The Sun.
London, England, 1859-03-10 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, THURSDAY EVENING, MARCH 10, 1859.

THE MINISTERIAL MEASURE OF

_REFOR3L

BIRMINGHAM, WEDNESDAY NIGHT.
A meeting of the townspeople of Birmingham
was held this evening, in the Town-hall, to take
into
Parliament consideration the Reform Bill introduced
Parliament by her Majesty's Government. The
large hall was filled in every part, some estimates
of the number present reaching as high as 8,000.
The chair was taken by Mr. Lucy, in the absence of
the Mayor. The borough members, Mr. Bright and
Mr. Scholefield, were present. Mr. Ernest Jones,
who had announced his intention of taking up the
cudgels with Mr. Bright on behalf of the working
classes, was accommodated with a seat on the plat-
form, surrounded by a select knot of his followers.
After a few preliminary observations from the
Chairman,_

Mr. C. EDMONDS moved, and Alderman LLOYD
seconded, the first resolution :

“That the Reform Bill introduced by her Majesty's Go.
vernment, while pretending to effect a settlement of the
question, makes no adequate provision for the enfranchise-
ment of the working classes, disfranchises an intelligent
and independent class of county voters, does not provide
the protection of the ballot, and leaves the small, corrupt,
and dependent boroughs in possession of an amount of m-
fluence which counteracts and swamps the real opinion of
the country, is an insult to the people and demands the un-
compromising opposition of all true Reformers.”
Mr. BRIGHT, who was received with great cheer-
ing, then stood forward to support the resolution.
The hon. gentleman said,—ln this great assembly
there may be thousands, I think there must be many
hundreds, who were here in October last, when I
had the pleasure of standing before you for the first
time in the character of one of your Parliamentary
representatives. If there be such, they will bear
me out when I say that on that occasion I told you
the cause of Parliamentary Reform was in a trium-
phant, but, at the same time, in a perilous position.
I said it was in a triumphant position, inas-
much as no man now dared to stand up and
openly profess himself to be against all reform; in
a perilous position, inasmuch as for the moment the
conduct and consideration of the question were in
the hands of men occupying high places in the
State, but who had been in all past time consistent
opponents of reform. I took the liberty of warning
you then again placing any implicit faith in her
Majesty's Government. I told you that they had
not professed any conversion on this matter, and
therefore I thought that we ought all of us to en-
tertain a wholesome suspicion, and to watch with
intense observation every step taken by the Govern-
.ment in connection with this great question. lam
here to-night to ask you whether the warning
which I gave you was not necessary ; whether the
suspicion which I pointed out to you was not a
wholesome suspicion ? (Loud cheers.) I ask you
whether the Government of Lord Derby, in the bill
which they have produced, have not adhered to all
their ancient practices, and whether they have not
disappointed the hope which existed in the minds
of the people that they would produce a useful and
substantial measure of reform? (Cheers.) Why
is it that last week any bill was introduced into the
House of Commons ? Did the members of the House
of Lords urge upon the Government to proceed with
their question of reform ? (Laughter.) Is a majo-
rity of the House of Commons intensely anxious for
a great improvement of the representation? (Cries
of" No.") But surely somebody asked for it ; and
who and where are they ? 'low comes it that
Government after Government has put into the
mouth of the Queen a recommendation to the House
of Commons to consider the amendment of the re-
presentation of the people ? Because, with your
present representation, your Government is chang-
ing from year to year. Things are almost con-
tinually at a dead lock, and there is growing up in
the minds of a great and intelligent people the clear
conviction that your constitution, so far as it mostly
affects you in the composition of your House of Com-
mons, does not give youyour just rights, and does not
secure to you that fair defence of your interests
which the constitution intends, if it intends anything,
by the existence of a House of Commons. (Cheers.)
