-
sex, begs to hiform Lis friends and neighbours that the
Latest edition of "The Sun" can be seen at his house as
above.

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BENSON, J. W by Special Appointment to
11.R.H. the Prirce olWales.

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Sent Safe by Post.

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HIGH WATER AT LONDON BRIDGE.
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