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EDINBURGH

MAGAZINE.

JANUARY, 1857.

THE POLITICAL PAST AND FUTURE.

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PARTIES perish-principles survive. Men may change their opinions, but the opinions are not affected by the change. For some years now past, perhaps a majority of the public have rejoiced in belonging to no party. If they had closely examined the origin of their joy they would have found that it sprang from their possessing no political principle. The late Sir Robert Peel has been accused of the murder of party in this country, but he did a worse deed in destroying popular belief in the principles of public men, and enshrining the doctrine of expediency in its place. We charge him not with catering only for his own love of power and vanity, as others have done, but he was the statesman of expediency; a hazardous guide, and in this respect he debauched political confidence in public men, and ended it. Every man is supposed by many men to have his mission. It is obviously true; but some people's mission is not casily perceptible to others. Sir Robert Peel's was probably that blow at partizanship which he struck with a tremendous power. Nobody can regret too little the death of old party distinctions, but their cradication may be bought dearly if party principles have by mistake been committed to the same grave; for these belonged to men who should not forget them. "Principles are few, details are many." Twenty years since, the people were agitated concerning details, while they believed that they were labour ing for principles. They were disappointed, and soured, by delay and procrastination, not because their principles were defeated, but because their details were unsuccessful. In 1857 it is melancholy to turn back in memory to 1837, and the struggle then commenced for the details and the principles of political reform. One half of the leaders in that movement are dead, without seeing any result of their labours, except disappointment. Government by the people is a principle, and it may be secured by more ways than one. Optimism

* See Jelinger Symons on Peel, noticed in our last number.

Men seek, naturally, the

in politics is desirable. best of everything; but until they can procure firsts they do not reject seconds. Nobody starves with abundance of brown bread, because whiter loaves are not to be obtained. Even so it should be with government by the people. It means the healthful life of society; but if it cannot be procured in one form we must strive for another; if it cannot be secured in perfection we must take the smallest imperfection that is procurable. The Royal British Bank depositors will not refuse five shillings per £1 this month, and four shillings per £1 next month, because they want twenty shillings in the long run-and we hope they may get them. Wisdom in monetary is wisdom in political affairs. Go for the whole right, but never reject an instalment. Take that, meanwhile; it will give you heart to push harder for the remnant.

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Government by the people is avowedly sought by all the Liberal party; and by almost all parties in this country. The Conservative party, with few exceptions, profess the same "principle." France, the electors of the legislative assemblies are obviously not the people. In Russia, the people do not govern; but are bartered or bought, and governed. Even in the United States, the free coloured men do not govern, for their citizenship is denied, and the slaves carry votes for their owners, but none for themselves. The inhabitants of India do not have government by the people; but they are nearer to that result than either French, Russians, or Americanised-Africans of the United States, for they have a free press, unfettered rights of speech, and assiduous efforts made for their intellectual and religious progress.

All parties in this country speak of popular government and the influence of public opiniontwo different matters-for public opinion, probably, influenced Nebuchadnezzar, and was not altogether lost on Nicholas; although neither of these Emperors submitted to popular government. These general statements, confused occasionally as they

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are, do not interfere with the possibility of working out the principle of popular government, without a hard adherence to every detail. The Legislature of our country includes a slight representation of the learned bodies; a larger of the middle classes; the army and the navy indirectly; the bar and the church in the same fashion; the banking and the colonial interests in an equally crooked way; and the larger proportion of the representation falls to the landed interest, although that community have not advantageously employed their influence at all times. The artisan class, as separated from the labouring, or lower paid classes, have a certain degree of influence over the representation of several boroughs; but the agricultural labourers, a very numerous body of men, have no representatives; the miners in counties, have nothing to say in the choice of members; small farmers are less than small, they count nothing at the polls; factory operatives in county villages, comprehending an intelligent and numerous body, neither directly nor indirectly affect elections; and the great majority of labourers and operatives in all towns, have not a shadow of influence over the legislature. Individuals belonging to other classes are disfranchised by accident, but they are left destitute of political power by design. The shopkeepers and tradesmen of counties who pay rents under £50 per annum have no vote. The arrange. ment is bad. But the individual only suffers. His class is represented. We are dissatisfied with that distribution of power; and those who suffer from it should also be dissatisfied, but the exclusion of entire classes, comprising the majority of the nation, from any share in the formation of its laws, is still worse.

