NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE franchise section of the Reform Bill, both as regards the borough and county qualification, passed finally through Com- mittee on Tuesday., It will establish in the boroughs household suffrage pure and simple, qualified only, as the present 10/. occu- pation suffrage is qualified, by the condition of a year's residence and of a full personal discharge. of the municipal rates due on the occupier's house ; and it will give in addition a lodger franchise, also qualified by a condition of twelve months' residence, to any one who has paid as much as 10/. annually for the apartments Occupied by him, exclusive of all charge for furniture. For the counties the occupier's qualification is to be laud or tenements rated at 12/. annually. The change is a vast one. Mr. Bright said on Tuesday that in 1858 the Bill he advocated in his tour of agitation was, as regards the borough franchise, precisely what Mr. Disraeli has now carried, and he did not doubt that Mr. Disraeli had, in fact, borrowed it from him: He congratulated the country gen- tlemen on _their wonderful and sudden change of opinion, but thotight the result ought to warn them not to take for granted so easily as they did last year all the alarmist views which their leaders impressed upon them._ Mr. Disraeli, a little nettled, congratulated Mr. Bright on another_ speech of_" incoherent conciliation" to the Tories, such as he had so often lately delivered, and had the audacity to express a doabt whether he could prove that the Tory party had changed their opinions at all,—which raised, however, such a shout of derision from both sides of the House, his own as well as the other, that Mr. Disraeli was driven to put on suddenly that mask of sullen incapacity to understand, with which he so often veils his embarrassment. None feel more keenly than the Tories themselves the abruptness and ludicrousness of their own political somersault.
