The Sun.
London, England, 1868-10-24 00:00:00

MR. NEWDEGATE ON HIMSELF,
13PIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

The Saturday Re ieta says some of the leading Conserva-
tive organs seriously assert that the Government will get a
majority at the elections, and that Mr. Disraeli will have
the command of the new House of Commons. It may be
'so ; the issue of the elections is in the womb of the future,
and the country, which at present appears modestly to
'conceal its preference for them, may be heart and soul on
the side of the Conservatives. But if we are to discuss the
new Parliament at all, we must discuss it on the basis of
what is known to the world at large, and not on the basis
of secret Conservative information. So far as outsiders
have the means of guessing, there will be an incontestable
Liberal majority. Whether the majority reaches one
figure or another is not of much importance. The one
great aim of Liberal constituencies seems to be to get
representatives who will go with their party and do what
Mr. Gladstone wishes them to do. What they want is to
avoid the reproach uttered last session against the party
by Mr. Bouverie, as a party without a leader to lead or
followers to follow. It is the Liberal constituencies that
are backing up, or rather creating, the paramount
authority of Mr. Gladstone, and stipulating that the
men they return shall be true to him. Tea-room parties,
and Caves of all kinds, are an abomination to them ;
and they hate strategic movements to support Mr. Glad-
stone's flank. The only question is, not whether they
will succeed, but whether they will not go too far, and
turn out honourable and independent men in order to
return mere delegates and party tools. Here and there,
it is to be feared, this may happen ; but no one can doubt
that, if it is the object of the Liberal party to carry out
the principles it professes, this interference of the consti-
tuencies was, to a certain extent, very natural and very
proper. The party fidelity of the Conservatives is carried
to the last extreme of excess. A few Conservatives,
indeeed, shewed independence in the last two sessions,
some of whom were honourable men of good fortune and
with safe seats, and some of whom were young men who
deliberately threw away all their chances of parliamentary
distinction in order to maintain their self-respect. But,
as a rule, Conservatives have no independence at all.
They need not consult their constituents, they need not
like or trust their leader, they need not stick to their
principles, but they must go with their party. They all
vote in a lump directly any question is declared to be a
party question. It has become a part of their creed and
tradition to do so, and recent experience has shewn that
they will move altogether in a body, even when they are
suddenly called on to undo and unsay all that they have
been doing and saying for years. In face of so compact
and so unanimous an Opposition, the Liberals are natu-
rally doing all they can to introduce compactness and
unanimity into their own ranks.

The Spectator thinks that Mr. Gladstone missed a great
opportunity on Thursday. The single incident in his
career which his followers would gladly forget, and which
every now and then suggests a doubt whether his
Liberalism is world-wide, is the attitude he assumed
towards the Southern rebellion, He believed that it would
succeed, that a slave empire could be founded, that it
was possible to elevate a caste of slaveholders into a
nation ; that in fact, as he said, the work had been accom-
plished ; and he expressed his belief as if in some way it
brought him pleasure. His speech upon the subject gave
deeper offence to English Liberals than even to Americans,
for it suggested that there' was at least one subject upon
which the moral vision of their leader, usually so clear,
was dimmed by prejudice ; one corner of his mind in which
his sympathies for the oppressed, usually so despotic, were
not dominant; one region of politics in which his foresight,
usually so keen, was arrested by some failure in his mind.
He has, we doubt not, since then received light, has
perceived not only, as he says, the enormous energy
nations derive from extending popular privilege, bat
the enormous suffering which any compromise with
slavery, any tolerance for that supreme wickedness, brings
even upon States otherwise wisely organised ; but he
should have taken the opportunity afforded him by the
banquet to Mr. Reverdy Johnson to announce the change,
and clear his political character from its solitary stain, to
prove that there was no point upon which men who love
freedom could regard Mr. Disraeli as superior to himself.
It is conceivable that his reticence may have proceeded
from an exaggerated courtesy towards Mr. Reverdy John-
son as a Marylander, or from a mere reluctance to enter
at such a banquet upon a personal topic; but it has disap-
pointed, not to say wounded, some of his best supporters,
and we shall be delighted to find that, before the election
comes on, the ill-timed silence has been amply explained.
Even had slavery not been in question, Mr. Gladstone's
false estimate of American forces would have been a
blunder; but it was one committed by politicians as saga-
cious as himself ; by one, for example, as coldly watchful
as the Emperor of the French. No apology was needful
for an error so widely spread, but sympathy with slavery
is a mental taint of which a leader almost worshipped by
English Liberals, and worshipped for the sincerity of his
belief in freedom and in man, ought to avow himself
wholly free.

