The Sun.
London, England, 1859-12-03 00:00:00

Stage Manager, Mr. It. Phillips

eI.ANTERBUR Y HALL CONCERTS.-
EVERY EVENING.—The Music of Verdi's Opera of
MACBETH (now first made public in England at these Con-
certs).

And a Grand Se ection from Meyerbeer's new opera of
DINORAII.

Comic Vocalists —Messrs. Georrre Ralson (the Irish Come-
dian and Mimic). W. T. Crit6ifield, and M. W. _la.elcney.

Several interestin Pictures are added to the Fine Arts
Gallery. The suite of Ilalls have be re-decorated and
beautified, and constitute one of the most unique and brilliant
sights of the metropolis.

II.‘)SA BON II EU R'S celebrated PICTURE or the HORSE
FAIR is now added to the already maznificent Collection of
Painting's in the Canterbury Hall Fine Arts Gallery. The
gallery is opea from 9 a.m. till 12 p.m. Admission, Six-
pence.

THE WEATHER.--SUN OFFICE, DECEMBER 3.';

THERMO:I=P.M, IN THE SHADS.
5S —highest since noon yesterday.
35 —lowest this morning and during the night.
38—this day at noon.

BA ROMETEII-30.18.
WIND, Northerly; fresh, with snow, and cold dull

weather.

HIGH WATER AT LONDON BRIDGE.
THIS DAY.—Morning, 7h. 31m.—Afternoon, Bh. 3m
To-monnow.-Morning, Sh. 37m.—Afternoon, Oh. lOin

43.)
YtSQtY.IU• kc.„,
?7324
, •• • 0 s ,

THE SUN.

LONDON, SATURDAY, DEC 3, 18,59.

It is a very easy matter indeed to ridicule prac-
tical economists like the present member for Lam-
beth or the late member for Montrose. But what is
really the complaint uttered nowadays by Mr.
Winmams ? Has that hon. gentleman fallen foul
of some purely imaginary grievance? It was only
the other evening he explained very clearly the
cause of his anxiety as one of the popular represen-
tatives. As recently as on Monday evening last
Mr. WILLIAMS told his constituents what it really
is he struggles session after session to accomplish
in the way of salutary retrenchment. The harangue
which was delivered upon this occasion by the
member for Lambeth at the Horns Tavern, at Ken-
nington, we had reported at some length in our
impression of the Tuesday evening following. And
there were compressed within the compass of this
frank and outspoken harangue so many plain and
wholesome truths that we do very earnestly trust
the speech itself may have caught the attention of
many others beyond the circle of Mr. WILLIAMS'
own constituency.
'We are all so perfectly and so painfully aware by
this time of the molancholy fact, that our estimates
for the last financial year amounted very nearly in-
deed to the lamentable aggregate of L7o,ooo,ooo,that
we cannot wonder in the least that Mr. 'WILLIAMS
started in his argument from that one frightful
calculation. Any more than we can wonder at the
dismay excited in his -mind by a comparison of
the national expenditure of fourteen or 15 years
ago, with the.national expenditure recklessly adven-
tured upon during the current twelvemonth. That
precise year-1835—Mr. WILLIAMS remarked that
he selected, " not on account of any special frugality
of expenditure, but because two of our greatest
statesmen—Sir R. PEEL and the Duke of WEL-
LINGTON—Were in the Government at that time."
Having said which, he adds, " Well, they required
for the expenditure of 1835 only .E,18,700,000,
being £20,000,000 less than was asked for during
the present year." Oat of which consideration
starts forth upon the instant the very obvious but
miserably tantalising, deduction that, supposing the
Government of the country could be carried on as
cheaply now as in 1833, we could, of course, dispense
with the whole of the income tax, with the whole
of the duties upon tea, upon sugar, and upon malt !
Strike off £20,000,000 from our yearly expendi-
ture, and we might clearly strike off simultaneously
£20,000,000 of our annual taxation. From any such
reduction, however, we are effectually debarred
nowadays by what may be deaignated, without
zaggeration, our systematic egtravagance. Of