What is it you said when I was here last year ? You
said it at least by affirming when I said it—you said
that only one man out of five of all the men in
Great Britain and Ireland had a vote for members
of Parliament. (Cheers.) You said, moreover, that
those who have votes are so placed that a vast num-
ber return few members, while small numbers re-
turned many members, sothat not only are four out
of five disfranchised entirely, but the fifth, by the
manner in which members are apportioned,. is ren-
dered almost as powerless as if he had no vote at
all. What was it that we asked for ? That there
should be a great many more electors ; • that what-
ever exclusions should exist hereafter should be
exclusions not directed against any class, such as
putting the men who wear white kid gloves on one
side the line, and. the men who don't on the other;
but that all exclusions whatsoever, whether neces-
sary or unnecessary, according to the boldness or
the timidity of Parliament, should at least not be
directed against one class, and that the most nume-
rous, but should, so far as they acted at all, act with
fairness and justice through all classes of the popu-
lation. (Cheers.) You ask, also, with an unanimity
which has never been exceeded by any people, in
any country, on any question, that when Parliament
confers the franchise it should confer also that
which will enable you to exercise your franchise in
accordance with your intelligence and conviction,
and by the guidance of your own conscience—(loud
cheers)—you asked not for some miserable, delu-
sive, impudent sham, in the way of voting papers,
but that you should vote fairly by an arrangement
made by the friends of the voter under the shelter of
the ballot. (Loud cheers.) You asked that small,
dependent, helpless constituencies of 200, 300, or
400 electors, who are not their own masters in an
election, should to a considerable extent cease to
return members to Parliament in their own little
circles, and that their members should be distri-
buted among the great populations of the coun-
try. Everybody who asked for a reform asked
for what I have described. I don't pretend
to draw an exact line either as to the suffrage
or as to the distribution of members, but
what I have generally described is to a greater or
less extent the demand of every man in the king-
dom who is in earnest in urging the Government or
Parliament to bring in a Reform Bill. If any man
had come from abroad, and had heard that there
was this general demand—a demand so general that
Government after Government thought it necessary
to act upon it—he would, of course, have expected
that when the leader of the House of Commons
stood up to speak for three hours and a half on this
question, and to introduce a bill, that bill would
have had some remote resemblance to the demands
which the people had made. Well, in the midst of
this general expectation we have a bill that offers
several things that not only nobody wanted—
(laughter)—but which men stand aghast at, and
which refuses with the most insolent contempt
nearly everything that you demand. Will you allow
me for a moment, as probably all of you have not
carefully read the bill, to describe to you two or
three of its main points ? The only particular in
which it appears to make a concession to the popu-
lar demand is where it deals with the county fran-
chise in regard to occupiers of £lO value, and from
£lO up to £5O. You know that farmers or house-
holders in counties, if the rental or value of their
occupation be £5O a-year, have a vote for the county.
This bill proposes to reduce that franchise to occu-
piers of a rental of £lO. I presume this concession
is made in consequence of previous votes of the
House of Commons, and the belief in the minds of
the Government that there was a majority in favour
of that proposition. Now, what is the effect of that
reduction ? Mr. Newmarch, a great authority on
matters of figures, says that it will add to the county
constituencies, now numbering 500,000 electors,
about 100,000 more voters. This appears to be an
extension of the franchise, but it is only an appa-
rent extension ; there is a giving with one hand
and a snatching away with the other. I can show
that the county electoral body -would be worse under
this bill than it is under the existing system. Are
there any of you here who live in the town of Bir-
mingham and have qualifications for the county of
Warwick? You know that within the limits of the
borough there is a considerable division of freehold
property, many lots of freehold, and many freehold
houses. Throughout the whole of England and
Wales there are not fewer than 100,000 of these
county voters whose qualificati6ns are to be found
within the boundaries of boroughs. By this bill,
..
if it should pass, all these voters will be disquali-
fied for the counties, and will be required in future
to vote only in the borough in which these qualifi-
cations lie. At first sight you might suppose that
it does not make much difference whether a man
votes for the county or borough ; but in this case it

makes a :neat difference, inasmuch as, probably,
60,000 men out of the 100,000 have at present
votes far the boroughs, and would not get any addi-
tional votes for the boroughs, but would simply
have their existing county franchise utterly de-
stroyed and abolished, being left merely with the
borough franchise which they now enjoy. This
full, therefore, proposes to do the most audacious
thing which has been attempted in our time—
namely, to disfranchise about 60,000 men, the most
independent portion of the entire constituent body
in the United Kingdom. And the measure also
seeks to do another thing, which I must just men-
tion, to show the animus with which this part of it
is drawn. It is intended now to appoint a com-
mission to go_over all the boroughs in England and
Wales, and ascertain whether there is any portion
of a borough left out—any suburb or adjacent vil-
iao.e, in order that the boundaries of those boroughs
may be extended so as to include the neighbouring
ipts and for what purposes think yoi3/4 is it to be
done ?