If the law regarded labourers as helots or serfs, or slaves, the consequent exclusion from the suffrage would not be logically wrong. The law that calls a man a chattel, is not hypocritical in refusing to him a vote. The arrangement in the States is different. There the slaves are considered to be politically under age. Their owner is their trustee who votes for them. This law is hypocritical. It assumes that a good time is coming for the negroes; that they are abstractly entitled to political power, but are not yet ripe for the use of their rights.

Personal freedom is guarded more jealously in this than in any other land. We are entitled to come or to go, as we please. The right is even now carried occasionally into something very near wrong. A man is free to get drunk as he pleases if he avoid any trangression of the police regulalations. The personal right of property runs into extravagance. We have heard of a Scotch landowner levelling a thousand homes for a crotchet. To high and low we assign a large personal freedom. If labour were a silent sufferer, the policy of our course might be wiser. People would speak against rousing questions that slept, or wrongs that were not felt to be wrong; but now labour and its interests are perpetually before the legis

lature; while the persons who are affected chiefly by these proceedings are refused the criminal's right of being heard by counsel in their own behalf.

The law does not by statute refuse the labourer a vote. It is not prohibitive, except in the sense of a Russian tariff of seventy to a hundred per cent., which is called protective, but is prohibitive. A working man earning £60 annually cannot pay £10 for rent with prudence. He is, therefore, virtually excluded by statute unless he be an extravagant person; and those who make laws should remember that rents are one charge, and the costs of housekeeping and taxes are additional expenses. It is not the difference in rent alone, but in many other matters, that constitutes the increased expenditure in a large over a small house.

The inadequate representation of the operative classes cannot be denied, but many persons hold that they would not be benefited, indeed that they would be damaged, by any extension of their political power. They want information and can be better cared for by others than by themselves. Arguments of that nature would be thoroughly useless, if they had no truth in them. Truth is the grain of salt that keeps the corrupting mass from becoming thoroughly offensive. We could all bear more information than we possess, and occasionally others see our interests more clearly than we perceive them. For these reasons we do not prefer to be called ignorant, or leave our affairs entirely to the guidance of wise neighbours. Truth in this case is in the form of grains. They are few, and very small. Truth in this description of pleading is atomical; and anatomical precision is necessary to trace its place in the mass. feudal system was maintained by the same apology. The serfs of Russia are supposed to be incapable of caring for themselves. The slaves of the United States are kept in slavery for their own good. The interest of the oppressed has been often the reason pled by the oppressor for his deeds. The preservation of law and order has not seldom been made the justification of proceedings that rode roughshod over the foundation of all law.

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Government by the people for the people, infers that all classes of the people share its arrangements; but in this country we have an excluded class; and that class the more numerous portion of the nation. Our meaning in seeking for principles, instead of mere details, is illustrated by an empire and a republic. The Emperor Napoleon was chosen to occupy the throne of France, by the direct votes of the electors. Mr. Buchanan has been selected for the White House at Washington, by the indirect votes of the electors. The latter chose delegates to vote for a President, instead of directly naming their man upon the ballot cards. The details in these cases present considerable differences, that may even change the result of elections; but if the votes have been fairly given

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in both instances, we must concede to Buchanan and Bonaparte election by the people.

The present Government may fulfil the promise made by another Government, three years since, to carry an extension of the suffrage, combined with a re-distribution of electoral districts. As the opening of the Parliamentary session approaches we hear less of the rumour. The bill, however, may be introduced and passed. It will not certainly be a perfect bill, but if it presents an honest step in advance, it should not be opposed. Mr. King has frequently pressed the extension of borough rights to county farmers and tradesmen. The reform urged by him is merely the assimilation of the county franchise to that of Parliamentary boroughs, and would effect a great improvement; but it would not solve the entire question yet it should not be opposed.

