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in the fields and in the workshops, is the obvious interest of employers, and of the shopkeepers who deal in their produce; but at present the workmen have not a single representative in the Legislature to speak in their behalf. "The frequency and alarming character of the strikes which have prevailed in every part of the empire since these principles were carried into practice," says our author, "and the steady emigration of above 250,000 agricultural labourers for the last eight years, even in times of greatest prosperity, from the British Islands, prove that the effects of this class legislation have been fully felt by the working classes, and that they have sought to escape from them, either by illegal combination against the laws, or by withdrawing entirely from the sphere of their influence."

Another evil of the Reform Constitution is the vast increase of corruption at elections. After the last general election in 1852, no less than fifty-two returns were petitioned against on the ground of bribery. Nothing approaching to this was ever heard of in the worst days of the old House of Commons; and the notable failures of the Legislature to remedy the evil are due to the fact, that the evil arises from a permanent cause- namely, that the chief power in the constituencies is vested in a class accessible to bribes. The decisive proof of this is to be found in the fact, that, though petitions against borough returns have been so frequent since the Reform Bill passed, there have been none against those for counties. The reason of this is, not that the forty-shilling freeholder is inaccessible to bribes-probably he would often as willingly take them as the freeman or ten-pounder in towns-but that that class have not the majority in counties, and they are not bribed, because it is no man's interest to bribe them. "Even if, by lowering the franchise," says Sir A. Alison, "the constituencies were made so large that no fortune could corrupt them, the evil would not be removed, it would only assume another and a still more dangerous form. The worst and most dangerous species of bribery is that which is practised by holding out prospects of legislative injustice and spoliation; and the nation will have little cause to congratulate itself if it escapes slipping sovereigns into electors' pockets, but induces the putting the

VOL. XLVI.-NO. CCLXXI.

sponge to the national debt into their hands, and untaxed spirits into their mouths."

The last obvious defect of the Reform Bill was, that it greatly diminished the representatives of intellect in the Legislature. Of old, the House gathered to itself all the young men of known intellect throughout the country, and brought them in through the nomination boroughs. It was in this way that Pitt and Fox, Burke and Sheridan, Wyndham and Romilly, Canning, Mackintosh, and Brougham, took their places in the Chapel of Saint Stephen's. We have a dearth of such men now. Even Macaulay was turned out by the shopkeepers of Edinburgh, aristocratic as that constituency is generally regarded; and the consequence was, that he disdained to stand again, and in 1852 was elected only by a rallying of the better classes of both parties. "Independence of character," says Sir A. Alison, "intrepidity of thought, wide views for the universal good, can hardly now obtain admission into the House of Commons. Large constituencies have an instinctive dread of such characters; they are either jealous of or hate them. Ability and eloquence, indeed, they all desire, but it is ability devoted to their interests, eloquence governed by their will. Their wish is to have, not representatives, but delegates, and no man worthy of ruling an empire will become such. Hence, the House of Commons, since the passing of the Reform Bill, has been nearly deserted, so far as new members are concerned, by men of brilliant talents; and they have sought to influence public affairs by writing in the periodical and daily press, the talent in which has as much increased since the change, as that of the new entrants into the Legislature has diminished."

In closing his remarks on this important era of our history, Sir A. Alison asks, but leaves unanswered, the deeply-interesting question:-" Is the transference of power from the land to the boroughs in England analagous to, and produced by, the same causes as that which removed power from the Roman senate, the stronghold of the patricians, to the Dictator, the repre

sentative and idol of the urban multitude? and is the clamour for cheap bread, which in our times has changed

C

the whole policy of the empire at bottom, the same as the cry, Panem et Circenses which ruled the whole policy of the Cæsars, and, in the end, by destroying the rural population in its heart, subverted the Roman Empire? If so, are we to rest in the mournful conclusion that the seeds of mortality are indelibly implanted in nations as well as individuals that these seeds are quickened into life equally by victory and defeat, and that to both the lines of the poet are precisely applicable

"The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,

And all that virtue, all that wealth ere gave, Await alike the inevitable hour;

The paths of glory lead but to the grave'?"

