tflbr t tyD Etitur.
ADULTERATION OF PUBLIC OPINION.
Son—A future historian examining the records of the City of London, may find it duly enrolled, that in the mayoralty of Wire, on the 5th of February in the 22d and 23d year of the reign of Queen Victoria, the electors of the City, in the Common Hall assembled, resolved unanimously "that in the opinion of this meeting no extension of the franchise can be satisfactory that does not concede their just share of power to all classes in the community ; " and from other collateral proof he might infer that it was then and there deter- mined by the electors of the City of London that the suffrage ought to be what is termed manhood suffrage or universal. The historian, or a writer distant not in time but in place, as a contemporary foreigner like Count Montalembert, might moralize in this wise upon the great fact set forth in the record. "What a magnificent moral and social spectacle have we in this deliberative act of the electors of this first metropolis of the world ! What abnegation of self! What generous testimony paid to the education, the intelligence, and the virtues of the population socially beneath them, to see the entire body of these electors solemnly take exception to a provi- sion for sharing their electoral power with only some two and a half fold their present number—to see those great but humble merchants, traders, bankers,. manufacturers, and shipowners joining in insisting upon calling into their council, their sailors, their workmen their shopmen, their clerks, amounting to four or five fold the existing numbers of the present constitu- ency! The record states no more than the great fact. But imagine what a scene it must have been ! Some enlightened civic leaders, the Grotes, the Ingram Travers, or the Gassiots, or the Dillons, would leave the Common Hall to proclaim the electors' generous act of recognition to the outside assemblage of non-electors, or their deputations,—who, from a sense of delicacy and propriety becoming their soma position and admitted pre- tensions,—must have declined to be present, to influence in the slightest manner a discussion so personal to themselves. Though the electors and the non-electors might not actually embrace and kiss each other on either cheek, as would certainly be done on such an occasion in France, yet, allow- ance being made for the difference of habits of peoples, there would be shaking of hands and congratulations in the most hearty British manner. The non-electors would await the representative of the electors the chief magistrate, and headed by those humble, but apostolic men, thr; watermen i
and cabmen, would respectfully accompany him n joyful procession to the Mansion, and thence after taking an impressive leave they would go to their respective class meetings, and announce to them the joyful union and fra- ternization in sentiment."
Unhappily for our moral as well as our political state and progress, the record which might give rise to such picturings is, as a record of the pro- ceedings of the electors of the City of London, a great lie. It was an in- ferior body of non-electors, who were inside and who filled the hall, who enacted a character which they well knew to be false, and carried resolu- tions as electors in behalf of themselves—it was the electors or the great body of them, who were outside the Hall at their own homes, not caring to attend or take part in a conflict with those who commonly intrude on such occasions. The lItnes report notices the fact, that "the appearance of those present indicated that the majority were, at all events at present, non- electors." The fact must have been perceived and well known to the Lord Mayor. Then why did he, allow a resolution to pass, which, as ex- pressing the opinion of a meeting of citizen electors he knew to be un- true? Because it is conventional to do such things: because if he had challenged the untruth he would have provoked from those determined to maintain it an explosion of violence. The commonly fraudulent composition of public meetings, more particu- larly of open air meetings, is a moral as well as a political evil. It is one form of wholesale lying, by men entering places of meeting and acting in bodies in characters which they know do not belong to them. Little better may be said of the acts of many platform orators, who accept and put forward as bona fide demonstrations of public opinion, proceedings which they well know to be false and hollow. A highly educated and distinguished native of one of our colonies who came to the mother country, possessed with his- torical and literary associations of the character of the old English yeoman and freeholder, eagerly attended a meeting of the freeholders of the metro- politan county, at one of their meetings at the last Middlesex election, in the expectation of seeing an assembly of large, staid, peculiar, and independ- ent men, befitting the fancied scenes around the huge oaks on the estates oc- cupied by them, and which their Anglo-Saxon forefathers had tilled. Our visitor was surprised and disgusted to see nothing of the sort of men he had imagined, but only a small and miserable assembly, lower even than the itinerant Punch gathers in almost every thoroughfare, of errand boys, cads, butchers' lads, and loose idlers, to whom the candidates were submitting their views on questions cf public policy. Observers of the working of our institutions are frequently perplexed by the fact, that the electors decide one way by the show of hands, and another and totally different way by the poll. Now such demonstrations as there have of late times been on the Re- form question' have all been much of the sort of the meeting of the electors of the city of London, and about as trustworthy. Disparaging inferences are often made by foreigners as to the independence and truthfulness of the English electors, from the opposite results of the demonstrations by the show of hands and by the poll ; the common and the simple fact being, that in the great majority of instances the demonstrations are from widely different classes. So difficult is it to get meetings of the busy and respectable classes in our chief towns, almost for any ordinary purpose,—(not that they are in- different on political questions to any such extent as might be inferred from the extent of the non-attendance, but that except in the case of some remark- able elocutionist, or person whom they strongly desire to see as well as hear, they expect to read what is said in the newspaper reports, and do not care to mix themselves with the looser sort who intrude on such occasions,) so that the promoters of public meetings connive at the doors being thrown open to all corners to get up a show of an audience, and augment the impression of the interest taken in the subject. The attendance of the loose and idle is never- theless so uncertain, that we are informed that in the City when business is required to be done, as when the election of a Sheriff or other officer is to be insured, the initiated hire disciplined bands of attendants or claqueurs to form or influence meetings. In the accounts of a Sheriff, Alderman, and Parliamentary- candidate were found such items as this, "Popularity, 39/." ; and dirt cheap too. The payment, by the solicitor or agent, for the half-day's work, or the attendance of some two or three hundred liverymen, watermen, or long-shoremen, who had to hold up their hands when the candidate's name was proposed, and cry out, "All, all!" "Humdrum for ever ! Huzza for Humdrum !" and make such manifestations of zeal, and of impatience of opponents,—with "turn him out!" "out with him !" that Humdrum (who may not in fact be aware that all this is the work of his Parkes or his Cop k, for which he has paid,) lays his hand upon his heart, and finds it • i.cult to express his feelings on the appreciation of his merits by his fellow citizens ; a tight and broken heads on the platform of the meeting of the electors of Greenwich, and similar electoral scenes elsewhere—of one of which the Right Honourable Robert Lowe was a bleed- ing witness,—might serve as admonitions, that we are not so far in advance
of our brethren in the United States as we are apt to assume. C.
Previous page
