The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1848-07-11 00:00:00

TO ADVERTISERS.

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to the important fact that the
LIVERPOOL STANDARD
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PUBLISHED WEEKLY ON TUESDAY,

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Ebt Kibtrpooi 'tanbarb.

TUESDAY MORNING, JULY 11, 1848.

The debate, on the motion of Mr. Hume, for the
adoption of a semi-Chartist system of Representa-
tion, has resulted as was anticipated by most accu-
rate observers of the tone of parliamentary feeling
upon the subject. In a House of 435 members,
only 84 could be found to vote for the motion ;
and, of these, a considerable portion were opposed
to important parts of the plan. Moreover, the
decision of the House was at last taken upon a
much modified system, as compared with that
originally proposed, its author having announced
his abandonment of what is usually understood as
the Electoral district system, and the substitution
for it of a modified system of his own, which was
to be made known to the House when the Bill
should have been laid upon the table. This parti-
cular hobby of the ultra Liberal party may be
regarded as having been got rid of for the present :
and we should scarcely have thought it worth
referring to except to notice some extraordinary
statements and admissions made during the
course of the debate.
The first which we shall notice is an assertion
made by Mr. Cobden, in reply to Mr. Serjeant
Talfourd and Lord John Russell, who had denied
the existence of any urgent desire amongst the
people, at the present moment, for extensive organic
changes. We give the denial in question as most
eloquently expressed by the learned Sergeant ?
" Before he sat down he wished to say a word or two
of the Parliamentary Reformers of past times. In those
days there were great and acknowledged abuses ; but was
the present a time when the sober and discreet portion of
the people of this country desired to see great changes
effected ? At this time did any reasonable man think of
unsettling the institutions of the country ? There might
be some anomalies in our representative system, but surely
a more fitting season than this might be discovered for
applying to them a remedy. The hcuse had been remin-
ded of the number of petitions presented upon this subject,
but those appeals to Parliament would never have been
heard of but in consequence of delay on the part of the
hon. member for Montrose, in consequence of a speech
that was supposed to have been made by the noble lord
at the head of the Government, and in consequence of a
resolution that had never been agreed to by the commit-
tee. Was it well to bring forwar such a motion as the
present, when the results of democracy on the continent
were so disastrous,—when it was felt that in this country
at least there were institutions time-honoured and invalu-
able,—when severe trials had proved that our constitution
was not a theory, but a practical reality, that we had
something worth living for and something worth dying
for,—when thousands of humble hearts were raised in
grateful acknowledgment of such blessings,—was that a
time for unsettling institutior.s which were likely to prove
a model to the nations of the continent, when they should
awake from the fearful dream that now overcame their
senses,—were Englishmen at a moment of such doubt
and danger to waste their time and energies in tampering
with institutions which had long been to them a source
of fame and protection ?"

