TOPICS OF THE DAY.
WORK FOR THE POST-OFFICE COMMITTEE.
Ie Sir JAMES GRAHAM'S Committee make good despatch, there is yet time to have a bill for placing the Post-office on an unsuspected footing carried through both Houses before the prorogation. It is of consequence that this should be done; for, without prejudging the case of the Home Secretary, or assuming that he has taken liberties with letters intrusted to the Post-office greater than have been taken by any of his predecessors, we think it pretty obvious, that if he had a mind, a recent alteration in the law relating to the Post-office enabled him to do so with safety.
In the last discussion of the subject, Mr. LABOUCHERE explained that the bill introduced upon the recommendation of the Post- office Commission in 1837 merely went to consolidate the 137 acts relating to the Post-office, except in one respect. " As to the power of opening letters," said Mr. LABOUCHERE, "he found that the fact was this : there was one set of words in the Irish Act, which gave this power to the Lord-Lieutenant and the Chief Justice in his absence—there was another set of words in the English Act, which gave this power to the Secretary of State ; in consolidating these laws, it was of course necessary to choose be- tween the two sets of words, and the words of the Irish Act were adopted instead of those of the English Act." In consequence of this alteration—if Lord LYNDHURST was right in the construction put upon the "set of words" in the consolidated Act, when the sub- ject was first discussed in the House of Lords—it is now unnecessary for the Secretary to specify in his warrant for examining letters, whose letters are to be examined. Lord CAMPBELL doubts whether it would be safe for a Secretary of State to avail himself of the greater latitude conceded to him by the Irish phraseology, but does not deny that a restriction has been removed. The more latitudi- narian practice of Ireland has by the alteration of the " set of words " come to be engrafted upon that of England. There is something suspicious in the readiness with which Lord LYNDHURST threw this charge in the teeth of Lord CAMPBELL, in the course of debate : it looks as if the Government people had been examining how far they might safely go in opening letters. This illustrates the danger of sanctioning questionable practices by legislation with a view to temporary emergencies. The power conceded to the Secretary of State of opening the letters of private individuals, is traced back to a revolutionary period—to a Govern- ment which, because based on the execution of a King, was re- garded as a kind of outlaw by all the Monarchical states of Eu- rope. The extreme measures which such a Government might conceive itself warranted in having recourse to, can form no pre- cedent for an old-established Government, the legitimacy of which is unquestioned by its neighbours. The great practitioner in the art of letter-opening, cited as their exemplar by the defenders of the practice, is Sir ROBERT WALPOLE. Would any Minister in our day venture to avow that he managed the House of Commons as WALPOLE did ? Is that Minister's opening of letters any more a justification of this practice, than his barefaced purchase of votes in tip House of Commons is of Parliamentary bribery ? And yet it would appear, that neither the first revolutionary legislator who gave to a Secretary of State the power of opening letters, nor the unscrupulous WALPOLE, who exercised it in the time of a new dy- nasty and a disputed succession, amid Jacobitical plots fomented by foreign gold, claimed such a latitude as is given by the existing law. Our correspondence intrusted to the Post-office is now at the mercy of Government, armed with a law originally enacted for Ireland in the domineering and unjust spirit with which that coun- try was too long governed. The evil has, as usually happens, been insidiously increasing. Our injustice has hit ourselves at the re- bound : the oppressive enactments which Englishmen have too lightly sanctioned for their Irish brethren have surreptitiously been turned against themselves.
Post-office espionage, as the Whigs used to say of the influence of the Crown, "has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished." The legal restraint upon the practice appears to have been loosened, and the range of subjects pried into extended. It is to the pro- gressive character of the abuse, and to the means of checking it, that the inquiries of the Committee will be most usefully directed. The blackening or whitewashing of Sir JAMES GRAHAM is a very secondary consideration. Indeed, Sir JAMES is, properly speaking, not the only culprit at the bar of the Committee. Mr. Mazziai's
letters are not likely to have been stopped without a previous ap- plication from abroad ; and Foreign Governments do not usually
communicate direct with the Home Office. Lord ABERDEEN is as much implicated as Sir JAMES GRAHAM. And if there is any truth in what we hear, of letters from abroad opened and resealed before
they reached the parties to whom they were addressed, as early as 1839 or 1840, there will be reason to apprehend that the invidious power of the Home Secretary has not now for the first time been exercised under impulses conveyed through the medium of the Foreign Office. It is this very appearance of system and uni- formity, which is (perhaps with justice) urged in extenuation of the individual, that renders the practice dangerous. Modes of government are changed by imperceptible degrees : the exception— the crime of one generation of officials—becomes the precedent of the next. The power of stopping and examining the letters of a specified individual, for domestic ends, has silently been converted into a power of issuing general warrants for the examination of anybody's letters, for the ends of Foreign Governments. And
there is no reason to believe that the usurpation, if tamely sub- mitted to, will end here.
The Committee is appointed to inquire into "the state of the law in respect to the detaining and opening of letters at the General Post-office," and "into the mode under which the au- thority given for such detaining and opening of letters has been exercised." It will not be necessary to waste much time in what Lord DENMAN, with proper scorn, calls the "antiquarian lore " of the practice. The year 1837, when the " set of words" giving power to the Secretary of State to open letters was altered, is the central point of practical, useful inquiry. At that time a laxer phraseology, conceding a greater latitude to Ministers, ap- pears to have crept into the law ; and since some uncertain date, (possibly since the reestablishment of " legitimacy" by British arms in 1815,) this latitude appears to have been made available for supplying Foreign Governments with information respecting the correspondence and correspondents of such of their subjects as find it convenient to reside in this country. By placing the law and practice relating to the opening of letters before and after this period, and the advantages (if any) and disadvantages of the prac- tice, in a clear light, the Committee can facilitate that immediate legislation which is necessary to restore the English Post-office to the respect and confidence of which recent discoveries have de- prived it.
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