Mr. Fawcett has sent to the Liberal papers a very
just and temperate defence of Mr. Odger, the working-class candidate for Chelsea, against an attack in the Pall Mall of yesterday week, so furious, and,—what is exceedingly rare in the Pall Mall, indeed we could not quote another instance,—so ungentlemanly, that we incline to believe that it must have slipped in by mistake. If so, —or indeed in any case,—it would have been but fair to admit Mr. Fawcett's very moderate protest. No paper has usually been more superior to the small affectations of journalism than the Pall Mall ; and we know no affectation of journalism so senseless as that affectation of moral infallibility which makes it a point of policy to refuse insertion to all criticism, however temperate, on the morality or fairness of its management. The Pall Mall did not merely attack Mr. Odger for his participation in the Hyde Park disturbances,—that would have been perfectly fair. It com- mented on the tendency of his friends to pronounce his name "'lodger," asked what evil Chelsea had ever done that it should be selected by him as the unfortunate object of his choice, and spoke of his claim as consisting, by his own confession, in the fact "that as he has never had any education, he knows the value of it, and that his father was a miner, and his mother mad." The last gross personality would have been justly selected by the Pall Mall for the severest lashing, had any vulgar people launched it at the head of a middle-class candidate, and it is only the more ungenerous when cast by such a paper as the Pall Mall at the head of a man of lower social rank. Mr. Fawcett very truly says that Mr. Odger is one of the ablest, most temperate, most upright, and, though only self-educated, most carefully self-educated, of the working class; and, for our own part, we believe that he would be a far more valuable member of the House of Commons than either of his Liberal rivals. That he sanctioned violent and mischievous things in the heat of the agitation in 1866 is very true. Mr. Bright in old times has said and sanctioned many things quite as violent and mischievous, when you consider his political standing, as Mr. Odger when you consider his ; and yet Mr. Bright is one of the most powerful, weighty, and trusted members of the Liberal party. The Pall Males very unfair blow will probably do Mr. Odger only good. But we heartily wish it had come from any other quarter.
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