The London Review holds that when 'Mr. Mill first put
himself forward as a candidate for Parliament, there were
those who feared that the peculiar bent of his mind and
the habits of his intellect would incapacitate him for tho
particular kind of service required in the House of Com-
mons. A philosophical thinker is sometimes too much in
advance of his time, and at others too singular and way-
ward (or at least apparently wayward) in his views
to suit the rough and necessarily imperfect work of a
legislative assembly, which is compelled to reflect rather
general opinion than special opinion. It is to be regretted
that some of Mr. Mill's proceedings during the last year
or two have given a degree of confirmation to the judg-
ment thus expressed. We are not insensible of the advan-
tage that is to be derived from the utterances of an intelli-
gence such as that of the member for Westminster. But
this order of mind has its special liabilities to error, and
those of a nature particularly unfortunate in connection
with political subjects. No one will deny that Mr. Mill
has delivered in the House of Commons some very
thoughtful and suggestive essays on the first principles of
statesmanship ; yet many, even among the most advanced
Liberals, look with distrust and aversion on his crotchety
views with regard to the representation of minorities and
the rights of women. We are afraid that this feeling
of distrust in Mr. Mill as a representative of the Liberal
party will be greatly increased by the singularly impru-
dent course he has recently been taking with respect to
the elections.

. According to the Imperial Reriezv, the remark that there
is "nothing in the papers" has acquired a fresh signifi•
cance since Mr. Gladstone has monopolised a page or so
in them every day. The ingenuity that contrives to string
together column after column of well-rounded periods,
and carefully exclude from them all original thought, is,
doubtless, very great. The performance, it would be
thought, must be an exhausting one to a man of Mr.
Gladstone's undoubted intellectual capacity. It certainly
is very exhausting to mere observers. One of the most
terrible tortures of the old Inquisition was that which
allowed a stream of water to trickle ceaselessly, drop by
drop, on the head of the victim. The result was idiocy.
And a similar result would probably have attended anyone
who was exposed to the ceaseless drip, drip, drip of Mr.
Gladstone's eloquence. The most striking characteristic
of Mr. Gladstone's series of speeches consists, of course, in
the fact that he should have talked so much and yet have
contrived to say so little. The reticences that are observed
by the two Liberal leaders, by both Mr. Gladstone and
Mr. Bright, are very significant. On the great question
of the Irish Church Mr. Gladstone has announced a
definite policy, and has appealed to the nation to restore
him to power in order that he may carry that
policy into effect. The nation has a right to
know the details of the plan by which it is pro-
posed to accomplish so great and revolutionary a
change as the destruction of the union of Church and State.
The explanations that Mr. Gladstone hesitated to give in
the House of Commons were, it was hoped, only reserved
for the hustings. But they have not yet been given, and
there is now little probability that:they will be voluntarily
afforded. Those who maintained that they were withheld
because they were not of a kind to prove acceptable or
even endurable, have been thoroughly justified. And it is
essential that Mr. Gladstone's reticence on the subject,
and the causes which alone will satisfactorily account for
it, should be urged on the constituencies. The Radical
electors of South-west Lancashire will doubtless be
gratified ; and not ignorant of Mr. Gladstone's past, and
mindful of his probable future, they may be tempted to
remember and apply the ingenuous avowal of the
American politician: "These are the sentiments of an
honest man and an honest politician ; but, gentlemen
and fellow-citizens, it they don't suit you they can be
altered."