Simply to cut off from the counties the £lO
householders who live inthose villegesand suburbs,

to throw them into the boroughs, to weaken the
popular party in the counties, and to make the
county representation even more exclusively terri-
torial than it already is. Now, have you not ob-
served that in the House of Commons, e er since
the Reform Bill, you have had a phalanx amen 200
or 300 strong, landed proprietors or the direct re-
presentatives of landed proprietors ? You have
150 of them now sitting behind this very Govern-
men. They are exclusive, so dull at learning
anything of reform, so careless of extending any-
thing like political rights to the people—they are
so united in defence of every political, and, as long
as they can hold it, of every commercial or landed
monopoly, that their Government can do nothing
in the reform or improvement of our legislation.
You recollect that in 1852 Lord Derby's Govern-
ment was turned out because Mr. Disraeli brought
in a budget which the House of Commons would
not agree to. That budget was introduced in obe-
dience to the wishes of the 150 landed gentry who
sit behind him, and now, though there are a great
many Conservative members in the House of Com-
mons representing towns and boroughs who can
have no sympathy with this bill, it is in obedience
to the majority in the House of Lords, and to the
150 territorial proprietors who sit behind him, that
he has offered you the £lO franchise in the coun-
ties, giving 100,000 more votes with one hand, and
with the other taking away 100,000 freeholders to
•
balance them. (Shame.) Whys it is not my inte
rest or your interest alone, but that of every man
in England, that this system, exclusive and mono-
polist legislation, should he broken up; and every
county member whose constituency is composed
partly of landed proprietors and partly of manufac-
turers, of shopkeepers, and of artisans, will be a
better member for the present, and still more for
the future of the country, than if he sat in the
House of Commons, as most of them now do, simply
as the stolid and unconvertible representatives of a
dozen territorial proprietors. We come next to the
question of what the Government has offered to the
population and to the constituencies of the boroughs.
At present in the boroughs of England and Wales
there are about 430,000 electors, exclusive of that
class called freemen. To this body the 100,000 free-
holders are to be brought in; but, as I believe more
than one-half of them already have votes for the
boroughs, the bill would in reality not bring in
more than 50,000. But of this 50,000 a very large
proportion do not live in the boroughs. For ex-
ample, the freehold properties in Birmingham are
not held by persons living in this borough and
voting for it. I undertake to say there is not a
county in England—probably there is not one in
Scotland either—in which there is nobody residing
who is not the owner of some freehold property in
the town of Birmingham ; and by this bill, whether
such a person lived in Caithness or in Cornwall, he
would vote for the borough of Birmingham ; but
suppose Birmingham were a place, not of 300,000
inhabitants, but of 5,000, and had only from 250 to
300 electors. Let us see how this would act ; let
some half-dozen country gentlemen living in this
neighbourhood, each having a freehold house
worth, say £2OO ; let him divide it into ten shares;
or, I take the house to be worth £2O a year; and
he will have ten votes of 40s. each. Let him put
his friends and dependents upon the electoral list
for the borough as owners of this house—in these
small boroughs you know the majority go by tens
and twenties, not by hundreds and thousands, as
they do here, and it would not require the buying
of more than three or four, or, at most, half-a-dozen
moderately-sized houses, and their division in the
mode I have described, all of which could be easily
done by persons living in any county of England,
Scotland, or Ireland; it would not require more
than three years of this bill to make it perfectly
competent for half-a-dozen gentlemen, setting to
work with such small boroughs, to make every one
of them as completely nomination, dependent,
pocket, and rotten boroughs as any one of those
that were disfranchised by the Act of 1832. (Cheers.)
They are not, then, going to improve the county
constituency ; they intend if they can only to trans-
fer the members from the little boroughs to the
great ones, but so to manage the law as that these
little boroughs, now sadly too dependent, shall lose
everyparticle f independence which they now pos-
sess, But this is not all. There are siome remark-
able concessions which I have previously termed
" fancy franchises." We won't discuss the ques-
tion of the lawyers, because everybody knows
that, whether they should have votes or
not, they have them, and will have them.