the delightfully cool and careless manner in
which those enormous supplies are voted Mr.
WILLIAMS gave his constituents, on Mon-
day evening, a sufficiently vivid illustration.
" One night," quoth he, "the Prime Minister
all at once proposed that they should proceed to
vote the Civil Service Estimates. There were seven
volumes of these estimates, which had only just
been delivered. The house had not five minutes
given them to look into the books, and he therefore
objected most strenuously to pass any of these
votes, containing, as they did, some thousands of
items, which he always made a point of carefully
comparing with the same items in former years. It
was no use to point out extravagance in a particu-
lar instance. This would only be laughed at ; but
when he showed that in the old borough-monger-
ing Parliaments less was required, Ministers some-
times hummed and hawed, and often tried to make
a joke of it. In the case he referred to he chal-
lenged any member to say that he had had time to
look at a single figure of these estimates. No one,
however, accepted the challenge, and, upon repeat-
ing it to Lord PALMERSTON, his lordship very jocu-
larly admitted that he had never looked at a
figure. Yet this happened in the House of Com-
mons, whose principal function was to protect the
pockets of the people. He was so disgusted that
he shut up the books and walked out of the house,
declaring that he would be no party to such a farce,
and that he considered an insult had been offered
to the House of Commons by the Premier. No
doubt they were very glad to see him go, and the
House immediately went to work and passed 57
votes, amounting to between £3,000,000 and
£4,000,000 of money, without a word from any-
body, as fast as the votes could be read over. One
might have supposed," he added, " that the Pre-
mier would have been anxious to allow the fullest
opportunity of examining and discussing the
estimates. But in this instance he (Lord PALMER-
STON) seemed in effect to say, You, the House of
Commons, have no business with these votes, ex-
cept to pass what I think proper, or what the Go-
vernment order you to pass !'" Showing that ac-
cording to a popular idiom, things had, in truth,
come to a pretty pass indeed when this was not the
exceptional, but the ordinary and almost invariable
method of getting pro forinct through the drudgery
of the Estimates.

In reference to our war expenditure, in reference
to the military and maritime estimates, we rejoice
to note that Mr. WILLIAMS distinctly repudiated
any desire in regard to the scrutiny and revision
of the estimates beyond that of discovering whether
the money annually voted for the Army and Navy
was, in truth, properly, judiciously, and thriftily
applied. No man, he protested, was more anxious
to see the country defended by a force which would
be irresistible against any attack that could be
adventured upon ! But when, for example, he
found that no more than £4,000,000 out of the
£13,000,000 voted this last year for them were
spent in paying and clothing the officers and men,
and in finding them necessaries and allowances—
his curiosity (Mr. WILLIAMS seemed to intimate)
was naturally piqued to find out what could possi-
bly have become of the remaining £9,000,000
Hence, indeed, his yearly motion for a Committee
of Inquiry into the system of our military expen-
diture. So, again, precisely in regard to our naval
estimates. How (he was curious to learn) had the
sums of money voted for years and years past for
naval purposes been actually exnenchd ? Remem-
bering that since the termination of the French
war £300,000,000 had been spent upon our navy,
and that at the close of the French war we had
upwards of 150 sail of the line, while at the begin-
ning of the present year,rafter:this enormous outlay,
we had only 29 screw and 12 sailing line of-battle
ships—how, in the name of fortune, or rather we
should say of misfortune (others besides Mr. WIL-
LrAms will be eager to know), have we contrived to
get through that awful sum of £300,000,000 ? If
Mr. WILLIAMS'S passion for economy be deemed
by some to amount to nothing less than a mono-
mania—it must certainly be admitted by all to be
a monomania that (no less than HAMLET'S madness)
" hath a method in it !"

We wish to have a word with the farmers o

England, with tenants-at-will, and with leasehold-
ing tenants too. A Reform. Bill is at hand, unless.
indeed, foreign affairs or preparations for defence,
are to be the pretexts for evading one once more.
Ought not the farmers of England to speak out ?

They have, we presume, their electoral grievances
to complain of—why should they leave all the dis-
cussion and action on the subject of Reform to the
towns ? Let farmers awake. There is not a finer
class of Englishmen than English farmers, yet we
never hear their voice on public subjects. They
think on them as they walk their fields, and as
they sit by their winter firesides, but they do not
tell us their thoughts. Is it because they dare
not ?

