NEWS OF THE WEEK.
Tin Report of Mr. Itcomucit's Committee, made public on Satur- day, has fructified in the resolutions which he moved in the House of Commons on Thursday. Quidnuncs and marvel-mongers ex- press disappointment at the issue of the affair : startled by his sudden disclosures of a practice hitherto veiled with a general for- bearance, they demanded to be as much startled by the upshot ; forgetting that they expect the one but did not expect the other. The amount of the surprise is a trifle; the question is, what is the value of that which has been done ? The Report has been called "humble," and much pains have been spent on showing that it tells nothing new. It was not desired on the score of amusement or excitement : it is no reproach to Mr. ROEBUCK that he has not sought to magnify or invent, and that his Report is the opposite of arrogant or abusive. It is a plain statement of mere facts, and of a class of facts which were well enough known to the initiated; but It constitutes a formal recognition by the Legislature of an offence hitherto unrecognized, and an authentic analysis of matters which have hitherto been suffered to remain in obscurity. The House of Commons has been the instrument for laying bare this particular process by which the constitution of the House is vitiated; and
that is—or it ought to be—some way towards a remedy. The dis-
closures are, however, not altogether without interest. We knew, for instance, that bribery prevailed; we knew that sometimes pro- vision was made for it ; but we have never before seen that to whole classes of political traders it is a matter of course—a distinct department of business—arranged with as much explicitness as the terms of a marriage-settlement. Candidates usually knew nothing of all these matters; but the Members for Reading are candid enough to allow that the thousands which they furnished could not be spent in a legitimate manner. But gentlemen of property and of leisure desire to be elected; the readiest way is to bribe the electors ; and those two necessities existing, a class of traders have arisen to provide for the demand—a set of panders, election-agents, who dis- creetly debauch the voters without rudely letting their customers, the candidates, know any thing about it. A candidate goes to an agent to get elected, just as a man sends for a hair-cutter to have his hair cut. The opprobrium of this new art is the Election Committee ; but the professors nave made some progress in obviating that evil by means of the " corrupt compromise." Does the bribery manceuvre appear likely to be frustrated by disclosure—is defeat anticipated ? compromise saves the trouble and money of all parties, and keeps open the market for the agents. Such is the system in which the Members 'subjected to Mr. ROEBUCK'S inquiry were de- tected; numbers of their fellows, being more lucky, escape detec- tion. No party can repudiate the reproach—Tory or Liberal, novice or veteran : the inexperienced Captain PLurstneE finds himself disposed of by compromise when he thought himself imma- culate; and the old Roman virtue of Sir Joins Cast HOBHOUSE, the leaser glory of Westminster—the Cabinet Minister—did not save him from being steeped to the lips in the corruption of one of the corruptest of constituencies : while the corruptionists used the private grounds of the Premier, Lord MELBOURNE, for the vulgarest of tricks, the " cooping" of voters, in a manner which showed that they counted largely on his toleration—and it does not appear that they were indicted for trespass.
The Committee appointed at the instance of Mr. ROEBUCK, under the auspices of the Premier, merely report these things. Mr. ROEBUCK goes further, and proposes three resolutions,—declaring that such arrangements cannot for the future pass unpunished ;
that they violate the franchises of the People and the privileges of the House ; and that the issue of writs for the places implicated must be suspended until measures be devised to protect the purity of elections. Of these resolutions, two are declaratory, the third is enacting. To the declaratory portion it was objected, that the Committee had been appointed with a special understanding that it was to search into evils for the sake of finding a cure, not to cri-
minate ; whereas the declaration that those particular arrange- ments were breaches of privilege, the highest offen'ce against the House were mischievously_idle unless followed up by chastise- ment—itself a direct breach of the faith on which the witnesses consented, in very many instances, to criminate themselves : and moreover, it would be unjust to punish, or even declare punish- able, those particular individuals who happened to be selected from the mass of delinquents in and out of the House. There is some force in these objections; for Honourable House is scarcely in a condition to condemn with decency. The objections to the enacting resolution are two. It imposes an unequal punishment, because, while some of the seats are vacant, others are not, and by possibility may not be for six years to come : those constituencies, therefore, for which the seats are vacant would be punished by priva- . tion of their " representation," while the others, whose representatives find it convenient to sit still, remain upon an equality with the most innocent of electoral bodies. It might be said that this were inflicting punishment by lot, if punishment were proposed : but it was not. The declared purpose of the resolutions was, not to in- flict penalties for the past, but to secure that the next elections oc- cur when they might, in all the places enumerated, should pa;tici- pate in the benefit of the expected measures to prevent bribery. It was proposed not to antedate the expected measure, but to make these events wait for it. Still, the constituencies might say, why force that virtue on us in particular ? why make time stand still for us, until the millennium under Lord Joni( RussELL's or some- body else's bill, when you allow other bribing and compromising constituencies—such as Ipswich—to carry on their trade ? • Again, it is said that the House cannot constitutionally withhold the writ until the fulfilment of indefinite conditions. It can suspend the writ in a single case, during its pleasure; and of course the occurrence of twelve cases, most of them contingent and remote, does not deprive it of the privilege in each individual instance : but whereas the House will probably be found hitherto to have suspended the writ till a certain day, or till the performance of an act depending on its own will, it was now proposed to suspend it until the accom- plishment of something in which the two other Estates must participate. It has not been shown that there is any " constitu- tional " warrant for so doing : so the technical objection is good. But after all, what is the value of the "representation" so jealously defended ? Would the nation duffer a jot though the whole six boroughs had no Members for the next six years ? what benefit will even Nottingham derive from the success of a manceuvre which places Mr. WALTER in the House instead of Sir GEORGE LARPENT ; or what benefit will either Falmouth or the country derive from the substitution of some gentleman unknown for Captain PLUMRIDGE ? The chief benefit of these small shiftings accrues to the election-agents —they had something at stake in the " constitutional " question.