A five instead of a ten pound franchise would more than treble the number of electors, especially in small towns; and would introduce a useful class of voters in many constituencies. It would not be abstractly right. It would be only an imperfect system, founded on brick and mortar after all, but still it should not be opposed.

An intellectual qualification is proposed, fortified by a tax on voting, or the registration of all persons, conforming to the intellectual requirement, and producing a receipt for income tax, to vote in the locality where they have resided for six months. If the tax be within the means of the great body of the people, it would be cheerfully paid; and would produce a large revenue, easily collected; and if the intellectual part of the qualification were rendered plain, as it might be, reading and writing for example, the plan would give a great extension of the suffrage, and, perhaps, settle the question for ever; yet it might not be abstractly right.

All these plans deserve to be aided and promoted; and in this way, by seeking to advance, we may attain the practice of popular government, without securing every detail, good in itself, yet not absolutely requisite to the result wanted.

In the past, this policy has been overlooked. The advocate of household suffrage has professed hostility to the friend of universal suffrage, while the latter styled the former a poor supporter of brick instead of mind; and both assailed any person who hinted at the propriety of an intellectual qualification, as a bitter foe; and all three joined often in aspersing the very general sort of man, who was for an extension of the suffrage, without caring how small, even if by hair-breadths, as a mere pretender, which he might or might not be. We do not say that all the persons in all or in any of these classes have acted in that way; but many of them, forgetting that we wanted a means to an end, a road through Idumea if possible; but if not, through the wilderness, have acted as if only one direction pointed to the journey's terminus; and no way but their way could take us there.

The past is gone irretrievably and with it many, who might have helped us now. The future is before us, and should not be wasted. The people, we suspect, are not much inclined to waste strength, and, although some may say that we surrender a right by consenting to a substitute, yet we sur. render nothing by taking what can be first obtained as a means to all that is requisite. They do not see the folly of declining to storm the Malakoff, unless they can carry the entire Sebastopol at a blow.

A knot of questions surround this suffrage movement; but they are chiefly dependent upon its solution. The use of the ballot, the payment of the members of the legislature, and the duration of parliaments, may be raised before the suffrage, or after, or never; but when the great body of the people have a fair place in the State, they can impute no blame to statesmen if such details are left in an unsatisfactory condition.

Rights exist that scarcely repay a struggle to obtain. Many individuals among the unenfranchised consider that the suffrage is one of these rights. It is not worth the trouble of seeking for, in their opinion. The future will, probably, reduce their number day by day. Our political wants can only be smoothly supplied by the agency of this reform. The people can carry many measures, or prevent others, when they become agitated and angry; but anger is a disease, and one of a dangerous nature.

In many parts of Scotland the land is held by a few individuals, whose power has been employe to weaken the nation. That subject needs to be rectified. We have no wish to take from any man his possessions; but neither has one man a right to convert them into nuisances, nor has another the right to render his property in them obnoxious. The nation could not suffer loss from the entail of money, but it suffers great injury from an entail of land. The life-renter has to make provision for a family, and his land provides only for one of a. flock, perhaps. As a wise man, therefore, he starves the land, that his children, and his children's children, excepting in one line, may not starve. Improvements have been accomplished recently in the law of entail; but the future needs the abolition of any law on the evil, except one for its destruction.

The game laws have become an engine of moral evil. They have rendered many persons into canvassers for the jail; and yet a man must be permitted to exclude trespassers from his property, and to feed any sort of animals, not absolutely dangerous, on his domains. A limit exists even to this right. If the Duke of Buccleugh became, for example, possessed by a passion for breeding locusts, and were successful against the influence of climate, we presume that the neighbouring landlords would seek for other obstructions-but locusts are dangerous. If another person with many acres turned them all into a vast preserve for destructive game, and all game are not des

2

LAW, CURRENCY, AND COLONIES.