Why is there so great a difference, politically,
between the ordinary £lO householder and the £5O
farmholder The former, as the rule, votes as he
pleases. Many of his class, no doubt, must vote
with some lawyer, creditor, or banker ; some will

vote with those who buy them—Gloucester and
Wakefield can tell us that. But hardly a man
among the £lO-householders must vote with his
landlord; while hardly a man of-the farmers of
England dares vote against his landlord. Why

this last great difference ? Why does the average

borough voter vote as he pleases, while the farmer
everywhere must vote as his landlord pleases ? The
reason is, that in the actual state of England every
farmer has a political master; the generality of to wn s-
people have none. The cause of this every farmer
knows. He knows that, firstly, every farmer's
farm is his living ; that, secondly, in this little
island, farms cannot be multiplied, and, if turned out
of the one he holds, twenty other farmers would
like to have it, while he cannot easily find another.
In the town the tenant, if dismissed from one house,
could readily obtain another; the landlord, there-
fore, if ever so hot a Tory, never thinks of parting
with the most Radical tenant who regularly pays
his rent, and keeps the house respectable. It is the
same, of course, with the Radical landlord and the
Tory occupier of his house.
The farmers.of England are powerless to remove

this cause of difference between the tenant of a
house and the tenant of a farm. The supply of
houses will never long be wanting where there is
a demand for them. The supply of farms must be
deficient, if every farmer, on the average, brings up
more than one of his sons to his own business.
Hence the competition for faring. Hence the higher
and higher rents given for them since the repeal of
the Corn-laws; and hence, again, the power of the
landlord over his tenant. He can turn him out
without loss. He can have a tenant who will give
him his vote as well as his rent ; and his tenant's
vote counts for two in every contested election.
His landlord is proud of the votes he can command ;
and is mortified if he cannot command his tenant's
vote. Sometimes his influence with the Government
of the day is at stake, and then it is not a ques-
tion of pride merely; for it may also be a question
whether he shall get an appointment for a relative,
perhaps for a son, from the Horse Guards, or from
a Secretary of State. Add to all, that landlords

grasp pertinaciously this last relic of feudality—that
they like to regard their tenants as political serfs,
when they are, socially, serfs no longer—and we
shall not wonder that the landlord class avail them-
selves, ruthlessly, of the dependent position of their
farm tenants. Some of these men have large town
properties also ; but they rarely venture attacks on
the liberty of their town tenants. The latter would
laugh at a threat, or bid them find another tenant.
Now we want that every such landlord should be
compelled to respect equally the political rights of
his town and his agricultural tenants. Why should
the house tenant be free and the farm tenant wear
the collar ?

There are no men such perfect political ciphers
as the farmers. The miserable wretches who sold
their votes at Gloucester and Wakefield are not
such nothings. They could sell their vote to which
side they liked. Some of them did sell cheaper to
one candidate than they would to another. But the
farmers of England alone are mere ciphers. They
just stand at the right hand of their landlord, and,
though nothing themselves, serve to multiply his
vote by ten or by a hundred. Some apologists for
this glaring fact would have us believe that farmers
prefer to vote with their landlords. Do they? For
what reason, we should like to know? Is it because
they never think about politics ; or, if they do
think, because they feel not the slightest interest in
voting as they think ? If such political indolence
or indifference be a fact, to what in this free coun-
try is it to be ascribed ? So far as it is the case, it
can only be the result of hopeless bondage. Men
who cannot break their chains will not gall their
limbs by fretting against them ; and 'electors, who
never can by any possibility vote as they think, will
not take the trouble to think. American slave-
holders point sometimes to the thoughtless merri-
ment of the slaves as a proof of the excellence of
their "domestic institution." But a truthful writer
observes that this is its bitterest condemnation. It
degrades men into being happy, in their way, under
the loss of liberty. Just so must we regard the'
assertion that farmers prefer to vote with their
landlords, and are content to do it. It proves the
debasing power of landlordism. It has sunk num-
bers of farmers below the level of Wakefield bribe-
takers. It has trained the sturdy sons of the soil to
have no political notions at all; or, if they have, to
give cheerfully, when required, their vote against
them. We are not prepared to deny that our
honest JOHN BULLS are to a large extent become
content to vote blue or yellow, according to the
colour of the last successor to the estate or its last
purchaser. But we do call upon such farmers to
allow themselves to think how unworthy of them

is such a position.
We cannot, however, believe that our agricultu-
ral friends generally wish to be such ciphers. They
prefer to be units, and to increase each of them
the strength of the Eide they take. Further, we
deny that the landlord's side is, naturally, that of
the farmer. On many questions it must be the re-
verse. The first interest of the farmer and that of
the landlord are clearly diametrically opposite.
The landlord wants a high rent, and a short strin-
gent lease, if he grant leaes at all. The farmer wants
a low rent and a long liberal lease, with full secu-
rity for improvements. To call these two interests
identical is an abuse of words. The game laws are
another illustration. The farmer hates game ; the
landlord is mad upon it. Hence a code of rent-laws
and game-11ws, both wholly en the side of the land-
lords, who have forged these fetters for their far-
mers out of their own votes. In truth, the farmers,
in voting for their landlords' nominees, vote that
the seller shall legislate for the buyer—the man
who lets for the man who hires—the sportsman
who shoots and hunts for the man who has to bear
the cost of the shooting and hunting !—As well ask
the sheep to vote that the wolves shall guard their
fold.