(A laugh.) We won't discuss the question
of the clergy or dissenting ministers, or the doctors,
or the schoolmasters, or even the pensioners.
(Laughter.) What we will discuss is this—is there
in this bill the shadow of a shade of an inclination
to extend the franchise to the people. I see in a
newspaper which I suppose very few people read—
it is one of the supporters of this bill—(laughter)—
the statement that everybody may have a vote be-
cause everybody may have £6O in a savings-bank.
(Laughter.) If this were only true—if I could
announce this to-night as a great fact—why it
would be the most welcome intelligence that ever
reached the ears of the million. (Cheers.) I had
a letter the other day from somebody in Birming-
ham, who told me that he had £lOO in a bank of
which your esteemed member and my colleague is a
director. The writer said he had as much faith in
that bank as he had in any savings-bank, and he
asked me to be good enough to ascertain for him
whether it was necessary for him to withdraw his
money from that bank and place it in a savings
bank, in order that he might have the franchise.
(Laughter.)L I received another letter from a person
living in ondon, who states that as Mr. Disraeli
says one illustration is better than a heap of argu-
ments, he will furnish him with one. He observed
that he is one of those fortunate working men to
whom the Government propose to give the franchise
by the savings bank clause in their bill, and yet
that there are none who can feel themselves more
insulted than he does by this provision. He goes
on to say that he has been married 12 years, and
has a family of six boys and girls grown up, as he
hopes, to be respectable men and women, able and
willing to fulfil all the duties of citizenship. He
thinks the bringing up of a family in respectability
and giving themthe advantage of as liberal an edu-
cation as his means will allow is something in his
favour, if it be not also commendable. He continues,
" On referring to my bank book (for you see he
speaks quite in commercial language), I find the
first deposit, which I paid in 1849, amounted to £5,
in 1851 it reached £10." Now, listen. Then came
a time for falling back on his little hoard, and
the sum is reduced to £4. You can imagine
this strong-hearted man labouring from morning
till night, putting scanty savings by, denying him-
self many perfectly innocent enjoyments, at length
succeeding in scraping together £10; then sick-
ness of a child, or perhaps the loss of employment
from a commercial panic, shrinks his little fund to
£4. You see his anxiety, and almost his agony,
as it is gradually being extinguished. He adds,
" And so it goes on decreasing or increasing as our
family necessities compel us to draw upon it, until
after many struggles it rises to £30." Then he had
a piece of good fortune which does not fall to every
body. A relation of his who died left him a small
sum, just enough to bring him within the pale of
this new constitution. (A laugh.) Then he says, " I
am bold enough to assert that I was as capable of
exercising the franchise when I had only £5 as I
now am when I have £60." (Cheers.) He pro-
ceeds :—" Another objection is this—that if I think
proper to withdraw that amount and place it in a
building society or in some other eligible invest.
ment I lose my qualification as a citizen ; if a
friend should want to borrow a few pounds from
me—as often happens in all classes of society—if I
oblige him I shall also be disfranchised." This is
his moral, " The whole thing (he says) appears to
me simply absurd and insulting to common sense,
which seems to be a scarce commodity where such
a proposition came from." (Laughter and cheers.)
I had another letter from a man living either
in Portsmouth or Plymouth, who tells me he hap-
pens to have as much money in the savings bank
as will qualify him under the bill. " Nobody," he
says, " beyond you and myself knows of this fact.
Is it necessary that my small pecuniary transactions,
my condition with regard to my savings, should all
be published to my neighbours in this e
town ? Sup-
pose you were to carry this rule through all the
different classes of society, I say it is an insulting
and absurd proposition which which ought to be rejected
by the unanimous
A few days ago a
Sir B. Hall,
therebank were
ek 0
no
ef
ht.uhnedilreoedwe
membervoice of the country." (Cheers.)
in
ash of the late Government,
Making
gsected the savings-
nomatfribNuezratfroaHdye
elec-
tors
he find that '
all due deductions,
how . omfatnhyatthibonrkouygohu.
constituency
wonder-
fuleneofremaineud tyo a
would be just. one
conundrum would add to the
Newport ? Why, that, if things
hair's breadth as they
tahree,rtehgeisrteer.
simple voter added . One might in-
vent 100 qualifications quite as good as this. This
is not a qualification to admit you, it is to give
perpetual
you
tehxeolsuhsoiown.oflavdhmeinssiolntwhiinthk tohfe
trhecalit ofis situdes
to
which every man is exposed who lives upon wages,
and depends for his weekly earnings upon the capi-
tal of another man, and the success or continuance
of that other man's trade, I say there could not be
a proposition more utterly fruitless for good,
wallod, a
indi-
catings greater ignorance of the condition as _
of the wants of the people, or more insulting to the
common sense and intellect of the nation. (Cheers.)
