The Sun.
London, England, 1859-08-20 00:00:00

one. It was regarded as an attempt to show what
would be considered a moderate demand by a man
of the people. Then a measure was looked for
from the Tories, and there was an indisposition to
act till it was seen in what course action ought to
flow. Then, when the bill was before us, it had
so much good mingled with the objectionable, that
a large section of Reformers were disposed to take
the good, and to endeavour to get rid of the bad.
Thus there has been reason for the apparent want
of enthusiasm which Mr. COBDEN notices.
After all, however, the improved condition of
the great mass of our working classes has diminished
their interest in political questions. They can earn
good wages without help from the Legislature
they have seen that the disposition of the upper
classes has rather been to legislate for them than
even for their masters, and they think they could
gain little by a vote. This very fact, however, if
it be the fact, should be the strongest argument
with the timid classes. It would be most unwise to
wait till some convulsion at home or abroad brought
the great mass of the now better educated, and
therefore more powerful working men, to knock
clamorously at the door of the constitution for ad-
mission. By all means let us open it and ask them
to walk in, and not take no notice of them till they
burst it open, and stare us in the face in a temper
not too amiable.

In the corn-law controversy, Mr. COBDEN'S forte
was convincing antagonists. Mr. BRIGHT, as now,
was the orator to rouse, by his impassioned appeals,
his own party to an irresistible onset on their anta-
gonists. Mr. COBDEN was the man to carry the flag
of truce, and to say to them " You will gain by
surrender." With a certain dogmatism of style, he
invites a real confidence in his cause, and a good
nature equal to that of the late Lord ALTHORP,
which tells powerfully with Englishmen. People
like to be saved the trouble of thinking. A man
who speaks positively, yet goodnaturedly, therefore
at the same time disarms their hostility, and fur-
nsihes them with a short cut to truth—or what
they take for truth. And, following his old course,
we observe Mr. COBDEN addresses himself to the
electors ; to the class which fears lest its own power
should be attenuated by diffusion amongst so many
more. To them he says the working men, as fellow-
electors, can do you no harm. They would soon da-
mage themselves and learn better if they could, as
you learned in regard to your protective laws of
all kinds ; but they won't do it. They might pre-
fer an income tax to a tax on tobacco and tea, but
that would all be for the good of trade and com-
merce, of which you will get your full share. They
may, moreover, become dangerons as outsiders—
take them in and all will work smoothly.
Mr. COBDEN is quite come round to one of our
long-expressed opinions, that bit-by-bit reform, as
Lord JOHN RUSSELL haughtily designated every
substantial reform when proposed independently, is,
after all, the most practical course. He would, there-
fore, deal with the Extension of the. Franchise, the
Ballot, the Redistribution of Seats, and
shorter Parliaments, by separate Bills. We
are satisfied that this is the only wise
course. A whole string of alterations at once,
is the very thing which frightens the feeble and
fearful amongst our legislators ; and one house at
least has such a number of them that it is essential
to remember that we have a house of old lords—
ladies, we might almost say—to do with as well as
a House of Commons. We have no objection to
let the suffrage come first in time, if Mr. COBDEN
prefers it, since he shows that he does not consider
the Ballot as second to it in point of importance.

His testimony on that subject to its position in
America is admirable and valuable. It works too
truthfully to be gainsayed by any one, and corro-
borates the vast mass of evidence now accumulat-
ing, that as a means of saving our constituencies
from demoralisation, it is worth all the praise which
has been bestowed upon it. We believe that if it
were tried at but one election, every one would be
as ashamed to condemn it as they now would be to
censure the adoption by Parliament of a free-trade

policy.
We cordially welcome Mr. COBDEN'S strong com•
mon sense as an auxiliary in the cause of Reform

He will convince thousands whom Mr. BRIGHT

would irritate; and while many listeners must give
the palm for a more ardent oratorical genius to the
member for Birmingham, all will yet feel that Mr.
COBDEN is the man to conciliate more opponents,
and to indicate what can be done.

In our curiously-complicated system of constitu-
tional government there arc several processes that
are apparently valueless to a superficial observer,
but that really and truly have a certain and some-
times a very singular efficacy. There is the peti-
tioning of Parliament, for example—a habitude
among our politicians that, to a careless looker-on,
must seem, of course, quite useless, mere waste of
time, and utterly preposterous.

