The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1844-06-04 00:00:00

MR. FERRAND AND SIR JAMES GRAHAM
OR, " THE GREAT MOTT CASE."

We suspected, at the time when the Home Secretary
brought the shield of a parliamentary majority to defend
his character and conduct against the charges directed
against him by the chivalrous member for Knaresbrongli,
and the latter refused to plead before the tribunal offered
him, that the world at large would be allowed to know
the actual facts upon which the charge against Sir James
was based ; and in this expectation we have not been dis-
appointed. Repudiating the arena of the House of Com-
mons as the fit and constitutional place for defending
language used out of it, Mr. Ferrand has boldly appealed
to the public, in a pamphlet entitled " • The Great Mott
Question,' or the Mystery Unveiled," which, if it do not
exonerate that gentleman from the imputations of slander
and calumny attempted to be thrown upon him by the
House of Commons,—deciding upon his conduct without
hearing evidence in its justification,—would, in our eyes,
go very far to prove that the world is tired of the truth,
and wiling to be slavishly dragooned into the recognition
of falsehood and injustice at the dictation of a cabinet
minister—that, in fact, we are fallen, as Englishmen, into
the condition of a people willing to submit, not our per-
sons only, but our minds as well, to a grinding despotism.
We will briefly recal to our readers a few of the facts
of the case between Mi. Ferrand and Sir James Graham,
and proceed to detail the evidence offered by the former
in the pamphlet before us.
Ina speech delivered by Mr. Ferrand, at a meeting
held in Leeds. that gentleman imputed to the Home Se-
cretary that he had procured a report to be made which
was false, " for the purpose of crushing him" ; and that
Mr. Mott, who made that report, was subsequently dis-
missed, in order to prevent its truth or falsehood being
accurately investigated and exposed. Such a charge, it
appeared to the meddling member for Bath, was so da-
maging to the character of a cabinet minister, that it
ought to be met and confuted ; and he accordingly thought
proper to bring it before the House of Commons. Upon
this Sir James Graham rose in his place—said something
of his disinclination to notice such charges, which, how-
ever, he also took the opportunity of repudiating—de-
clared that be knew nothing of Mr. Mott or his report,
except that he had found it in his office, of course casu-
ally, and had used it in debate, of course most innocently,
and without the slightest notion of its being unfair or
unfounded, or got up for a special object. How the
House of Commons afterwards behaved towards Mr.
Ferrand, the public will remember. He was virtually
denied the opportunity of replying to Sir James Graham's
statements, and very properly walked out of a house, by
whose members he was insulted, whilst the minister rode
off in the impunity which was thus temporarily afforded
him. The matter, however, was not allowed to remain
here. Sir James Graham was to be formally white-
washed, and Mr. Ferrand asked to admit the falsehood
or error of his charge. Mr. Ferrand refused, however,
to plead ; and the house, without hearing evidence, be-
yond the declaration of the minister himself, decided that
be had been guilty of using language and making charges
which were slanderous and untrue. Here the matter
rested until the publication of the pamphlet before us.
Let us see, then, what is the vindication—or, rather, what
is the corroboration of those charges—which Mr. Ferrand
might have offered had he recognised the House of Com-
mons as the proper tribunal before which to make them.
On the 25th August, 1841, during the debate on the
address, Dr. Bowring narrated three cases of distress,
suffering and death, which had occurred in Bolton, authen-
ticated to him by the evidence of the guardians and ma-
gistrates, and which told severely against the system of the
Somerset-house Commissioners. An immediate inquiry
into the circumstances was promised by Sir Robert Peel ;
and Sir James Graham, as home secretary, subsequently
dispatched Mr. Mott, an assistant poor-law eommissioner,
for the purpose of instituting such enquiry. That gen-
tleman arrived at Bolton on the 10th of September—
glossed over the matter by shutting out the evidence upon
which the original statement was founded, and culling
fresh evidence suited for his own purpose—and finally de-
spatched his report to the house, with which Sir James
Graham well nigh extinguished the learned doctor. Un-
fortunately, however, for Sir James and his special com-
missioner and concocter of reports. Mr. Mott's statemenfs
got wind, and created a perfect storm amongst the doc-
tor's constituents in Bolton ; and, as the result, a meeting
was held and evidence taken of the correctness of his
original version of the matter, which had been denied by
Mr. Mott. That evidence, verified on oath before several
justices of the peace, was forwatded to Sir James Graham,
and a motion made for its being printed and circulated
through the usual channels. Acdompanying this evidence
was a declaration signed by thirteen respectable inhabi-
tants of Bolton, expressing their surprise that a public
functionary, holding the high and responsible office of
assistant poor-law commissioner, should " have ventured,
without personal investigation of his own, to accuse" a
committee appointed to enquire into the distress of the
town "of partizanship and misrepresentation, leaving the
impression that they had invented or exaggerated tales of
distress in order to serve a political and party object,"—
and stating further that they " denied the accusation, and
complained of the levity and cdrelessness in which it had
been made." This was sufficient to stagger an ordinary
man, or minister, in any amount of faith which he might
have reposed in his pet commissioner, especially when at
the head of the signatures to the document was the name
of so respectable a gentleman as Mr. Edward Ashworth,
of Turton—a liberal and pro-poor law man of the first
water. But this was not all; for we find that the remon-
strance concluded in these words--;

