The Sun.
London, England, 1859-08-11 00:00:00

Government! That there were petitions sent in
against the opposite party was a fact that only
breathed of powerless spite, of an innocuous attempt
at retaliation. " Wait a wee"—and then—we
should see, what we should see !

Well, the sequel has come—but it is a sequel that
has partaken somewhat of the character of an anti-
climax. To our grief, as Liberals, the tables have
been wholly turned. The thirteen have long since
disappeared altogether—the majority that changed
the Ministry with a Presto has clean vanished.
Liberal after Liberal has been unseated by succes-
sive Committees of Inquiry—the grossest bribery
and corruption having been proved against the agents
of each of them individually. Conservative after
Conservative has been confirmed in his seat as
having been duly returned as the free choice of his
respective constituency—the charges of bribery
having broken down upon scrutiny as trumped up
or as groundless. And now, so to speak as the
climax to the anti-climax—comes this last decision
of a committee—the committee appointed to in-
quire into the election at Beverley ! There one of
the two members returned is declared to be unseated
(because of bribery proved)—and this unseated mem-
ber is down in Dod as an " advanced Liberal." The
other member returned for Beverley is declared by
the report of the committee to have been duly so
returned, and is confirmed in his seat accordingly
—and this duly elected M.P. for Beverley is a
Derbyite, is a Conservative ! To be bribed by
the Earl of DERBY and his party really
seems to be about as substantially beneficial
as it might be to dine with Duke HUMPHREY.
The £60,000 subscribed by the Carlton has
certainly been made away with very mysteriously.
There is no tracing it anywhere. As for the
£lO,OOO of the ex-Premier he must surely have been
deluded by some one most infamously. Or—there
is an alterative—the Earl and Club must have dis-
covered some extraordinary means of rendering
money more illusory than Fairy Gold. It is con-
tributed here to the tune £lo,ooo—it is subscribed
there to the gross amount of £60,000, if not
to the monstrous aggregate of £lOO,OO0—
when—lo ! there remains in the grasp of the
agents not even a handful of dead leaves. It is
very mysterious what can have become of it all.
Can't Sir JAMES GRAHAM help us in our bewilder-
ment at this annoying disappearance ? Or Mr.
BRIGHT—or any other brother-in-law of a Quaker
Banker unseated for bribery of the grossest kind
through his agents ? We pause for a reply. And
in the meanwhile, as Liberals, heart and soul, we
turn with unaffected dismay and anguish from
these most lamentable revelations.

Our readers ofthe working classes know that there
is one point on which we have been old advocates
of their claims ; we refer to the right of suffrage,
and we may naturally be supposed sensitive respect-
ing anything which shall enable our Conservative
antagonists to retort, " See what sort of fellows
you would put in power." How often have we
been told, " You might buy hundreds of them with
a pot of beer," and the habits of some of their order
has made it not easy to refute the charge. And, we
must confess, when we saw this morning the address
of the " Central Association of Master Builders,"
and its opening appeal to their operativds, as to how
their present proceedings would affect the lowering
of the franchise in a new Reform Bill, we were not
surprised. The same thought hitd occurred pre-
viously to us. As counsel for the unenfranchised,
we would not be the first to raise the question, but
seeing it is raised, we may acknowledge that we
had several times been thinking of the answers we
must furnish if asked, " Will you put on the
register men who can tyranise in this style over
both their own fellow-workmen and their masters ?"
Now, what could our answer be ? Ato quoque
might be easy. We might show how the now en-
franchised classes had once been Protectionists in
every mode, and endeavoured to impose their prices
on the community at large. But the reply would
be,—" True, but we have unlearned that, and are
we to give power to those who have not yet learned

the laws of supply and demand." And the reply
would be responded to very generally, and would tell
strongly against operative enfranchisement, Could