A private member, during the Parliamentary ses-
sion, upon any evening you please except Sunday,
Wednesday, and Saturday, rises in his place from one
of the back benches, shortly after five o'clock, and
mumbles a few words which nobody cares to listen to
—that nobody even affects to listen to. The rest of the
members are talking together. Mr. Speaker is in the
midst of of a laughing conversation with one of his
intimates. The clerks of the house in getting ready
for the more serious business of the sitting. The
Sergeant-at Arms, in his tights and silk stockings,
perched on that little bench of his far below the
gangway like a verger or a beadle in full dress, is
goodnaturedly scribbling an order of admission for
some applicant. The strangers up aloft are endea-
vouring to recognise the ringlets of one right hon.
gentleman, the whiskers of Lord JOHN, the nose of
Sir CORNEWALL LEWIS, and are of course propor-
tionately elated or dejected as the familiar features
are recognised or remain undiscovered. The reporters
in the gallery opposite are mending their pencils
or running their glance down the orders of the
day and the notices of motion, printed on those
blue-white sheets of paper, curiously introduced
with the old monkish prefix of those dog-latin
dates, as though it were impossible for an official
document to mention, in plain English, that the
day was, let us say, Tuesday, the 9th of August.
But we have left our private member all this while
mumbling from his back bench—and, generally,
speaking, he has very little indeed to say upon
these occasions. Depositing his hat upon the seat
behind him, or retaining it carelessly in one hand
While he talks, he holds, you will observe, in the
other, a roll of paper, that looks to the uninitiated
Particularly statesmanlike and oratorical. If you
know no better you fancy you are going to hear a
speech—it looks so remarkably like that inevitable
scroll represented in the grasp of the sculptured
effigy of so many great Parliamentary celebrities—
a hollow baton of paper like that Mr. GLADSTONE
right
ig i n t thathn.
is playing with (in the true rhetorical style)
careworn photographic likeness of the h
gentleman published by the Messrs. MAULL and
POLYBLANK. Don't be alarmed—the business of
the evening is not going to be unnecessarily de_
layed by one who is a mere unnoticeable unit amonc,
the aggregate of the six hundred and odd repre-
sentatives. It is only a Petition that the hon.
member for Blankborough is presenting from

the parish of Pig-cum-poke, down in Wheat- •
shire, praying that so-and-so and so-and-so
may be taken into the consideration of that Hon.
House, and so forth. The hon. gentleman has done
mumbling, however, and shuffles down, by the steps
at the gangway, down to the floor of the House, up
to the table—upon which (in the midst of a won-
derful litter) he lays the important roll of paper,
the Petition—and the thing is_done, the ceremony
is over, and the member goes back to his seat again
or lounges out of the House. If you watch these kind
of proceedings only for a very few minutes you will
see the rolls of paper beginning to multiply on
the table—and you are about to wonder perhaps
what will be done with them all, when one of the
Clerks of the House, in barrister's wig and gown,
gathers them all up in a bundle, off the table, and
tumbles them underneath it. You more than sus-
pect now the fate of those petitions ! 0 the surfeit
of the waste-paper baskets of the House of Com-
mons, as well as of all those public offices in D ownin g-
street, and in the purlieus and precincts of White-
hall! Yet it would be altogether a mistake to
imagine for an instant that it is after all more
waste of time petitioning Parliament. Nothing of
the sort. Those apparently fruitless and frivolous
scrolls are in truth the straws and feathers, showing
which way the wind blows. And occasions not
unfrequently arise when such a storm of
petitions all streaming in one direction pours
into the House, that the members of the
Administration recognise with one accord that the
time has indeed at length arrived when something
must really b 3 done in the way of legislation upon
this particular matter, whether it be to remove a
grievance or to secure an improvement.
In another way there is often much real good
effected by means of those apparently idle Deputa-
tions waiting from time to time upon one or other
of the members of her MAJESTY'S Government.
There is a strong family likeness, of course, in
all these deputations. At a particular hour accord-
ing to appointment a number of hack cabs and pri-
vate broughams clatter down to the fag-end of that
dingy and disheartening eta de sac called Downing-
street, described so very humourously and truth-
fully but a few months since by Sam Slick, of Slick-
fills, otherwise Mr. Justice HALIBURTON. A mis-
cellaneous cluster of gentlemen pours into the
cheerless little waiting room on the ground-
floor to be ushered up the staircase, soon
afterwards, in a straggling procession, and then
introduced, bowing and bowing, into the presence of
the noble lord or the right hon. gentleman.
There were several spokesmen ; a number of ques-
tions are asked and answered ; the Minister replies
in a few general terms to the whole of the argu-
ments, leaving his hearers, when he has done speak-
ing, in a mist of doubt as what really may be
the drift of his observations. There is a great deal
of suavity, and a great deal of amenity,
sometimes a little jocularity is indulged in, the
deputation thanks the noble lord or the right hon.
gentleman, as the case may be, for his extraordinary
courtesy—and the thing is done. The deputation is
bowed out again—but its sayings and doings are
reported next day in the newspapers. That is the
chief value of it. That is what effects its object,
by giving its doings publicity and imparting to
them an air of importance.