Necessity may do more than reason or right on this matter, and but for the discoveries of gold in Australia and California, the laws in question would have been long ago repealed in the midst of ruin. From the nature of these discoveries the laws still exist to wring a private tax from those who labour, for the good of those who do not require to toil.

tructive of anything useful to man, his neighbours | public mind on the subject will repeal them. would resent this employment of the rights of private property. The line between the preserves that may be tolerated, and those that are intolerable, has never been clearly drawn, but it exists, and may be overstepped. The legislature, in a proper and rational state, would find a remedy in taxation. Taxes have a virtue that will never be practically understood until they are applied to deer forests and game preserves, and to all extravagances of a similar kind.

The army, the navy, the civil service, indeed every service, is periodically submitted to discussion without all those good results that might and and should arise out of so much nervous talking and sensible writing, as are expended on the subject; although the progress of improvement is visible even in the recesses of Government patronage, but it would be more visible if the legislature reflected the popular will in some more accurate manner than it does at present.

The mode of taxation offers many abuses. We have been engaged for a number of years in reasoning upon the comparative value of income from property and wages. A clever coterie of men have been allowed to persuade the country that the doctor's or the minister's five hundred, or one hundred pounds per annum, for work done, are as taxable, because they are as valuable, as the squire's rents of the same amount. It is the most puerile question that could be raised. A money lender will decide it in a moment. Only let A.B., whose fees run annually to three hundred pounds, and C.D., whose rents are equal in amount, both try together to raise money upon the capabilities or industry of the one, or the acres and houses of the other; from E.F., the banker, and he will explain to them soon the distinction between their respective properties. The public have allowed themselves, nevertheless, to be amused with this stupid question, while the tax has been going on and rising up, partly because its early and total repeal was expected, without any better reason than a Parliamentary promisc, and partly because the bold impertinence of the statement takes their breath from the boldest; until they are familiarised with its proportions; yet this abuse could not have been passed, or, if it had passed, would have been immediately repealed; if the Parliament had reflected the people; within twelve months from the day when it was felt.

The currency laws are the plainest infractions of free trade that have existed in our country within a civilised and recent period. A prospect of action and, we trust, execution upon them during the next Parliamentary session exists, yet for many years they have sown ruin over the land and have been assiduously defended by many friends of free trade, who bounced out with the question-"What is a pound ?"—and ran off without hearing a definition. A Parliament that gave a fair interpretation of public opinion would have rever passed these laws; and the first Parliament that reflects the

The colonial relations of the empire open out questions of more consequence to "the industrious" sections of the population, to those who carn, and who must earn to live, than to any other portion of the community. The larger group of colonies-those in North America—wish for union with this country on fair terms. The questions submitted to the people, by such men as Judge Haliburton, are two-" Will it be wise to be weak or strong in coming times ?"-and-"Is it better to extend England, Ireland, and Scotland, by regions larger than all Europe, or to cramp ourselves up in a few islands ?" Upon the industrious falls a large share of the fighting and paying, and all the working. From them, therefore, the responses to these questions should come. A short time since, many persons thonght that a separation into distinct and independent communities would be more beneficial than a federal union, who have been otherwise taught, by experience, and their number will be increased rapidly; but, be the answer what it may, ere we part from possessions so extensive, from a prospect so grand-let us have the answer, not from a part, but from the whole of the people.

The

Our foreign relations have become intricate; and the progress and stability of liberty everywhere, combined with the material prosperity, the social and religious advancement of mankind, require that they should be carefully studied. We are at war with Persia; and certain working men of Newcastle-on-Tyne, according to common placards on the walls, pledge themselves to prosecute any officers, or soldiers, who may hereafter be proved to have engaged in that war. The officers and soldiers, we fear, are more likely to be prosecuted if they should refuse to obey orders. placards arc, however, part of an industrial system, pursued by persons who think they do the world good service by asserting that our Government is always wrong. A society in one Yorkshire town have been snubbed by one member of Parliament, at least, if not more, for venturing to consider foreign affairs through a different medium from that which he uses. Bradford, in Yorkshire, has a society of the same nature. Sheffield has been long famous for a lively opinion upon foreign matters, not always sound, but always vivid. do not discuss these matters here, although we believe that our Government has frequently acted from better motives than have been ascribed to it, in some quarters; yet as all the people have to pay for, and many of them to fight, in these quarrels, they should enjoy better means than they

We

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