we refute the charge of tyranny ? We fear not.
Allowing, for argument's sake, that it may be fair
(wise we cannot think it) for any body of persons to
combine to fix a minimum price for iron, or for
labour, or for anything else, it is not fair for them
to make rules, and enforce them by every kind of
social penalty and vexation, as to the manner in
which any artisan shall do his work, or the
number of hours he shall be permitted to
work the price he shall charge for
over time—and even how many bricks he
shall put on a hod—,or as to the use he shall make
of his hands and his trowel. A skilled artizan is
not to lay down his trowel—not to move a part of
the scaffold, although he may have to wait half an
hour for a labourer to do it ! Such regulations are,
it seems, enforced by the Trades Union—enforced
to prevent the skilful and industrious workman
doing more than the stupid and indolent.
Now, it is this class of regulations which strike
us as peculiarly objectionable on the workmen's
own account. There may be with a few unthink-
ing men a plausible reason to allege for them.
They suppose that by thus restricting each others
LIBERTY OF LABOUR they are benefiting a large
number who would otherwise get no work at all.
If they can compel a clever hand to do less than
he is able, of course what he leaves undone
makes work for an inferior one, and the
in'erior one is the better for it. But there
is quite another side of the subject. What
right have the inferior men to deprive the better
hands of the legitimate profits of their superior
skill ? Workmen have as great diversity of ability
among them as other classes. They reap the ad-
vantage of one tradesman or manufacturer being
cleverer than another and furnishing them, in con-
sequence, with cheaper clothes or bread—and why
should not the public reap the advantage of there
being hundreds of bricklayers or carpenters cleverer
than their fellows, and the clever bricklayer cr
carpenter reap his share of it too.
To us, the class of rules we refer to appear
very much like a confederacy of the more
indolent or awkward majority to prevent
their more skilful fellows rising in the world. The
ablest masters often rise from the ranks in every
department of trade and manufactures. How
is this to be accomplished if a man of,
what we may call genius or talent, in
his line as an artizan, is to be doomed never
do more, never to earn more, never to lay by,more
savings to become his first small capital, and never,
in fact, with his better brains and more dexterous
hands,!to hold his head higher than the commonplace
man. Talk of aristocratic exclusiveness, indeed !
wily this tyranny of the many over the aristocracy
'of their own class is infinitely worse. Shall work-
men really be jealous of the ability and talent as
conspicuous in their own ranks as in other grades
of society ? We would not ourselves entrust those
with the electoral franchise who, we thought,
were
envious of the rising men of their own class.

combination need not say much respecting
to raise wages. We feel perfectly confident that
through the inevitable laws of commerce it mug

work mischief in the end—mischief to the workman
himself. It may procure him a transitory advan-
tage; but as long as the consumption of the article
he produces, be it a cotton gown or a house, depends
on its price; he cannot ultimately prosper
except by cheap production, whether he
achieve that by his own personal dexterity, or
by his working in combination with machinery.
In proportion as houses are better and cheaper
will they be in demand. The great majority of us
live in as good a house as we can afford ; and what
is more, most of us would spend a few pounds more
in house rent, if we got more conveniences than we
now can by increasing our rent. The workmen
must aid in cheapening houses if they want the
house trade to be a flourishing one. Each artisan
knows, himself, that he would spend more on a house
or lodging in proportion to what he got for his
money. It is useless to kick against a principle
which masters both masters and men.

We have looked carefully at the claims put forth
by Mr. T. MARSII NELSON, who-writes strongly in
favour of the working men. But though it is un-
likely, indeed, that there should be no bad masters
and individual grounds of complaint, we cannot
understand how those he chiefly insists on can
be redressed by combination. It is utterly
impossible for a master to surrender the
right to appoint his own foreman, and
he alone can be the judge whether he deems
any of his men competent to fill a vacated foreman's
post. As to the charge of paying men off on the
Friday, to avoid paying for the short-time day
(Saturday), though it seems to be a very ungenerous
act, yet it is one which must bring its own punish-
ment, by good hands seeking masters who do not
condescend to it. Mr. NELSON praises the Trades'
,Unions for their moral rules and discipline.
So should we. But if they assume to dictate
the rate of wages, and the time and man-
ner of work, we must think that they step very
much beyond moral objects, indeed, that they be-
come guilty of an immoral interference with the
LIBERTY OF LABOUR. On this we insist, as the
right of every individual master and man
Nothing can be more degrading than for the arti-
zan to sell his freedom to the dictation of Unions ;
as, on the other hand, nothing could be more op-
pressive than for the masters to combine to take
away the individual liberty of workmen.

