The Trades' Union's Commission seem to have made a very
great -mistake, out of deference or subservience to one of their number, Mr. Roebuck. A Mr. Connolly, an artisan, who has watched the 'proceedings of the Commission on the part of certain trades, said recently, at a public meeting called in London to express indigna- tion at the Sheffield marders and outrages, after joining in the most vehement condemnation of those murders and outrages, " But what can you expect from a town that returns Mr. Roebuck to Parliament?" Mr. Roebuck read this in the paper, and at once -gave the Trades' Union's Commission the alternative between esxcludi g Mr. Connolly in future, and his own secession. The Commissioners, very wrongly we think, chose the former, and Mr. Connolly has been since excluded, to the great -disgust of the trades on behalf of which he acts. Mr. Roe- buck justified this in a very cavalier manner yesterday week in the House of Commons, saying that Mr. Connolly had in fact asserted that he, Mr. Roebuck, was a good representative of murder, perjury, and robbery. But Mr. Connolly did not say that. He said, "What can you expect of a town that returns Mr. Roebuck to Parliament ?" which very likely meant, "If the ten-pounders are so fond of screaming, rowdy, and sensational oratory, rarely grounded on sense, as to return Mr. Roebuck, what can you expect from the still more ignorant and uncultivated non-electors ? Will -not their rowdy sensationalism too often issue in absolute crime ?" That is at least as good a meaning to Mr. Connolly's certainly xather silly and very angry epigram as Mr. Roebuck gave it. 'But at all events the Commissioners had nothing to do with what 'happened at a London meeting of which they had no cognizance. It was an act of abject deference to Mr. Roebuck to defer to his 'cavalier threat. We do not suppose the Commission would have suffered by his absence.
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