Mr. ROEBUCK'S resolutions—disavowed by his own Committee, and, undoubtedly, ill-framed for passing—were met by the Solicitor- General with "the previous question" ; and in that, the most unsubstantial nullity, the affair ended.
. In few instances have the House of Commons seemed more earnest in their indignant resolves against corruption, than in the way they welcomed Lord Jonx RussELL's bill "for the better Dis- covery of Bribery in the Election of Members of Parliament "—to which generic title the specific distinction of "No. 2" has been appended, at once evincing activity in the pursuit of a desired object, fertility in resources, and accuracy in classification. Lord Joni; himself seemed inspired with the sudden conviction that really something must be done ; and the House party forgotten, seemed to agree with him. After many days his bill appeared : but it was consigned, with few words, to the hands of a Select Committee. It reappears again on Wednesday last, in a thitr House, at the fag-end of the session ; and remarkable is its treat- ment. The provisions for the " discovery" of bribery are closely scrutinized to guard against too much discovery : the most pains- taking is bestowed on paring down one too-searching provision, and contriving that attornies shall not discover bribery; the grand invention of the bill, the Joint Commission of Peers and Com- mons appointed by the Crown to investigate bribery with a view to disfranchise constituencies, is thrown out ; and the chef-d'eeuvre of the Opposition leader resolves itself ipto an improvement of some details in the existing law—into a sort of declaratory bill, set- tling a mode of regularly inquiring into compromises. The cincluct of the persons who abandoned the bill to this Pate amounts to an act of
gross disrespect to the public : Lord Jonx RUSSELL, its framer, had retired with his bride to the Scottish hills; Sir THOMAS WILDE, the Whig Solicitor-General, was off somewhere; Mr. CHARLES WOOD.
the Chairman of the Select Committee on the bill, was away : irk fact, at one time, only a single Committee-man was in the House, and he, who was left to explain the views of the Committee, was opposed to them. The bill is intrusted to the special charge of Mr. CHARLES BuLLEa ; who professes no more than a ‘‘ general ' interest in it, and unacquaintance with certain details ; who, when one of its main provisions is attacked, remarks that be supposes he must say something, though 4he has little to say; and who thanks Sir ROBERT PEEL for advice and countenance in dismembering the bill. So earnest was Lord Joy:ix RUSSELL, the leader of Reformers, for this reform that he left his measure to such fate, with so fully- instructed- a substitute !
While the Representatives of the People are displaying this care- lessness of the People's representation, they exhibit no less indiffer- ence to the direct invasion of popular immunities. Freedom of opinion is a boast in this country; and one mode of expressing opinion, much prized, cumbersome and imperfect as it is, is speech at public meetings. Mr. THOMAS DUNCOMBE brought before the House the case of a Chartist lecturer at Birmingham, who had been violently seized in the utterance of his peculiar doctrines, imprisoned, convicted, and fined. Ministers imply that the Policeman who seized him was not to be defended, only the Jury's verdict barred any direct censure of the meddlesome constable. That is evading the question ; which was, whether constables are proper judges of what constitutes seditious language ? Every man is answerable for his words before the law, and the proper challenge is deliberately to arraign him : but it is surely stretching the letter of the law to say that a constable—usually appointed for very different faculties from those of discriminating logic and judicial wisdom—may interpret speech as remotely tending to a breach of the peace which it is his office to guard. The House, of course, as the question was not one which actively interested honourable Members, looked on passively while Mr. Duricosinn and the Ministers discussed the point ; a little " debate " just serving to save the credit of the assembly. Next day something of the same kind occurred at Deptford—the seizure of a Chartist orator, under circumstances of disorder cer- tainly, hut not enough so as quite to redeem the transaction from an untoward resemblance to the other. Now nothing could be more awkward for the Conservative Ministry than for constables to get a notion that they have some discretion in dealing summarily with orators on doctrinal points of whose conclusions they disap- prove. True, Sir JAMES GRAHAM says that constables act on their own peril; but then if constables do act on their own peril, and even if they be punished for a faulty discrimination, Ministers will incur no less odium from the mistaken zeal of their subordinates than if the subordinates were successful, as in the case at Bir- mingham: no one thing could be so injurious to them—nothing so sure to hasten their downfal—as the supposition, mistaken or not, -that the Police were their familiars, acting for them in the suppres- sion of "public opinion."
The Irish potato-famine of 1842 furnished a topic for Mr. SHARMAN CRAWFORD ; who dwelt OIL the inefficacy of the Poor- law in Ireland, affording, as it does, no out-door relief; while Lord ELIOT had no more immediate consolation than the hope that the Irish will be gradually weaned from the use of the root which leaves them to periodical dearth. In the House of Lords, the chief events have been, a pithy debate on the second reading of the Poor-law Amendment Bill— outrageously attacked by Lord STANHOPE, defended by the Duke of WELLINGTON and Lord BROUGHAM, and carried of course ; a fruitless attempt by Lord CAMPBELL to establish a new standing order to prevent Mr. ROEBUCK'S pleading at the bar in support of the Sudbury Disfranchisement Bill: and an expression of astonish- ment by Lord WHARNCLIFFE, that because there are four element- ary classes at Exeter Hall to teach specific arts, it is assumed that Ministers may ultimately establish a system of Normal Schools, excluding religious instruction. Has Lord WHARNCLIFFE not yet learned that in some questions, people are always ready to assume any thing on any grounds ?