Austria, and her friends here, may well shrink
from a Congress. The more iniquity is discussed
the more unendurable it becomes. The mighty
paddlewheels of the Great Eastern on Monday,
though revolving but slowly, rendered the fecu-
lence of the Thames nearly intolerable ; the cham-
pagne and the stench had almost a drawn battle.
And the late short war has only served to disclose
more plainly what was well known before, the
universal odiousness of Austrian rule, and even of
the sub-despotism of its agents in the Duchies.
The fields of Montebello, Palestro, Magenta, and
Solferino demonstrated the inferiority of Austrian
soldiers or generals, or of both, to thoSe of the
French ; but the speedy cashiering of the dukes
and cardinals, as soon as Austrian regiments were
gone or checkmated, and the exultations of every
town where the two Monarchs or GARIBALDI
arrived, published, to all disbelievers, what Austria
was to her Italian subjects. HAPSBURGS, like
CATALINES, are past blushing, or we might expect
that they would retreat for very shame from the
soil which loathes their rule. Still, even they feel
exposure too much to like to provoke it. They
have had enough of it through the war. They will
avoid that of a Congress if they can.
To make as sure as possible of staving off this
unwelcome possibility was the real object of Lord
ELcHo's motion. He quite well knew that no
English Minister would step in at the eleventh
hour and help to adjust the odds and ends of a
peace with whose preliminaries he had had nothing
to do. He did not intend the motion to be carried,
nor did he even wish to ask leave to put in a form
suitable to be carried. He only desired to do all
he could to save Austria from a Conference. There
was indeed the subsidiary design of commending
the " strict and impartial neutrality" between the
contending powers of the late Government ; but
that was no longer a practical issue. We must

add, it was one which the less its friends say about
it the better. Neither Government is strictly and
impartially neutral, nor can be. The two Whig
lords lean strongly to France, Sardinia, and Italian
liberation from Austrian " influence." The Tory
leaders lean as strongly to Austria, and the main-
tenance of her power over the Italians, whom they
treat as incapable of self-government. A view,
now, happily proved to be a wrong one. Not only

has the Sardinian constitution worked admirably,
but, most remarkable of all, the duchies and lega-
tions, after turning out their Austrian or Papal
deputy governors, have preserved a measure of
public order which leaves nothing to be desired. It
has been questioned whgther our municipalities in
England would, under similar circumstances, have
been equally successful. It would be but honour-
able henceforth to drop this unworthy calumny—
the invention of their oppressors.

It is strongly suspected by many, both of their
friends and of the Opposition, that our Government,
though professing to see "more objections to a con-
ference than reasons for joining in one," as Lord
Jollx stated, has really not a little desire to get
one convened into which they could, honourably
for England, enter. If it really be so, they must
surely wish it in opposition to the Court. Prussia,
while even envious of Austria, seems to consider
the Italian possessions of the latter as, in a sense,
German possessions. We know what the other
. States of his Royal Highness the Field Marshal's
Vaterland think. It is presumable, therefore, that
our Minist2r's must find the service to her MAJESTY
of advocating Italian liberty rather than Austrian
domination, not a very acceptable one in the eyes
of her MAJESTY'S nearest and daily adviser. He
would think that in Italy "constitutional Govern-
ment" was, indeed, yet "on its trial." We need
hardly suppose that he can approve of Austrian
stick-rule, but sword rule he may not deem
so bad. Should, therefore, a conference be
ever assembled, and our Plenipotentary ever
go there, we only hope he will take his
instructions neither at first nor at second hand
from Germany, but go to represent the wishes of
the country which sends him ; and especially,r.that
he will not go at all, unless he have a clear and
reasonable prospect of effecting something for the
Italians, leaving the Germans to take care of them-
selves on this side the Alps.
The truth is, that we have but one honourable
course before us—to accept any opening which
presents itself of using our national influence in
favour of Italian liberty. Happily, this may
honestly be combined with urging ou Austria the
desirableness, for her own srke, of retiring as much
as possible, indeed altogether, from Italy. Austria
and her Tory friends dO not, of course, like such
advice. It touches their pride, E.nd it is adverse to
their natural ideas on the blessings of coercive
rule; but it is, nevertheless, sound advice. Austria
will be stronger without Venetia itself than with
it; stronger, if she leaves the Duchies td them-
selves, than if she imposes her viceroys on subjects
whom those petty functionaries ;cake her crlemies.