The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1854-05-23 00:00:00

THE LIVERPOOL STANDARD, AND GENERAL COMMERCIAL ADVERTISER.

tetrerpoot g‘ii)tanbarb+

TUESDAY MORNING, MAY 23, 1854,

AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE OLD SPIRIT.

THE spirit of Popery has aptly illustrated itself
this last week. The Lord Mayor of Dublin is a
Roman Catholic gentleman—a different thing from
a Papist. The latter, as an Ultramontanist, is
capable of any crime for the benefit of his Church.
The Roman Catholic gentleman has respect for the
laws of the country of which he is a native, and

he does not hold that his Sovereign is only at
Rome, and that all others are but Rome's viceroys.
The Lord Mayor of Dublin then, Sir Edward
M`Donnel, at the usual inauguration of the Irish
Chief Magistrate, entertained Her Majesty's Repre-
sentative in Ireland, his Grace the Archbishop of
Dublin, the principal officials and dignitaries of
his own Church—among others Dr. Cullen, the
priest who thinks Galileo a fool and Newton a
blasphemer. At this festival the health of Dr.
Cullen was complimentarily drunk ; but as the
Lord Mayor did not violate the law and describe.
Dr. Cullen as that which he is not—Archbishop of
Dublin—all the Ultra-Papist faction opened upon
him such a battery of abuse, that his surviving it
may be ranked among the miracles of the moderate
portion of the Church of Rome ! Sir Edward
would have been guilty of falsehood, had he
described Dr. Cullen as Archbishop of Dublin :
the doctor would have been an impostor, had he
replied to the toast ; and the law would certainly
have fallen upon him, had he had the impertinence
or the hardihood so to inflict outrage upon it.
The doctor's friends, however, have waxed wrath-
ful; and they have omitted no opportunity to
wreck their miserable vengeance on Sir Edward.
Had he been an infidel, guilty of the most odious
offences, they could not have assailed him with
more violence of dirty vocabulary.
Their great desire was to prevent his being
elected to act as chairman to the meeting held to
denounce Mr. Chambers's Convent Bill ; but in
this attempt they signally failed. Sir Edward was
voted to the chair ; and, by his occupation of it,
he conferred respectability on the meeting, secured
decency of conduct as far as his control would
reach, and prevented a prepared exhibition of dis-
loyalty, to the utter disgust of the party who had
hoped to fling vituperation at the throne without
impediment.
We are glad to perceive that the Romanists have
such men among them as Sir Edward. Be is not
the man who, like the notorious priest Cahill,
would gloat over the " glorious idea" of a
Protestant massacre ; or who would tell young
Romanist ladies that it were better to read obscene
books than a chapter from the English Bible !
Sir Edward is the " black swan" among the Irish
Papists ; and we hope he may not reap assassina-
tion because be has been upright and loyal.
As for the aggregate meeting held to denounce
the Nunnery Bill, it went off as was expected—
that is to say, from beginning to end, it was a
scene of brutalising blackguardism. Nothing was
done by the speakers save reviling each other, or
defying the " chair," or exciting the auditory—
who, nothing loth to be excited, upset the reporters'
tables, and behaved more like fiends than men
assembled to protest against an alleged wrong.
Is it not strange that the Irish Papists can never
thus meet without gaining for themselves the dis-
gust and abhorrence of all decent, respectable, and
loyal men ?—Church and State Gazette.

THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AND ITS

TYRANT MINORITY.

WE heard a great deal, lately, in connexion with
Lord JOHN RUSSELL'S abortive Reform Bill, of

the representation of minorities. On Thursday
last we had a specimen of the tyranny of minorities.
The British House of Commons has succumbed,
formally and confessedly, to the threats of an inso-
lent and tyrannical minority. That minority an-
nounced its intention to obstruct an inquiry, the
necessity of which a large majority of the House
had affirmed, by abusing the forms of the House
for the purpose of raising interminable objections
against each individual whose name should be
proposed on the committee for conducting the
inquiry. The result is that the inquiry itself is
abandoned. This determination will, the House
may rest assured, be received with the utmost
indignation out of doors. What use is a House of
Commons, if that assembly cannot vindicate the
dignity of its proceedings against the obstructive
tyranny of a faction P What use is there in re-
turning members to the legislature, if they have
not either the power, or the will, to assert their
right to legislate upon, or even to inquire into,
matters on which they themselves have declared
that inquiry preparatory to legislation is impera-
tively required ?
By the theory of our constitution, the House of
Commons is the guardian of our liberties. Let the
House of Commons beware how it betrays that
sacred trust. Let it beware how it suffers the
country to fall under the domination of a faction,
and that faction prompted by an alien power
irreconcilably hostile to our constitution and our
liberties. The House of Commons cannot, any more
than any other body or institution in the realm,
afford to incur public odium or public contempt.
We write in no inimical, we trust in no disrespect-
ful spirit, in warning the House of the danger
which it is incurring. The disclosures which have
taken place since the assembling of the present
Parliament, as to the means by which honourable
members are, in many instances, brought into the

House, have not tended to raise the House of
Commons in public estimation. The imputations
since thrown out, and still under investigation, as
to the barter of votes by members of the House
for government patronage, and the appropriation
of that patronage to their own private uses, involv-
ing, in some instances, direct charges of venality,
have not added to the respect of the public for the
House. The fact that a small but compact
minority has been enabled, at its pleasure, to oust
and to instal Ministries, without any attempt on
the part of the majority of the House to put down
so intolerable a usurpation, has still further da-
maged it in public esteem. And the avowal of

the fact that the House retires from a position
which it had emphatically taken up, under coercion
from a minority, cannot fail to damage it yet fur-
ther. The loss of public confidence and public
respect is an injury which all the powers vested in
the House by the constitution will be found insuf-
ficient to repair. That confidence and that respect
the House, like every other public body, must
earn, if it wishes to possess them.
The time is not far distant, when, in a neigh-
bouring country, a popular Assembly, by suffering
itself to be made the play of factions, incurred a
degree of public scorn which rendered it an easy
matter for a man of bold and determined mind to
overthrow the Assembly, to disperse its members,
and to grasp the reins of arbitrary power, in the
character of benefactor of his country. The liber-
ties of France have perished before our eyes in
consequence of the loss of respect which the
National Assembly had incurred. An exact pa-
rallel to the events to which we allude is not, of
course, to be dreaded under a settled Monarchy
like ours. But it does not follow that a similar
disaster may not, under anotb.er form, fall upon
this country through the fault of its national re.
presentatives. Au unscrupulous
Atinister, or an