The Sun.
London, England, 1845-09-13 00:00:00

Motu Alt ' '

LONDON, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13. 1845.

The proceedings on the charges against ikl‘DonnAL,
the Master of the Andover Union Workhouse, for gross
and criminal misconduct in that office, are likely to ac-
quire a c.lrtain degree of increased interest (much as
they had already attracted public attention), by a very
strange, and, as we think, a very suspicions interposition
on the part of the Poor-law Commissioners, On some
accounts we are glad that this intervention has taken
place. It is likely enough to co:npel the attention of
Parliament, next session, to the important question,
whether it has nut become necessary to reconstitute the
Poor-law Commission on principles, and with powers
more analogous to those of the Constitution and
the common law than those upon -which it is, at
present, organized. It seems that on the thirteenth
day of this protracted investigation the gentleman by
whom, on the part of the rate-payer, sit had been pro-
moted, received from Mr. GEORGE GOODE, the Assistant-
Secretary of the Poor• law Commissioners, a commu-
nication intimating their opinion; or their command—

it is difficult to determine wiiich of the two it is meant
for—that the inquiry should be immediately terminated,
although, as our readers may be aware, the whole of the
charges had not yet been entered into. But we will en-
deavour to connect the consideration of the letter and a
resume' of the principal features of the case in
a plain and intelligible form. In our paper of
yesterday we gave a summary of that case, from which
it will be interred that, assuming the general truth
of the charges against M'DOUGAL, the master of
the union-house, which we do hypothetically, and for
the mere purpose of the argument, the man must be
unfit for the office. But this complexion of character
is so far, however, from being very uncommon, among
the class of men who solicit and voluntarily assume em-
ployments of that invidious nature which are necessarily
connected with the restraint and management of
congregated masses of paupers or of prisoners, that
better-minded and comported men, in such positions, are
the exceptions rather than the rule. We have met,
here and there, with an intelligent, humane, and well-
conducted master of an union-house. Union-house
masters, in all respects the reverse, obtrude themselves
at ever 3, tarn,on, the reluctant notice of the most casual
observer. They are one of the staples which supply the
large assortment of grievances, always in course of ex-
hibition at our Policesoffices and Quarter sessions in
the country. Such a man it is, if he be unable to rebut
in a court of justice the accusations which he has been
unable to disprove before a court of inquiry, whom the
• act of the Poor-law Commissioners is dragging into an
unwholesome notoriety, a sort of momentary import-
ance, which his name never would have acquired,
had they not thought fit, in the first place, on his
behalf, in the course of the inquiry, to manifest,
through their assistant PARKER, that spirit of
partizanship which is always their besetting sin ;
and subsequently to cut that inquiry short, so far
as depended upon them to do so, on the score of the in-
convenient length to which the proceedings bad run.
If Mr. PARKER exhibited something like incompetency for
his position, Mr. Assistant-Secretary COODE S epistle to
Mr. WESTLAKE is an exhibition of delinquencies in
grammatical composition, and in logic, such as
would have " broken PRISCIAN'S head," and con-
fused the analogical acumen of BUTLER himself.
The matter of the letter is of far more consequence
than the manner in which the views of the Somerset
House Commissioners are announced in it. Yet it is so
rare to find a public functionary amenable to the charge
of not being able to write an official dispatch without
committing errors that are shocking to Englishmen, who
retain the prejudices of early education in favour of the
indefeasible rights of moods and tenses, that we cannot
but express our surprise at the " style" of Mr. CooDE.,
The very first sentence in this letter made us doubt
whether we were not once more engaged in the perusal
of one of those lucid reports of another Commission
(now happily defunct) which were wont to announee
the fate of Railway, No. 10, in Group X, or 110, in'
Group A. It states that the Commissioners " heve had
under consideration the length to wh,iei—ised inehtiiy, at
Andover
havel has s alreadybe e n rr that the suspense
peoxseteanded" riti4
and outlay, to which both pdalies interested in this in-
quiryWEsTLAKE ware (S 3 if M`DoUGAL and Mr.
erlllatiy Candidate; for the former's ap-
pointment) . " must be still further ittentred, if the
inclutf is continued in the same form. Mr. Coon 's
.Lotions of the distinction between, the Viitive and the
conditional, the subjunctive and the indica:lye, are the
most vague we have yet met with : and a confusion
proper to that character of vaguetess pervades
every passage in which it is necessary to employ the
" signs " of the one or the other. Thus—" It
is needless to say that if the master is convicted by
a jury . . . . the Commissioners would at once
dismiss him."- "If he is convicted on the second charge,
he becomes disqualified, Ste." But now to the matter of the
letter. ' On the night of Tuesday, the evidenee to the
charges of drunkenness, preferred against 1141Juni:tan,
was gone thrdugh. The nature of that evidence, it is
clear from one paragraph in this letter, had been com-
municated to the PoOr law Commissioners the same
night, or early on Wednesday morning. On Wedcesday
morning, at an early hour, Mr. WESTLAKE received
their letter, submitting to the rate-payers the " option"
of proseeuting .M‘Douoin. How happened they not
to offer this ".option" (trumpery and evasive offer as it
is) at an earlier stage of the proceedings, the protraction
of which their assistant secretary affects so much to
regret. From the very first they had abundance of
chars of cruelty to go. upon—afterwards of scard 11.. us
libcifiertate*with female paupers ; the charges of
drunkenness had already spread over two or three days,
and were only concluded on' Tuesday night list Is