The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1833-02-26 00:00:00

THE CORPORATION " REFORM."

His Majesty's ministers having referred the revision
of all the municipal corporations in this country to a
select committee of the House of4Commons, the composi-
tion of which presents a satisfactory guarantee that,
whatever may be its faults or deficiencies, undue tender-
ness to any thing that exists will not be of the number,
it can excite no surprise that the movement party should
strive by every artifice to increase the power and enlarge
the jurisdiction of this committee, and that attempts
should be made subject to its jealous and unfriendly re-
view, in addition to the municipal corporations, every
trading and every charitable corporation in the kingdom.
If any good is to be expected from the labours of the select.
committee, there is no mode in which this good can be
frustrated so effectually as by charging the committee
with an excessive multiplicity and complication of duties.
Can those who affect to believe that every municipal cor-
poration is a sink of iniquity and abuse, deny, without
the grossest inconsistency, that municipal corporations
alone will afford the committee as much work as it will be
able to get through in any reasonable time ? There is
much reason also to apprehend upon general principles,
not to insist upon the more direct proofs afforded in the
case of the
.Merchant Tailors' Coinpany of the city of
London, whose petition occupied so large a share of the
attention of the House of Commons last week, that
to appoint a committee with inquisitorial powers into the
affairs of charitable and trading corporations would be,
in effect, to open a receiving-house for slander. Many
of thoSe corp Orations have the distribution of large funds,
and among their members whom the present charters
keep out of office there are occasionally to be found needy
and disreputable individuals to whom a share in the
management of such funds would be exceedingly conve-
nient. With such provocatives to envy and discontent
it would be absurd to doubt that the existence of a com-
mittee of the House of Commons empowered to receive
complaints would give rise to the most desperate and
reckless calumnies; that so favourable an occasion of
promulgating libels with impunity would be seized with
eager and malevolent avidity.
If any further investigation respecting the constitution
or conduct of such corporations should be thought neces-
sary, the only mode in which it can be conducted without
producing manifest injustice and shocking immorality is
by a commission, which can pursue its inquiries free from
the liability, inseparable from a parliamentary committee,
of becoming during their progress an engine for the se-
cure propagation of slander. It is proper to observe
that the conduct of all the corporations of this class
throughout the kingdom, with respect to the management
of their charity funds, has recently undergone the scru-
tiny of commissioners appointed for the purpose. Most
of them, we believe, have passed this ordeal with honour,
and we know that the particular corporation which has
now been made the subject of calumnious attack received
from those commissioners a tribute of unqualified appro-
bation.-L-Morning Post.