Farmers, in fact, have no representatives. One
tenant farmer, we believe, there is in the house, but
even he, if we mistake not, obtains his livelihood
chiefly by his dealings with farmers. Yet it is also
a fact that they could, if they were free, have their
own representatives in every cottiity. They, and
those connected with them, are a majority gene-
rally of the county electors yet they allow a
wretched minority of landlords to return all the
members ! It is not that their landlords are men of
such intellectual superiority as to deserve the hon-
ourable trust ; with a few splendid exceptions, the
county members are but the dummies of the House
of Commons ; or, if they stutter out a speech, its
laughing stock. Were farmers free electors they
might find intelligent men from their own number,
who, in a house where real solid knowledge on any
subject is always listened to, would command atten-
tion ; and they would find great numbers amongst
the landed gentry themselves who would be
quite different men if they had to represent
constituents who could call their souls their
own. Farmers ought to be represented
as well as landlords. Farmers ought not merely
to choose representatives for landlords, but for
themselves also. If the give-and-take temper of
Englishmen, nowhere more conspicuous than
amongst farmers, made them willing to give land-
lords one member for a county, yet surely farmers
ought to look to it that the second member for any
county, or division of a county, was a farmer's
member—and well, too, that he should be also a
farmer. We must defer consideration of the means
of accomplishing this till Monday.

A Cabinet Council was held yesterday at the
official residence of the First Lord of the Treasury in
Downing-street. The Ministers present were Viscount
Palmerston, tho Lord Chancellor, Earl Granville, the Duke
of Argyll, Sir G. Cornewall Lewis, Lord John Russell, the
Duke of Newcastle, the Right Hon. Sidney Herbert, Sir
Charles Wood, the Chancellor of the Exchquer, the Duke
of Somerset, the Right Hon. C. P. Villiers, Sir George
Grey, the Eari of Elgin, and the Right Hon. T. Milner
Gibson.

THE PRINCE AND PRINCESS FREDERICK WIL-
LIAM.—Their Royal Highnesses and suite left London this
morning on their return to the continent. The illustrious
party travelled via the South Western Railway.

Their Imperial Highnesses the Princes Nicolas
and Eugene Romanoffsky, accompanied by Col. Rehlimdu,
have arrived at Claridge's Hotel, from Paris.

His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge is
expected to leave town early in the ensuing week on a visit
to the Earl and Countess of Derby at Knowsley.
His Excellency the Ambassador of France ar-
rived at Albert-gate House on Thursday evening from visit-
ing Mr. and Lady Caroline Townley, at Townley, Lanca-
shire. The Countess de Persigny will return to town from
the same place on Monday.

His Excellency the Austrian Minister and the
Countess d'Apponyi have returned to Chandos House, from
visiting the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough at Blenheim
Palace, Oxfordshire.
The Duke and Duchess of Northumberland ar-
rived at Northumberland House last evening, from A:lnwick
Castle. Their Graces leave to-day for Sion House, Isle-
worth.

The Earl and Countess Delawarr and Lady
Arabella Sackvillo West leave Wimpole Hall, where they
have been visiting the Earl and Countess of Hardwick°,
to-day for Hatfield, to stay until Monday, when the noble
earl and countess go to Buctchurst Park, Sussex.
The Earl and Countess Stanhope and Lady Mary
Stanhope arrived at the Pavilion Hotel, Folkestone, on
Thursday, from the Continent.

DEATH OF TIIE MARQUIS DE LAJATICO.—We re-
gret to learn that the Marquis de Lajatico, the distinguished
Sardinian statesman and diplomatist, died on Thursday
evening at the Clarendon Hotel, Bond-street, after a short
illness. It is stated that he died from an attack of small-
pox.,

APOTHECARIES' HALL.—The following are the
names of the gentlemen who passed their first examination
on Thursday, Dec. 1: —Theodore Orton, Littleburn, Kent;
Rowland Mounsey Bowstead, Caistor, Lincolnshire. •