The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1844-12-17 00:00:00

place in Mr. Cobden's service ?" Exquisite simpli-
city ! Mr. Cobden has a cottage to let himself—a 1
supernumerary cottage prOvided for the purpose.
" He may sell his cottage, however." Yes, poor fel-
low, he may do that—at just the price of a thing
which Mr. Cobden has made a superfluity where it
stands, or may choose to promulgate his ban against!
A nice specimen this of " liberal" purity ; but a
better is the following proposition :
" Then there are numbers of young men employed in
this town as clerks, &c., in counting-houses, who live in
lodgings. I have heard many complain that lodgers can-
not qualify ; but some of these young men might club
together and buy a house, and, by letting one of their
number have the key of it, they will confer a vote upon
him. Any clerk in a warehouse or office may by this
means put himself on a perfect level, as far as time
electoral franchise is concerned, with Mr. Scarisbrick, of
Scarisbrick."
Of course the young man who has " the key" of a
house which, confessedly, is not his own, will have
no difficulty in swearing to his ownership before the
revising barrister ! Such is the League estimate of
the morality of its dupes. And yet Mr. Thos. Black-
burne " did not think that this was an immoral
mode of procedure" ! Alas, how faction blunts the
perceptions and obliterates the high principles of
even honest and respectable men !
Whatever may be their glaring dishonesty, and
however quixotic some people may think these pr -
jects, we must contend that they cannot with safety
be regarded with passive contempt by the Conser-
vative public. The unscrupulous and unprincipled
efforts threatened by the League must be met by
Conservative zeal and activity. If our opponents
mine, we must countermine, unless we wish to see
the representation of this important district surren-
dered into the hands of an anti-national and reck-
less faction, and the House of Commons itself be-
come an enslaved tool of an unconstitutional and
dangerous body of conspirators against the laws and
the liberties of the people.

It is with some reluctance that we turn to an ex-
amination of the lengthy epistle which Mr. Miller,
the late Head Constable, addressed last week to his
Worship the Mayor. We have certainly no wish
to inflict an injury upon Mr. Miller. We regret
much the unfortunate position in which. he is placed ;
but we regret still more to remark in his conduct,
since he has occupied that position, a perverse ob-
stinacy of disposition, and a love of public contro-
versy, which, we fear, will ultimately provoke from
the Watch Committee, in pure self-defence, retorts,
the necessity of which they would willingly be
spared. Mr. Miller was "let down" very easily by
the Committee; and, in the matter of his salary,
very liberally dealt with. He was free to seek other
employment ; the only stigma against him (if that
could be called a stigma,) being an error, on his
own part, of the extent of the discretionary control
vested in him by his office. By the charitable for-
bearance exercised towards him by the Committee,
that body voluntarily placed themselves, for his bene-
fit, in a position which might be misunderstood, to
their own injury. He drove them at length to the
task of setting themselves right with the public, which
they endeavoured to do by their recent report, in
which much, which would have told materially
against him, was still forbearingly kept back. His
recent letter, however, compels ourselves, as jour-
nalists, for the reputation of an important branch
of our local government, to be more explicit; and
it the result is not attended with pleasant conse-
quences to himself, he has at least no individual but
himself to blame.

We pass over the introductory remarks of Mr.
Miller, and proceed to quote the third paragraph, in
which he commences his vindication :
" But now for the charges, such as they are. In the
first place, the report of the Watch Committee (accord-
ing to the abstract in the newspapers, whence alone 1
derive my knowledge) states " that during the tire Mr.
Miller acted as Head Constable, the printed rules and
regulations of the police force had not been carried out."
In answer to this, I say, that I exercised what I con-
ceived to be a sound discretion in carrying out those rules
and regulations. Having, as I thought, the management
of the force, I earnestly thought to bring it into the high-
est possible state of efficiency, and in so doing I necessa-
rily placed some reliance on an rx,Jerience of no limited
character, gained in the discharge of the duties of a
similar situation."

