LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE BRIBERY SENTENCES.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] SIR, —Your article of the 24th inst. answers your corre- spondent " B." so completely, that I need not add anything on the main question, but his reference to the County Derry election should not pass without notice. No better illustration of the pro- cess of straining at gnats and swallowing camels could be found than his condemnation of the candidates in Derry and his sym- pathy with the condemned criminals now undergoing punish- ment. But I am not concerned even with this ; my purpose is to deny that, as a matter of fact or inference, Mr. Porter tried to bribe the electors with offers of other people's property, or that his appeal to what had already been done by the Land Com- mission can, with any sense of fairness, or even common intelli- gence, be confounded with Sir Samuel Wilson's wholesale pro- mises of favours to come, if he were elected.
The object of the Land Act was to fix fair rents. If the Com- missioners are fit for their posts (and the contrary has yet to be proved), it follows that if in most cases they have reduced the rents, those rents were previously unfair rents, or, to go no further, are in the estimate of the Commissioners unfair rents for the next fifteen years, considering the altered conditions of agriculture. To assume, as " B." does, that the Commissioners have given the tenants whose rents have been reduced a pre- sent of other people's property is quite gratuitous, and is merely an oblique attack upon the whole policy of the Act itself. I can see nothing base about the conception of a reduced rent, any more than of a reduced income-tax, and if the candidate of a political party is not to be at liberty to speak to the electors concerning the greatest and most difficult feats of legislation, either past or future, which it has achieved, or hopes to achieve, it is difficult to see what he will have to discourse about. But I am afraid " B." shows, by his objection to criminal legislation against bribery and his hatred of the Land Act, that his political ethics are of too etherial a type to be of much practical use, in this work-a-day world.—I am, Sir, &c., H.
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