The John Pull criticises Mr. Gladstone's definition of
national property. Will Mr. Gladstone open the statutes
at large, and point to the date and to the chapter of the
Act which endowed the Church with so much national
property ? We are ignorant of any such statute ; we have
not so read the history of England. Parliament has, it
is true, now and then voted money for church building,'
and even for the endowment of poor benefices ; but
the amounts have not been large, and the remem-
brance of the Acts, which gave such moneys to the
Church, are fresh in the memories of men. But Par-
liament never gave the tithes as an endowment
to the Church, and they never were at any time, or in any
sense of the word, a State income. The tithes were
given to the Church by private persons of piety and
liberality, for the support of the clergy, before a Par
liament existed in England—before the complex idea.
the State." had obtained either form or
P pre,sion. They were given as a free gift ; and they
became the property of the clergy, or the corpo•
rations to which they were given, by a prescription.
of centuries. The violent transfers which were
experienced by other property in England di6
not affect them. The rights of the owners of tithes to
the enjoyment of tithe were untouched by the Roman
Conquect and by the wars of the Roses. Indeed, the
very phrase " national property " is a legal absurdity.
We know of no such C.ive, " national property." But
by what is now a legal fiction, though it is based on the
chernettr of the ancient feudal tenure of land, all the
landed property of England, it may be urged, is the pro..
Forty of the Crown. It is true that this is legal view ;
and tie landed possessions of the Church are the only
case in which the doctrine does not apply. The
endowments of the Church, at least those of the parochial
clergy, are not, and never have been, held by feudal
tenure. They were held in frankalmoyne, or free alms
and, therefore, by an ancient constitution, they were not
liable to the same burdens that other landed property lay
iieler ley- virtue of its tenure. It was on this account
ti; a t, until a comparatively late period in our own history,
the possessions of the clergy were not taxed in Parliaroe4

Mr. Newdegate thus concluded a speech he matte on
Thursday to some of his constituents in North Warwick-
shire :—" Gentlemen, I have heard the queerest reports.
I was told that I hadbeen married. I am told that some people
say I have got a concealed wife. Other people have said,
Look how that fellow Newdegate works ; he must make
a good thing out of it.' However, I can say this, I have
never touched one shilling of public money in my
life, except my pay as a member of the Yeomanry
force, to which I belong. My attempt to serve you
honestly these five-and-twenty years have cost
me tens of thousands of pounds, and also
the best years of my life. As Parliament is reforming.
and as there will be many new members, experience will
be of some value. I ask you to send me back this time
to serve you, and if you do, I hope I shall not betray the.
precedent I have set in your service hitherto."

MR. ROEBUCK ON THE _RATEPAYING

CLAUSE.

Mr. Roebuck on Thursday delivered an address on
capital and labour. He repeated many of the arguments
he had already adduced. Afterwards (as the custom is)
he answered any questions put to him. Being interro-
gated about what he would do in the matter of
the ratepaying clause, he ventured on prophecy :
"I think there is a misconception about them. My
idea of the matter is this, that so long as
the suffrage was confined to £lO I objected to the
ratepaying clause being added ; but when every person
rated to the poor, down to the poorest householder in
Sheffield, was entitled to vote, I thought it a very
proper precaution that you should add who paid his
rates. I acknowledge at once that that 'is an exclusion
to all who don't take a real interest in the State, and
persons who are not by their position likely to know
much about politics. I have seen a good deal of it in
this town. I should not like to see those persons at
the polling booth, and I will not, and Mr. Gladstone
wont propose it—mark what I say--Mr. Gladstone
won't propose it. My opinion is that we have passed
a great bill. We have largely increased the consti-
tuency. We are making an experinaent. That experi-
ment ought to be followed through. There
ought to be no tinkering—no paltry opposition—
and there won't be when they get into power. The
whole thing then will drop ; but I say to the people here
—I say to the people in the country—that the experi-
ment has been proposed. We are making it now,
and let us make it fairly. Do not interfere until they
have tried the bill. If the bill work well, then will be
the time to say, ' Now you can fairly increase the
suffrage to the poorest and least educated class of the
community.' I don't think you could do that now safely.
Let us try the experiment, and when the experiment has
been fully and fairly tried, I will do all I can to extend
the franchise."