Opiniund of tbe Prr41.
COMPROMISE BETWEEN THE MINISTERS AND TIIE REFOIC■IERS: WHO GAINS BY THE BARGAIN?
LONDON Review—A compromise appears to have tacitly established itself between the Ministry and the thorough Reformers in Pasha. merit and in the press. What has been given up on both sides fur the sake of the alliance, we can only infer from what we see. The con- cession made by the Ministry seems to be, that instead of shaping their conduct so as to avert public indignation from the Lords by never giving those careful guardians of the public weal any good measures to reject, they shall occasionally bring forward propositions acceptable to the People, allow the Lords to do their worst in spoiling them, and content themselves with splitting differences afterwards ; thus taking upon themselves a part only and not the whole of the discredit at- tached to niggardly measures of reform. This seems to be the price which the Ministers, placed as they are in a state of absolute depen- dence upon the support of the Radicals, are willing to pay for it. What they get in return is, that no measure is to be proposed which they do not like ; no principle enunciated which may, even indirectly, reflect upon their conduct ; and that any one who dislikes any thing which they say or do, is to keep his disapprobation confined within his own breast. We think the Ministers have the best of the bargain. We do not wish the Radicals to attack the Ministry; we are anxious that they should cooperate with them. But we think they might co- operate without yoking themselves to the Ministerial car; abdicating all independent action, and leaving nothing to distinguish them from the mere Whig coterie, except the memory of their former professions. As little do we see why the Liberal press—not content with bedaubing. the Ministry with fulsome etiolation for all they do, whether it be what those papers have been just before recommending, or the very opposite —should be so trembliogly afraid of giving insertion to a single line which may lead a chance reader to think they have an opinion of their own—should seem to think all lost if their columns contain any thing but a probable anticipation of what the Ministry will next day propose. It is a fact that it was far more usual, before there was a Reform Ministry, to see Reform opinions of a stronger kind than were held by the Whig leaders advocated in the Liberal newspapers, than now when circumstances are so much more propitious to Liberal ideas. To give one specimen among hundreds; we remember no period for the last ten years when such an exposure as our last number contained of the jobbing in the English Army for the benefit of the great families—of the manner in which our military establishment is systematically made an engine for extracting large annual sums from the People under false pretences, to give to the sons of the rich—would not have been laid bold of by nearly the whole Liberal press, and beaten into the People's minds by successive blows, until they all rose up as one man and demanded that the iniquity should cease. In the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and thirty. five, for the first time since the word Reform ceased to be opprobrious, not one of the daily papers professing Liberal principles dared say a word in condemnation of one of the grossest, most palpable, and most costly abuses remaining in our public expenditure. They knew not bow their masters would relish the exposure. If their object be to benefit the Ministry, this is not the way to do it ; and stone-blind with self. conceit must the Ministry be if they fancy it is. One journal which while it generally supports a Ministry, occasionally condemns some of its words or actions, is worth more to it than a hundred which dare not cull their columns their own, nor give currency to an opinion' or a sentiment which they do not believe to be acceptable to the givers of good things. When the Times supported first the Wellington and then the Grey Ministry, its support carried authority ; not because ary one believed in the honesty of the Times then more than now, but because it was known to have an independent judgment. It had not wedded itself to any Ministry for better for worse. It did not commit the tasteless blunder of praising all they did. When it sup- ported them, therefore, there was a concurrence of two opinions ; the Times coinciding with the Ministry—not the voice of the Ministry merely echoed back by people who only struck into the same tune because their prompters had commenced it. It is the daily press chiefly which has laid itself open to these strictures : the Examiner, the Spectator, and others, though perhaps of late rather more panegyrical than necessary, cannot be accused of having compromised their pristine independence.
REFORM OF THE HOUSE OF PEERS.
LEEDS TIMES—Lord John Russell, in replying to an address front Plymouth and the adjacent towns, has earnestly, recommended the People to abstain from urging organic changes. This has been seized with avidity by those Conservative Whigs who oppose a Rethrm in the House of Lords as giving the authority of Lord John Russell to their side of the question. But they may cease their exultation, for it does happen that the noble Lord is not the best possible authority on such an occasion. His dictum is to be regarded with considerable suspicion, for two reasons—First, that his Lordship is an interested party ; in- terested by relationship, interested by marriage, interested by personal advantage, in maintaining the Peerage ; and therefore his evidence on this occasion is to be viewed in the same light as that of the Town- Clerks on the Corporation Reform Bill. Second, that his Lordship is an avowed supporter of what is called the Theory of the English Con- stitution ; which leaves quite out of consideration the only proper object of legislation—popular welfare, and argues every point upon a system of checks and balances ; which are very pretty things to talk about, but when the checks, as in the present instance, check, and threaten to stop the working of the machine, are very injurious things to !Hive in practice. It is a delightful recollection, that these absurdities of checks and balances, and theories, are fast passing away ; and that the convic- tion is rapidly gaining ground, that to arrange a constitutional question by an appeal to such &tiara analogies as these, would be as ridiculous as settling a question of architecture by appealing to the construction of a fish. The general welfare of the community is the only just standard of constitutional improvements. We fully agree with the editor of the Spectator, that Ministers are not expected, and cannot be expected, to take the lead of the popular voice on the question of a Reform in the I louse of Lords. But let them beware of opposing the popular voice. Let them remember that the Duke of Wellington declared his enmity to Reform and fell. And if Ile, backed by all the Tory and Borough- mongeriug influence, could not stand ngainst the People of England, how can they, whose mainstay is popular support, maintain their posi- tion after they have alienated a large »tajoritg of their adherents? We trust that they will pursue a wiser policy, and not rashly oppose them- selves to a tide whose course they cannot stay.
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