If you revert to the years 1831 and 1832, you will
find that a very celebrated and then most powerful
individual, who now lies beneath the dome of St.
Paul's—the Duke of Wellington—declared that
there was no need of any reform. It is said that he
even donbtedwhether if some one descended from a

higher sphere to teach a nation how to rule itself,
or how to be ruled, a better constitution, or a more
admirable system of government, could not have been
chosen than that under which we then lived; and
no doubt, as far as regarded his own order, this was
perfectly true--(cheers)—but the Duke of Welling-
ton himself, with all his courage and all his robust-
ness of denial, never told you that it was necessary
to go back; he never offered you a bill which would
make your representation worse ; he never proposed
to disfranchise clean off 50,000 freeholders in Eng-
land and Wales ; he never said, patting you on the
back, " put £6O into the savings-bank, save £6 a
year for 10 years, excellent citizen of Great Britain
as you are, and at the end of that time your name
shall be written down in the voters' list of Bir-
mingham, and you shall have the ten-thousandth
part of a member in the House of Commons."
-(Laughter and cheers.) It is a very serious question.
As citizens of a free country we are free to meet in
magnificent gatherings like this • so long as that right
is preserved to us, and men value freedom, so long
freedom cannot be utterly lost. But, I ask you,
are you willing to come to this ? Did your fathers
in 1832 toil; did they run risks ; did they devote
days and nights to the carrying of great questions,
that you should be told twenty-seven years after-
wards that four or five of you cannot have votes—
that the Constitution never intended it—that the
peerage would not be safe—that the Church would
rock on its foundations, and, for anything I know,
that you would have a better Government and be
more lightly taxed ? (Cheers.) Marvellous changes
have taken place within the twenty-seven years of
the existence of the Reform Bill, In the county
of Lancaster there are a million of people more than
there were when the census on which the Reform
Act was based was taken. All your railroads have
been made, 300 or 400 newspapers have sprung up
and are in every house; there is not a single point
to which you can refer, social, commercial, political,
moral, or religious, in which the people have not
not made astonishing strides within the last thirty
years. (Cheers.) All this was admitted by the Chan-
cellor of the Exchequer when he came forward to in-
sult you with this miserable bill. I cannot, in any
language known to me, express the astonishment
and the alarm with which I regard this measure.
(Cheers.) It indicates not only that your rulers
distrust you, but that they despise you. They
might have said they did not believe the govern-
ment would be bettered by any Reform Bill ; that
the people were not sufficiently in earnest to justify
them in proposing or to enable them to carry such
a bill. That would have been a fair matter for ar-
gument. But nothing can explain the effect of
their having offered you such a bill, but this—that,
though they distrusted you as much as ever, they
despised you more than before. (Loud cheers.) If
the Government of this country be good, just, and
economical, why should they fear to admit the
people, of whom they speak so highly when it is
not a question of the extension of the suffrage ?