" We have thought it desirable to notice principally
those parts of Mr. Mott's report, with which we are indi-
vidually concerned, but we cannot refrain from protesting
against the manner in which Mr. Mott has conducted this
inquiry, the animus which pervades his report through-
out, and the exceedingly unsatisfactory character of the
whole investigation."
More than a month having elapsed without any notice
of this communication, a letter was addressed to Sir
James Graham by Mr. Bolling, the conservative member
for Bolton (radical and conservative thus equally protest-
ing against the correctness of Sir James Graham's pro-
tegee), in which Mr. Mott was impeached of having in
his report dealt in " unfounded statements and slanderous
insinuations," and appealing to him, on the score of jus-
tice, for an investigation into the statements contained in
the report in question. He appealed, however, in vain.
Sir James Graham persisted in screening his special com-
missioner, and thus established between the Home Se-
cretary and that worthy functionary a kind of partnership
account. And there, notwithstanding a subsequent at-
tempt to bring Sir James to confess the wrong done, the
matter remained. Dr. Bowring was bamboozled, and,
with all the evidences of the truth of his controverted
statement in his pocket, quietly swallowed his leek !
What, then, was the position in which Mr. Mott was
left ? He was still a shot that might be fired at any hon.
member who might happen to be troublesome to the Ne-
therby Baronet; and Mr. Ferrand was the unfortunate
party destined to receive the discharge. The Keighley
Union had been formed ; and Mr. Ferrand, an ex-officio
member of the Board, was unruly in parliament, and put
forth there some di,agreeahle statements. Down came
our Special-commissioner Mott to Keighley, and in no
very good humour ; for it comes out in the evidence of
Mr. Hulbert, vice-chairman of the board, before the
select committee on the Keighley Union, that " when he
came into the room (of the board of guardians) he ap-
peared, from the first words he uttered, to be in a des-
perate bad temper, before he saw anything." Upon what
he saw, however, during that visit, Mr. Mott founded a
report, which got into Sir James Graham's red box in
some mysterious way, to be ready to extinguish Mr.
Ferrand on the first convenient opportunity, as a
similar report had extinguished the poor polyglot doctor.
That opportunity arrived on the 17th of June, 1842,
when Mr. Ferrand having addressed the house, Sir
James Graham immediately rose to reply, and produced
Mr. Mott's red-hot shot, as he had formerly produced
the Bolton document for the edification of the learned
member for that city of loom shops. By this report the
Keighley Union was charged with sundry acts of mis-
conduct and maladminstration. Mr. Ferrand with " job-
bing as a guardian, by giving encouragement to lawyers to
create legal disputes, and sanctioning such proceedings in
his capacity as a magistrate." To clench the matter Sir
James declared that he was quoting from a document pre-
pared by one of a class of men " whose reports, he for
one, speaking from experience," (!) was ever anxious to
rely upon with confidence; and, on a subsequent oc-
casion, when driven to the wall by the pertinacity and
downright English courage of Mr. Ferrand, he declared
solemnly of Mr. Mott, " I am not aware of any circum-
stance which ought to dispose me to think any statement
made by him to be untrue." And this, as Mr. Ferrand
justly says, " after the Bolton affair''!
We need go no further into the subject ; but this we
must do. Let our readers before they again listen with
any credence to the radical villifiers of "the notorious Fer-
rand," raad this pamphlet. We should not, and few men
would like to be placed in the same position in which it
leaves her Majesty's Home Secretary, Sir James Graham,

MANCHESTER AND THE MOON IN ECLIPSE

TO GETHE R.

We have been given to understand that the people of
Manchester were an exclusively enlightened race, and
could see further through a millstone or into earth or sky
than their neighbours. The following parapraph, how-
ever, which we copy from the Manchester Guardian,
leads us to suspect, either that the pretensions of the
Manchester men are somewhat stretched or that during
the past week they have had their usually keen percep-
tions somewhat mystified. We quote our contemporary:—
" LUNAR' ECLIPSE.—The eclipse of the moon took
place last evening under the most favourable circum-
stances for those who knew where to look for it, the sky
being without a cloud ; but owing to the low elevation at
which the moon was during the period of its greatest ob-
scuration, comparatively few persons in Manchester would
observe it. The' darkness produced by the total eclipse
of the heavenly body was not so great as many expected,
the twilight being as powerful at half-past ten as that pro-
duced by the moon in her first quarter."
One would imagine that most people know where to look
for a full moon. But it is never too late to learn. Here
are clever people in Manchester it seems who do not
know I Then, as to the difficulty of observing the
eclipse, we cannot tell hovi that can have arisen, unless
the moon was " for that night only," as the players say,'
lower in the heavens in' Manchester than elsewhere.
Here it was certainly seen by any one who had any cu-
riosity for a look.

ROBBERY AT THE RAILWAY STATioN.--About nine
o'clock, on Saturday evening last, Mr. F. Thompson, a
commercial traveller from London, at present lodging at
he
t
No:
railway station, Lime-street, of a brown paper parcel con-
4, Clayton-square, had his pocket picke at
taining a t:5 Bank of England note, thirty or thirty-five
sovereigns and half sovereigns, and one of Pickford's
parcel tickets. The thieves have hitherto eluded the vi-
gilance of the police.