The Sun.
London, England, 1842-05-04 00:00:00

people, and they attributed it to the misrepresentation
of the people in that House, otherwise they said it was
impossi) le that a civilized country like this would ever
have fallen into its present condition. There was one
other document to which he would call the attention of
the House. It was a proclamation of the Magistrates of
Burnley, dated the 26th April, 1842, which prohibited,
under the peralties assigned by the law, any
number of persons from collecting together to gather
alms in Burnley and its neighbourhood. There was an
instance of whole masses of the population assembling
for the purpose of begging. The unemployed and
starving operatives, against whom that proclamation
had been issued, published a document in reply to it,
asking what they were to do ?—that they could not live
without the necessaries of life, and that they should
have them from somewhere ; that they did not wish to
injure property, but that they could not lie down and
die. That document was signed by the starving and
unemployed operatives of Burnley. Was that, he
(Mr. Duncombe) wished to know, a state of things
in which to let England remain ? Was
possible that such a state of things could continue ?
He would aek the Right Hon. Baronet by what mean>
he proposed to cure and redress their grievances. He
surely did not mean that his Income-tax or his taritl
would cure those evils. The Income-tax would bring
the middle classes to the level of the people, and the ta-
riff would have the effect of throwing thousands into the
workhouse. Surely the Right Hon. Baronet did not in-
tend to put down Chartism by having recourse to a sus-
pension of the Habeas Corpus ? He trusted the Right
Hon. Baronet would proceed by reason and conciliation.
He was happy to be able to acknowledge that yester.
day the petition had been respectfully treated, although
there were paragraphs in it from which the majority of
the House no doubt dissented ; he did not say that ha
subscribed to them all himself. He was sorry, however,
to say that there was a portion of the Press which sup-
ported the party opposite trying to throw ridicule upon
the signatures attached to the petition. But while he
found thul: with one portion of the Press, he was glad to find
that by one of the papers of that day the petition was at
least treated with some degree of respect; or, at all events,
that portion of the prayer which asked that the peti-
tioners should be heard at the bar, was supported by the
journal to which he referred, he meant the Morning
Herald. (The Hon. Member then read a portion of tin
leading article of the Morning Herald of this morning
on the subject of the petition.) He denied that there
had been any " cheating" as stated in that journal, for
the purpose of swelling the signatures to the petition.
But he entirely agreed with that journal in thinking that
nothing should interfere with their hearing what those
petitioners had to say ; and, he trusted that if it were
possible to apply a remedy to their grievances, thr
House would be ready to adopt it. These petitioners
had conducted themselves yesterday in the mos
peaceable and orderly manner, and all their proceedings
had been marked by a respect for the law. They did
not talk about physical force, and there was
nothing about physical force mentioned in the petition.
Some people objected to this petition, because it advo
cated the Repeal of the Union. It did no such thing ;
it only stated what Lord Spencer said some time before,
viz., that if the vast majority of the people of Ireland
m ere in favour of that repeal, no doubt they would be
entitled to it ; but if the vast majority were not in favour
of it, he would resist it to the death. All the petition
stated was, that if the majority of the Irish people were
in favour of the repeal of the Legislative Union, the)
were entitled to have it. What had been the conduct of
the Chartist Convention sitting in London ? It had been
exemplary in the extreme ; and he would just read their
last address to the working classes, previous to the pre-
senting of this petition.—(Mr. Duncombe then proceeded
to read the address, which commenced " Fellow Coun.
trymen," recommending the people never to have re-
course to violence in advocating those principles which
were founded on reason alone. This address has already
appeared at length in the columns of The Sun.) if,
would now ask the House, at all events, to give thes)
petitioners a hearing. It would not occupy them long.
The number that should be heard, or of whom the)
might ask questions, should not exceed six in number.
This inquiry could not occupy more than two days ;
but if it did take ten days, those ten would surely be wel,
spent in the present state of public affairs and public feel-
ing. They might think this petition absurd—they migh'
think many of their schemes and propositions wild and
visionary ' - but let them not shut their door against then)
till they had heard what they had to say for themselves.
He did not know that he need occupy the time of the
House at any greater length, though he had more docu-
ments, which would prove that Radical or Chartist Re-
form was progressing rapidly throughout the country.
If they' doubted his statements as to the determination o;
the people to have the House differently constituted, let
them hear these people at the bar of the House.
they failed to convince them, it would be their own fault.
At all events, by hearing them they would identify them-
selves, as they ought to do, with the people, and obtain
what at present they stood greatly in need of, their con-
fidence, affection, and gratitude. The Hon. Member con-
cluded by moving that the persons who had signed the
National Petition presented yesterday, should be heard
by themselves, counsel, or agents, at the bar of the
House.