(Cheers.) Do they mean to say that you are to keep
so ignorant, so brutal, so destructive, that, if you are
admitted within the pale of the constitution, you will
tear down or break up the sacred ark ? They know
that the power in this country—the power of tax-
ing and the poweof living on the taxes is a mono-
poly in the hands of a few hundred families. They
believe, and with reason, that if there were a fair
representation of opinions in the House of Commons,
that monopoly which has existed for the last 200
years would be broken up—that the public eye
would be upon every part of it—that the hand of
a strong, intelligent people would have hold of the
reins—and that the fattening of those few hun-
dreds of families upon your £70,000,000 of annual
taxation would be put an end to for ever. (Loud
cheers.) Let me call your attention just to one
point on this matter. You have seen in the news-
papers, in the course of the last fortnight, that the
First Lord of the Admiralty, without any dissent
on, the part of the house, has s proposed to add an-
other million during the present year to the expen-
diture on the navy. I am not discussing in the least
whether that addition is or is not proper at this mo-
ment; but it is a fact worth knowing that within
the last 20 years no less than £170,000,000 ster-
ling has been cast into that insatiable maw which
we call the navy. While all this tremendous sum
has been spent in building ships, in manning them,
in feeding the men, in selling old stores and buy-
ing new ones to replace them—(laughter)—not a
single ship of the English navy has been destroyed
or seriously injured in a war, and there has been
scarcely one loss by the violence of the elements or
by any mistake or clumsiness on the part of the
crew or captain ; therefore, whatever may have
been your stock of ships twenty years ago, when
they • told you that you had the finest navy in
Europe, they have been adding to it since to the
tune of £170,000,000, a sum the magnitude of
which the best head among you cannot in the
slightest degree comprehend, and now they tell you
that the country is in a state of absolute defence-
lessness, and that he is a credulous and dull Eng-
lishman who dares to go quietly to sleep without
fearing that somebody may not land on our
shores, and take possession of us before morn-
ing. (Laughter.) If the people of England
had been fairly represented in the House of
Commons long before this we should have
had a ransacking of everything connected with the
navy and Admiralty. We should have had honest
commissions or honest committees who would have
gone faithfully through the estimates year by year,
and whatever we had expended we should have
made sure that it was not more than was necessary,
and that what it produced was of the very best ser-
vice of its kind. (Cheers.) You can do nothing of
the kind. Now that the House of Commons has no
interest in economy it consents to no fair committee,
it insists upon no fair commission; and so long as
you are content to toil, and sweat, and pay, this
will go on, if you have not a reformed Parliament.
(Cheers.) This bill which we are met here to consi-
der, and which is so little worth consideration, can-
not by any possibility pass into law. (Cheers.) If it
could pass—if the House of Commons could behave
so ill as to pass it—and if the people of this country
were so lost to absence of shame, to all love of free-
dom, as to permit it to pass as it has come from the
hands of the Government, I should abandon all
hope of the future for this country. (Cheers.) Not
one single week longer would I take my seat in the
House of Commons as your representative. (Loud
cheers.) I should say the highest class among us is
corrupted by a long tenure of power. Our middle
class has no patriotism; it is engaged in domestic
or commercial affairs, and disregards the interest of
the country. The great body of the country, the great
body of the working classes, have been so long ex-
cluded from every right that they have lost even
the appetite for freedom. (Loud cheers.) I can pro-
mise you little from the earnestness of Parliament.
I believe the bill will be rejected. It is necessary for
all earnest reformers—and there are some in the
house, of course—to reject it. It is necessary, also,
for the exigencies of Parliament, that it should be
rejected. I believe that very soon it will go the way
of several other reform bills, and I hope for the credit
of its authors that nobody will take the trouble to dig
it up again; but there is a future. This Government,
as you see, is shattered by dissensions in its own ranks;
it is shattered, too, by the enormous—shall I call it
blunder or crime, of proposing this bill. I, as you
know, have never said one syllable that could be
called factious against the members of this Govern-
ment. I knew from what we had escaped when
this Government was formed. I was glad to see it
formed, and I have treated it on all occasions with
all the forbearance and all the fairness that, if I
were a Minister, and the Mintsters were in my
place, I should ask from them ; but the aspect of
things has changed. They have dared to meddle
with this question in a manner which no one with
a spark of respect for the reform cause can for one
moment tolerate. (Cheers.) I believe that nothing,
not even the dislocation of their opponents, nor the
unsavoury character of the preceding Government,
will avail to prevent this Government from coming
to them ; but if Lord Derby resigns, there will be,
as there always has been, a successor. There are
two men to whom little sections in the House of
Commons look up with anxiety and with hope.
