The Anti-Corn-law League promised active attention to the electoral registration
; and signs of their activity appear just now, in complaints from the Conservatives, that wholesale objections have been served upon persons of their side. These statements are quite ex parte ; but if they are true, the League has surely mis- taken its vocation. When Sir ROBERT Pm descried the true estate of his party, and rallied his followers with the cry "Re- gister, register, register ! " he gave good advice as a party-leader showing his adherents bow their forces were to be recruited. The cry was merely one of party warfare, and is not to be respected as anything more exalted. But the League makes pretension to stand upon higher ground than that of faction ; and therefore it could not adopt mere party tactics without abasement. It might indeed claim to put converts to its doctrine on the register : but what has that to do with throwing objections broadcast against Conservatives ? It might even claim to castigate the register—to say that the elec- toral body, the tribunal to whom it must appeal for any practical issue, is not genuine, and to purge it accordingly : but how could that be done by wholesale objections to Conservatives only, when both of "the two great parties" run an even race in the manu- facture of votes ? If the League sought a fair and true purgation of the constituencies, we should hear as loud complaint of whole- side objecting to Whigs. There are no such sounds. It looks as if the League, instigated by some of the electioneering busybodies that infest and constitute its most dangerous internal disease, had adopted a literal and misapplied use of the Premier's faction-cry. If 90, the great Free-trade body is degraded to a mere party-tool, and must lose some of its sources of strength. By a genuine purga- tion of the electoral body, it might have given effect to its doc- trine, for hesitating Whigs are as obstructive as avowed enemies ; or it might have proved that the electoral body is incapable of mastering and consummating a policy suited to the largest wants of the country, and thus have hastened a reform of the constituencies: but it can work no such proof if it has itself resorted to the tricks of corruption, and become a mere "Liberal" electioneering com- mittee. It is to be hoped that the tales against it are not true.