We have no hesitation in affirming the perfect
correctness of this exposition of the state of feeling
which pervades three-fourths of the intelligent
middle classes of this country, and even of a ma-
jority of the industrious working classes. Mr.
Cobden, however, says,—" At least six-sevenths of
the male population of this United Kingdom are
earnestly praying for and claiming the rights which
you are denvina• them,"—such rights hping,
presume, those to be conferred by the bill sought
to be introduced. And he adds,— will go fur-
ther and tell the House that a very large proportion
of the middle class regret that so many belonging
to a humbler order of society than themselves
should have been included amongst the unrepre-
sented portion of the community. They express a
sincere desire that the franchise should be extended;
they look with great interest to the result of this
night's division ! ' Now, there is one very decisive
test of the truth of this statement of the alleged
earnest desire of six-sevenths of the people to pos-
sess the right of voting. Do six-sevenths of those
within whose reach it is take any trouble to obtain
it ? It is notorious that they do not. A very large
portion omit the payment of their rates within the
time limited, through sheer indifference to the pri-
vilege to be conferred as the reward of prompt
payment ; and we believe firmly that if a proper
census were taken of the houses throughout the
parliamentary boroughs of England, whose rents
are sufficient to confer the right of voting upon
their occupants, it would be found that three out
of five of such occupants do not estimate the
value of the franchise as worth the trifling sacrifice,
in many cases of mere trouble alone, of claiming
to be put into possession of it by being rated. Mr.
Cobden himself could tell a story of the thousands
of parties, who are rated and who have paid their
rates, who, when objected to by the paid officers
of the league and other societies, have been found
unwilling even to take the trouble of attending the
Revision Courts to substantiate their claims. With
respect to the " great interest" with which the pub-
lic have been looking to the result of Thursday
night's division, it is the mere prompting of his
own inordinate vanity—the vanity of a newly-
breeched boy, who fancies, as he puts his hands
consequentially into his first pockets, that all the
world is setting him down for a man. We give
him a week longer for the result of the debate to
circulate in ; and at the end of that period assure
him that three-fourths of the world will never have
taken the trouble to ascertain what it has been.
Another statement of Mr. Cobden is, that this
movement for the four points of the Charter has
been a spontaneous one by the people—not one
dictated from some central point. May W 3 ask
how long it was heard of before a certain impor-
tafit conclave of ultra liberal members of parlia-
ment was held not a hundred miles from the
Reform Club ? May we ask him where would
have been the petitions sent up in its favour, but
for the active working of the Anti-Corn Law
League machinery in Manchester and elsewhere ?
We can tell him what, at any rate, is the opinion
of the great portion of the people, as to the alleged
spontaneous character of the movement. They
regard it as partly got up, by the boasting professors
of free trade, to lead the public from a contemplation
of the failure of their pet specific, and partly as the
effort of certain burst bubbles, of whom Mr.
Cobden is one, to float again. If free trade in
corn had produced national prosperity, or Messrs.
Cobden, Kershaw and their tribe had not proved
themselves rank parliamentary failures—a collec-
tion of mere parrots, with but one constantly itera-
ted " pretty poll," as the united stock of their
accomplishments,—we should have heard very
little of Mr. Joseph Hume's motion, or of his ab-
breviated version,—his "edttio castrata,"—of the
six points of the Charter.
That there is amongst the reflecting community
—amongst those even most conservative of the
institutions and the good order of the country—a
feeling of growing dissatisfaction with the working
of our existing system of representation we shall
not attempt to deny. The Reform Bill has not
brought about perfection of, legislature ; and we
never expected it would do so. It has not satis-
fied even its framers—the advocates of "the Bill,
the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill ; " for we
have just heard the principle of its finality aban-
doned by Lord John Russell himself. But its
practical errors are not on the side of its want of
an ample popular basis; and are capable of being
repaired without resort being had to, what our
political philosophers are pleased to term "enlarged
and comprehensive measures " of Reform. Cor-
rupt constituencies may be purged of their im-
purities, or the franchises, which they abuse, may
be transferred to othcp. A few of thou pocket

boroughs, which the framers of the Bill retained
for Whig uses, may be swept into a new schedule
A, as from time to time they exhibit their delin-
quency. But the great mass of the public are not
prepared to pull down the present structure, in
order to found a more democratic structure in its
stead, convinced as they are that, whilst from its
existing democratic elements have been produced
that influx of wordy froth ane vapouring,—that con-
stant flood of talk and declamation, which impedes
all practical legislation, and mocksat the most press-
ing demands and wants of the people—these elements
have brought before the world no eminent legisla-
tive talent, no great lights in the firmament, no
statesmen who, compared with the giants, pro-
duced under the old and vilified representative
system of England,—the Pitts, the Foxes, and the
Burkes of the last generation,—are not as utterly
ridiculous as would be any of the. gutters from
Rivington Pike compared with the Mersey or the
mighty Missisippi. It has foisted upon us Cob-
dens, Thompsons, and Kershaws by the score; but
it has not even produced us any thing so large as
Lord John Russell himself.