The Sun.
London, England, 1859-01-19 00:00:00

its workings.

Sir JOHN is no croaker. He has no fear what-
ever of largely extending the franchise. He thinks
that with the cessation of the Russian war and the
suppression of the mutiny, there is no pretext
on which a Reform Bill can be evaded, nor does
he wish to evade it. He thinks the bearing of the
humbler classes in regard to the war, their fighting
at Sebastopol, their aversion to the Conspiracy Bill,
with their behaviour in 1848, all show that the
country is quite safe in their hands. "Is there,"
he asks, " any ground for alarm, then, in the know-
ledge that the people are sensible of their power
. . . . I say not the slightest, as long as those
to whom are entrusted the reins of power promote
by legislative measures the best interests of the
empire, and show by their acts that the honour,
prosperity, and advancement of England are the
keystone of their policy, and not the strengthening
of their own position, wrought out by personal
manceu.vres and the unprofitable fencing of party
conflicts."

Sir JOHN first presents us with his ideas of dis-
franchisement and redistribution. To do this he
is obliged to consider what shall be its basis. For
this he takes the inhabited houseS in boroughs ;
since he has little difficulty in showing that the
present number of electors in each, the population
simply considered, and the income-tax, furnish no

sufficiently fair idea of the claims of the borough
to representation. The number of houses is, he
contends, a much more trustworthy and a less
fluctuating basis. By disfranchising all boroughs
having less than one thousand inhabited houses,
by taking one member from all having less than
two thousand, and by adding the four members for
Sudbury and St. Alban's, already disfranchised, he
gets sixty-four seats.
These he proposes to dispose of thus :—To
boroughs, 42. To counties, 15. To universities—
Aberdeen, 1 ; Glasgow, 2 ; Edinburgh, 2 ; Durham,
1 ; and London, 1; seven in all, as educational seats.

Two boroughs, Liverpool and Manchester, now
returning but two each, are to return four each.
Five boroughs—Birmingham, Letds, Sheffield,

Wolverhampton, and Bristol—are to add one mem-
ber and return three each. A second member is
to be added to eleven which have now each but one
representative ; all these boroughs containing up-
wards of 3,000 inhabited houses. Seventeen new
boroughs, of above 2,000 houses each, are to return
one member a-piece. These, with a new metropo-
litan borough, two members more to Scotch burghs,
and an additional member to a Welch one,
completes his redistribution of the 42 amongst
boroughs.
As to the counties—the West Riding of York-
shire and Lancashire, by further subdivision, are
to gain two members each; five more counties are to
have three instead of two members; and six new
divisions are to have one member each. These
make up the fifteen for counties; and with those for
the boroughs and for education make the required
total of sixty-four.
For the Borough Franchise our author proposes

inhabitants—householders who have resided
eighteen months in the town—as the basis of his
constituency ; and he furnishes ample proof that
in this he is proposing no innovation on the consti-

tution, but rather restoring it. To the above, how-
ever, be adds, since he objects to a homogeneous
franchise, all persons paying local, parochial, and
state taxes to the amount of fifty shillings per
annum ; all income-tax payers ; and all forty-shil-
ling freeholders, if they elect to vote in the borough
in preference to the county. He has also an edu-
cational franchise, comprising the clergy—whether
including Dissenting ministers he does not state—
the bar, physicians, surgeons, officers of the army,
navy, militia, graduates of universities, members of
literary and scientific societies, and perhaps certifi-
cated schoolmasters. These educational franchises
to extend to counties also. .

For the County Franchise he proposes the old
forty-shilling freehold ; copyhold of the same
amount ; tenants of land and premises to the
amount of £25 per annum ; leaseholders for seven
years of £lO per annum; also the . fifty-shilling
taxes, the income-tax, and educational franchises,
as for boroughs. The savings'- banks qualification
he rejects as a fluctuating one. These extensions
for boroughs and counties are, on the whole,
liberal ones; though we can conceive no reason
whatever for making a house, simply, the qualifi-
cation in the borough, and a £25 occupation the
lowest one for the county. There seems to be no
getting over the objection that a lower property
qualification in counties indicates a higher status
than in the boroughs.
It is, however, in his plan for purification of the
franchise that Sir JOHN appears to us most seriously
tt
71 than, first, , miss
his way. For this he has nothing better
improving our tribunals for disputed elec-
tions, by giving the House only the power of de-
ciding whether there be a prima facie case, and
referring the final decision to a judicial commission;
secondly, rcquirit0, the member, before taking his