Now, if anything could prove decisively the truth
of the charge in the Committee's report, this para-
graph proves it. We ask our readers to mark the
passages which we have given in italics. The Com-
mittee complain that Mr. Miller has not carried out
" the printed rules. and regulations of the police
force." He replies, "he exercised what he con-
ceived a sound discretion" in carrying them out !
In other words, he set his own discretion above the
Watch Committee's rules and regulations. He
constituted himself both Watch Committee and
Head Constable ! He relied "on an experience of
no limited character" in his own person ; he gave
little, if any, deference to the experience of the
Committee.

We might perhaps have been better disposed to
pardon this assumption and disobedience of in-
structions, could we discover it to be the first
time, or this the first place, in which it has been
displayed. But such is not at all the case. We
have before us a report, dated last year, by a Com-
mittee in Glasgow, where Mr. Miller recently held
the office of Head Constable, in which the same as-
sumption of superior authority is laid to his charge.
That gentleman had been directed to make returns
to the Commissioners " on the state of crime in
Glasgow for the year ending 31st December, 1842."
The report in question was further directed to be
made " under the superintendence of the Cimmittee
on criminal affairs." With respect, however, to
the litter direction the report states, that " the Su-
perintendent did not deem it necessary to consult this
Committee on the subject !" Quite in keeping this
with his preference here of his own "sound discre-
tion," as superior to the,authority of the " rules and
regulations of the police force" given him to follow !
But Mr. Miller's assumption did not stop here.
He presented his report to the General Board for
their consideration ; but that Board, in the words
of the report before us, " were surprised to find on
the following morning, and before they had been
allowed time or opportunity to look at the return,
it appeared at length in the Glasgow Herald, without
the order or sanction of the Board or its Committee."
Surely this bears out abundantly the truth of the
impression which our Watch Committee, and no
small portion of the public, have come to with re-
spect to Mr. Miller's vanity and self-reliance. In
Glasgow he set his own " discretion" above the
orders of his superiors : here he has pursued pre-
cisely the same course.
But to come to the next paragraph, which is as
follows :

" The second charge is, ' That Mr. Miller had not
made himself acquainted with the duties of his office.'
What is meant by the duties cf my office ? If the Watch
Committee mean to affirm that I am ignorant of the duties
of a Head Constable, / would atk how it is that I held the
office in Glasgow for many years, and discharged its du-
ties in such a manner as to gain the approbation both of
my employers and the public ? If they mean to say that
I did not turn my attention to the state of things existing
in this town, with a view of completely mastering them,
and bringing to bear on them the whole amount of my ex-
perience and knowledge, I must say that my ' Report on
the present system of police management, and proposed
alterations therein,' furnishes an answer to that charge.
In that report I went most minutely into the whole sys-
tem of ditty in Liverpool—a thing which it would have
been impossible for me to have done if I had not made
myself acquainted with it—showing where I conceived it
to be defective or bad, and proposing such alterations as
I thought would not only add to the efficiency, but pro-
mote the personal comfort, of the force. Some of my
suggestions, I am sure, Mr. \Vhitty would have himself
proposed, had he continued at.the head of the force, or
at all events, he would have approved of them. Up to
this moment, however, the committee have not taken my
report into consideration, showing that with them an
unreflecting-adherence to old rules, and a mechanically
exact execution of them, constitute a higher claim to ap-
probation than a zealous attempt to obtain greater
efficiency by modification or substitution."
Perhaps the quotations which we have given
above, from a report of a committee of the Glasgow
Town Council, will be thought sufficient to prove
that the " approbation," which Mr. Miller was in
the habit of receiving from his superiors, has not
been of the most unqualified nature. We shall re-
gret to have to produce further evidence of his
standing with the members of that town council.
The reference, however, to his vaunted " Report on
the present system of police management, and pro-
posed alterations therein," as conclusive of his
knowledge of " the whole system of duty in Liver-
pool," is still more unfortunate, the report in ques-
tion being, we are credibly informed, merely the sub-
stance of suggestions made to him, by his instruc-
tions, by the superintendents of the force, and put
into the shape of a report by a certain subordinate
member of the force more capable than himself of
drawing up such documents ! Further, we are as-
sured that, so far from Mr. Miller being perfectly
conversant with g‘ the whole system of duty in Li-
verpool," he scarcely knew, without reference, in
what police section any one street in Liverpool was
situated; and repeated difficulties, in carrying out