There was that deputation, for example, that
waited the other day upon the Prime Minister in
regard to the Designs for the New Foreign-office.
Its proceedings have already been recorded at
length in our columns, and in those of our prin-
cipal contemporaries ; and hence more especially our
hope that good may come of it. The argument
wished to be enforced by the deputation has
thereby obtained an opportunity of being
very generally ventilated. The reasoning of
those who spoke upon the occasion will force its
way home to general conviction. It will command
the attention of the public after having secured the
notice of the Premier. It was a deputation of
architects representing the views of 200 out of the
230 members of that profession who (in this and
other countries) had responded to the appeal
of the French Government for designs in
a grand competition. These designs for the
projected new Government offices, we remember
well examining, in several instances with admira-
tion, in some, with wonder, as they hung thei a in
bewildering profusion upon the temporary screens
erected in Westminster Hall. It is worthy of
notice, by the way, that among the members of the
deputation to Lord PALMERSTON on Wednesday,
there were some of the chief prizemen in the late
competition, Mr. H. B. GARLING, for example, as well
as Messrs. BANKS and BARRY, who had severally the
honour of being personally presented to the First
Lord of the Treasury. It is in urging the suffi-
ciently obvious claims of these gentlemen that the
deputation possesses, we conceive, a peculiar inte-
rest and significance. How those claims have been
overlooked was forcibly expressed by one of the
members of the deputation on Wednesday—Pro-
fessor DONALDSON, who, addressing himself ear-
nestly to the Premier, maintained that the deputa-
tion ought in fairness to bring under the notice of
the Government " some of the indignation felt by
a majority of the competitors and of non-competing
architects at the real result of the competition.
Not," said he, " that they were:dissatisfied with the
decision of the judges who, it would be remembered
by his lordship, had agreed with their professional
advisers in placing designs that were not Gothic at
the head of the lists of premiums. He condemned
the exertions which were made to reverse
the effect of those decisions by some of the
dilettanti, which were rendered nugatory by
the committee consequently appointed, as the com-
mittee came to no conclusion. He also laid consi-
derable blame on the Chief Commissioner of Works
for having attacked the integrity of the system of
competition, which ought to be founded on the prin-
ciple that the award of the execution should,
wherever possible, follow that of the prize." The
reason of this is apparent at a glance. And we
earnestly hope it is a reason that will yet be
accepted and acted upon at the authoritative in-
stance of the noble viscount at the head of the
Administration.

THE " TIMES" AND TIIE BALLOT

SOCIETY.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE SUN.

Sin,—Allow me to contrast the reports in the
Times and the Manchester Examiner of Mr. Cob-
den's speech to the non-electors of Rochdale, so far
as respects his allusion to this society:—
"I am for keeping the "I am for keeping the
question separate from other questions separate. There
questions, and I have always is a society in London orga-
advised the Ballot Society in nised for the purpose of ad-
Londonto confine itsattention vocating the ballot. I have
to this matter alone."— advised them always to keep
Times, Aug. 19, 1859, their society separate from
all others. They have, I
believe, some supporters in
Rochdale. That society is
worthy your support, and
will, I hope, go on advocat-
ing the ballot,'and adducing,
as it is adducing, the best
possible arguments to show
its morality and efficiency."
—Manchester Examiner,
Aug. 19, 18.59.
An accurate report of what Mr. Cobden said ought
not, I submit, to have omitted his commendation
of this society, and I beg leave, through your
columns, to call the attention of your readers to
the omission.—Yours respectfully,
WM. 'WICKHAM,
The Ballot Society's Offices, Hon. Secretary.
Guildhall-chambers, Aug. 19.