seat, to declare solemnly, on his honour, thit he
had been no party, directly or indirectly, to the
employment of corrupt influences ; and, thirdly,
taking the votes in each parish. The Ballot he
objects to, but only on very old grounds, such as
have been shown, a thousand times, to be worth-
less. This, indeed, reminds us that, with Sir
JosN's pamphlet, we have also just received the
third edition of Major-General THOMPSON'S Cate.
chism on the Ballot, or a List of Fallacies and the
Answers. Here the old " fallacies" of Sir JOHN
WILMOT'S pamphlet, and some scores of others,
will be found fully answered, and with the Gene-
ral's usual amount of epigrammatic wit or humour.
We have left ourselves no space for comment, but
our readers will, we doubt not, feel some interest
in "A Second Letter to Richard Freedom, Esq.,—
containing the present views of the predecessor in
North Warwickshire of Messrs. NEWDEGATE and
SPOONER.

A wholesome lesson of humanity was on Friday
last administered to the parish authorities of St.
Pancras, by Mr. TYRWHITT, the worthy police-
magistrate of Clerkenwell. The circumstances
which elicited this timely reproof to the master of
the St. Pancras Workhouse were simply these :
A police constable, while on the preceding night
on duty in Oakley-square, St. Pancras, observes a
young girl seated upon a doorstep crying. The
wayfarer is a servant maid, out of place, homeless,
aged sixteen. " Why not go to the workhouse ?"
asks the policeman. The girl has been there
already, and, in reply to her application for a
night's lodging, has been refused admittance.
The policeman conducts her back to it, and she is
again denied the luxury of a few hours' shelter in
the workhouse. Having then taken her to the
station-house, the policeman, this time accompanied
by a sergeant of his division, again leads the poor
homeless wanderer bask to the St. Pancras Work-
house. Finally, and for,a third time, the doors of
the workhouse are closed against her admittance.
The master of this inaccessible establishment, on
making his appearance, during the course of the
next.day, for the purpose of giving something in
the way of an explanation, is reported to have treated
the whole matter with great callousness and indif-
ference. The principal reason given is, of course,
the old one—the applicant belonged to another
parish—that of Clerkenwell. But when the
magistrate thereupon remarks, " You surely do
not mean to say that when persons are brought by
the police, found in the public streets without a
home, you refuse admission because they belong to
a neighbouring parish ?"—" Well, no ;" replies the
master cautiously, " that depends." In the instance
under notice, however, the applicant in the first
case, the policeman in the second, the sergeant of
police in the third had each Made an extraordinary
omission in the form of the demand for the night's
lodging—shelter was not asked upon the plea of
" destitution." Literally, upon this miserable'quibble
the door was closed upon a decent respectably-
attired homeless girl of sixteen. The mere circum-
stance of a girl like this met in the streets of Lon-
don at midnight, crying upon a doorstep, one might
imagine was sufficient evidence of the case being
one, for that night at least, of obvious destitution.
But no : the one magic word was forgotten which
appears to be the " Open sesame" to a workhouse!
And so, for the third and last time, the grim work-
house door was closed, and the bolt shot, and the
young girl of sixteen, guilty of having no roof to
cover her head, was left outside in the humane
charge of the police-sergeant and the police-con-
stable. All this is surely very wretched. It is
particularly wretched upon the very morrow, as it
were, of Christmas. Scarcely have the pauper
inmates of the St. Pancras Workhouse been regaled
upon their boneless meat and their all but plumless
pudding when the benignant door of the establish•
ment is thrice in one winter's night slammed in
the face of a poor homeless, shivering, crying girl
of sixteen. Heartily rejoiced are we at every
earnest word of indignation expressed in regard to
this inhuman proceeding by the able and benevo-
lent Magistrate of Clerkenwell.