Mr. LEADER said he had very great pleasure in
seconding the motion. The whole matter might be com-
pressed into very few words. Vast numbers of the work-
ing classes were suffering, and asked to be allowed to
state their grievances at the bar of the House. The whole
question was, would they refuse to hear them? They
could not possibly doubt the sincerity of the petitioners.
There had, indeed, been an attempt made by one of the
papers, which supported the party opposite, to throw
discredit on yesterday's proceedings. It was stated
that they resembled a May-day show, and that there
were not more than 15,000 or 20,000 persons in the
procession. It was said, also, with respect to the petition,
that it could not be signed by three millions and a half
of persons. It was not pretended that the signatures
were all those of grown men; many were those of
women, and there were a great number by persons
who had not attained twenty-one years of age,
He asked any one who doubted the genuineness of the
signatures, whether it was not notorious that, at the
public meetings held in different parts of the country
during the last year, there had been any topics that
called up so much the cheers of the people, as anything
connected with the Charter ?—(Hear, hear.) He con-
fessed, for his own part, that he thought it would be a good
thing for all persons in the House, not in the habit of
going much to public meetings, to hear the petitioners
at the bar, in order that they might become acquainted
with the intelligence and ability of the men who were
excluded from th 4 franchise. He believed it would have
a good effect on Members.—(Hear, hear.) Many of
them must recollect the effect of Lord Brougham being
heard against the Orders in Council, and many must
recollect the effect produced by the address of the Hon.
Member for Bath in favour of the Canadians. Those
who now came before them were in a worse situation ;
they were Englishmen, who paid the taxes, but
were not allowed to have a voice in making the laws.
He recollected, some time since, being told by a late
Attorney-General (Lord Campbell), that Chartism was
entirely put down. It was true that the violence of
Chartism was done away. He had heard last night
physical force repudiated by some of the principal men
among the Chartists ; they appealled to the moral force
of the millions of enlightened men who demanded their
rights. He told the Attorney-General of that day, and
he would repeat it to the House, that the real principle
of Chartism never could be put down till they had re-
dressed the grievances of those who complained, or till
they had brought those who now had no voice in the re-
presentation within the pale of the Constitution. This
was his firm conviction. With respect to that petition
which they were called upon that night to consider, it
was merely for the petitioners to be allowed to be heard
at the bar of that House. No doubt that any Hon. Gen-
tleman, eitber on that side of the House or the other,
would be able to pull that petition to pieces, and to show
in it a number of unwise expressions. They might,
perhaps, ridicule it to that House, though not to the
country. Any clever writer iu the Quarterly Review,
or a reviewer in the Edinburgh, might take up
that petition, showing a great deal in it of a dangerous
tendency, calling on the House, therefore, to have no-
thing whatever to do with it. He thought this could be
done, and would be done. He had had instances that
evening. Before he came iuto the House he had been
talking to a friend on the subject, opposed to him in
politics, and he pointed out many, to him, objectionable
paragraphs.—(Hear, hear.) He should like to
know what document—at any rate those that
came before them—could not be pulled to pieces ?
No doubt this petition would he sneered at, but this
only made the stronger case for what they now asked
the House to grant, viz., a hearing to the petitioners
themselves, in order that they might explain what was
meant by the petition. Any Act of Parliament was dif-
ficult of explanation, frequently to those who formed it ;
how then could they expect this petition to be intelligible
to everybody ? This was a strong reason why they
should be heard, in order that they might know what
was demanded of the House. He believed their demands
might be enumerated in a few words ; they were com-
prised in what was called the Charter-,---viz., Universal
Suffrage' the Ballot, the Abolition of the Property Quali-
fication, for Paying Members, and for Electoral Districts.
It was unnecessary to enter into the details of the ques-
tion. It had been before the House of Commons, al-
though not that House of Commons, and many highly in-
telligent men had advocated the principles, and he never
heard the respectability of those men questioned. Yet
there was something about the name of the Charter
which seemed to terrify men. Mr. Grote had introduced
the question of the Ballot. Sir William Molesworth had
introduced the same question ; and many other Members
had brought forward the question of the extension of
the suffrage. Therefore, it would be improper to enter
into those questions now. There was another question
before them, and that question was, whether they should
hear the petitioners at the bar of the House, or refuse to
hear them ? If they wished to secure the affection and
the confidence of the great body of the people—and he
believed they did wish to do so—then they would not re-
fuse them their reasonable request to be heard in their
own case. It was unwise to govern a nation by fear,
rather than by affection, and feeling that to be the case,
he would appeal to their sympathies on behalf of their
fellow-subjects, and urge upon them the duty of allowing
them to be heard at the bar of their delegates.

The question having been put,
Dr. BOA EING rose to support the motion of his
Hon. Friend. More than three millions of their fellow-
subjects had asked to be heard at the bar of the House
of those who called themselves the representatives of the
people, but who, they felt, had by incr using oppression,
denied them the right of representation. These people
were in a state of the deepest distress, for which the re-
presentatives of the people had been unable to devise
any remedy. These persons were called on to contri-
bute to the expenses of the State ; they were called upon
to make greater sacrifices for that purpose, and to bear
a heavier proportion of those burdens than their more
opulent fellow-subjects—he could scarcely call them fel-
low-citizens, because all the power was concentrated in
the hands of a privileged few, who exercised their autho.