Both of them cannot be sent for at the same mo-
ment, and, judging from the state of the house, and
judging from the fact that the crisis has oecurred,
or is likely to occur, on the question of reform, I
presume that that Minister whose name is most
associated with this question is most likely to be
the future Minister. But now, although I have
admitted before that I believe the sympathies and
opinions of Lord John Russell are distinctly in
favour of popular liberty and in favour of some real
improvement in our representative system, yet bear
in mind that a Minister is not a Minister of the
Crown nor a Minister of the people. He is the
Minister of the aristocracy, whether it be Lord
Derby with his followers, or Lord John Russell
with his. If he were anxious to give the people a
real, substantial, undeniable measure of reform as I
myself am, you must bear in mind that all those
around him in the same rank and class do not feel
on this question as I feel, or even as the noble
lord feels. It is not in the power of any Minister
to do even what an honest Minister might wish to
do, unless there be an uprising of opinion through-
tLnhoaenwc:stphihne
out all classes of the population. (Cheers.) You men
can
of Birmingham, you men of the midland counties,
united with the population of the metropolis, of
make
mcaanufacturing and populous districts of Scotland,
enkinextorrLitieesiyinto major ; measures which
iryjoein:asu:de:telh:eni.toelslt Westtimu
timid aristocrat;
and with the
rational
and e re volu
beneficial,tlon
it without breakingn
ntohthatinwghit
do
:thiyosuquettenstido:aienrvye,fnya
col
there is
.11cahtoyuoguh cannotought
t o
b e
laws of your country, or of one iota of the
the highest of eallaws—the moral lam. (Cheers.)

You can meet ; you can discuss the question; you
can send petitions within a fortnight, which Mr.
S cholefield and I can scarce carry into the house.
All the great populations can send great petitions ;
you did it in 1832. The very countenances of your
distrustful opponents in the house change per-
ceptibly as these great petitions are brought up. If
we have laid aside the barbarous weapons with
which men in this country in past ages, and men in
other countries now, carry great political changes—
if we shudder at turmoil and abhor bloodshed—the
more are we called on to use, unitedly with every
power of combination and resolution, from one end
of the kingdom to the other, those great legal and
moral weapons which the constitution of our coun-
try permits us to wield. (Loud cheering.)
Mr. SCHOLEFIELD, M.P.,rose also to support the
resolution, but he was interrupted by an attempt
on the part of Mr. Ernest Jones to address the as-
semblage. A scene of indescribable confusion ensued,
in the midst of which. Mr. Jones, in spite of some
rough handling from persons near him, persisted in
his efforts to obtain a hearing, and at length found
his way to the front of the platform, where he took
refuge behind. The question whether Mr. Jones
should be allowed to speak was then put to the
sense of the meeting, and was clamorously decided
in the negative.
Mr. SCHOLEFIELD then concluded his remarks,
Which were generally condemnatory of the Govern-
ment bill.

The resolution was then carried by acclamations,
as were also subsequent resolutions in favour of a
larger extension of the borough and county fran-
chise, the ballot, and a re-distribution of seats.
The meeting then separated.

of the prisoner, and witnesses were called to prove
an alibi. These witnesees were all of the gipsy
tribe, and some of them were women, with the real
dark skins and black eyes and hair of their race.
The cleverness and adroitness with which they
fenced with the questions put in cross-examination
excited much amusement in court. Their story was,
that the prisoner was the youngest of six brothers,
and that they were all in their tent at five o'clock,
the time the robbery was said to have taken place ;
that they were in their tent receiving a visit from
some of the tribe in another tent from three o'clock
till seven, when the policeman came. A cousin
and some of the prisoner's brothers were called, and
were so like him in appearance that a mistake as to
the prisoner was far from impossible. They all
had, as one of their women, who was dressed in a
red shawl, described it, " black eyes, black hair,
and dark skin—a good standing colour that would
neither wash off nor wear off.' One of the pri-
soner's brothers said they were all at tea with the
prisoner at five o'clock in their tent, and when
asked what they had to eat, said they had a " hod-
gun" cooked, which is the provincial name for a
hedgehog.
His Lordship—What do you say you had—
cooked urchin?

Gipsy—Yes, cooked hodgun. I'm very fond of
cooked hodgun (with a grin).
His Lordship's mind seemed to be filled with
horrible misgivings, when the meaning of the
provincialism was explained amid much laughter.
His Lordship having. carefully summed up the
evidence, the jury acquitted the prisoner.
A number of gipsies were in court, who appeared
to be in a state of great excitement during the trial,
and watched each turn of it with the keenest
anxiety.