We incline to take a more favourable view of the future. The question of Reform cannot fail to be revived, but the country, we trust, will be wiser this time. In 1830 it took a leap in the dark. Even the Whig leaders were totally mistaken as to the effect of the Reform Bill-Earl Grey, for instance, repeatedly expressing his conviction "how unfounded is the alarm of those who think that the present measure will be fatal to the influence of the landed interest." Enlightened by events, the Whig leaders cannot fall into this mistake again. though a love of popularity, it is to be feared, may again prove too strong for their patriotism. In any case, the true course for the Conservative party is clear. When the question of Reform is revived, they must not (unless it be introduced at a notably unscasonable

time) repeat their policy of 1830, and meet it by a negative. They must bring in a bill of their own. They must not merely say to the country, "We do not like our opponents' measure, and shall vote against it :" they must introduce one of their own, and leave the country to judge between them. In such a case, if they show ordinary wisdom, they need not fear for the verdict.

There are two main points to be attended to two transparent defects in the Reform Bill to be remedied. These are the representation of Labour, and the representation of Intellect. In his recent abortive bill, over whose fate no one shed tears but himself, Lord John Russell could devise nothing better than a general lowering of the franchise — a measure, whose fatal result would have been to transfer the chief power in the State from the £10 and £20 voters to a class still lower. This is most obvious. Society is like a cone or pyramid, narrow at the top, and widening towards the bottom. Each stage or segment as you descend the mass becomes greatly larger than those above it. At present the voters, paying rents between £10 and £20, outnumber all the classes above them - extend the suffrage indiscriminately, as Lord John proposed, and the £6 to £12 voters will then be the predominant class in the burghs, and (as the burghs predominate over the counties) in the Empire. By all means let labour be represented. In those days

Last autumn a Parliamentary Return was printed, the contents of which showed in a most striking manner the insane character of Lord John Russell's proposal to lower the franchise to a £6 qualification, and sufficiently explains why Lords Lansdowne and Palmerston, and divers others of the noble lord's colleagues, were so strenuously opposed to the further progress of the measure. The new class of voters, we find, would actually be almost as numerous as the whole of the present constituency. Let us give a few instances. The town of Bedford has now a constituency of 551 persons, occupying houses of from £10 to £100 value. But the whole number of houses rated to the poor at £6 and upwards, is 1,261. So that 710 persons, living in houses of £6, £7, or £8 per annum, may be added to the list, outnumbering the whole of the present constituency. In Reading, the present electors are 1363, but the houses rated at £6 and upwards are 2,552. In Cambridge the present constituency consists of 1,939 persons. The houses rated at £6 and upwards are 3,824. In Macclesfield the present constituency consists of 1,156. The houses rated at £6 and upwards are 3,121. In Stockport the electors are now 1,497 in number. The houses rated at £6 and upwards are 2,944. In Carlisle the constituency now amounts to 833. The houses rated at £6 and upwards are 1,704. In Whitehaven there are now 560 electors, but the houses rated at £6 and upwards are 1,301. In Derby the present list contains 2,130 names. The new list may contain 4,378, if £6 houses are enfranchised. In Exeter the constituency may be raised from 2,165, the present number, to 4,679, if £6 houses are to be added. In Weymouth the list would be raised from 630 to 1,295. In Durham it would be augmented from 590 to 1,285; in Sunderland, from 2,176 to 4,304; in Colchester, from 802 to 1,639; in Cheltenham, from 2,148 to 5,699; in Dover, from 1,080 to 2,990; in

of "strikes" and feuds between employers and employed, it is indispensable to give fair play to the latter, and afford a safety-valve to smouldering complaint. A mere lowering of the franchise is the simplest but crudest form of doing this. We do not think it is the best one; but suppose it so. What then? Does it follow that, therefore, the rest of the constituency is to be swamped by the introduction of these new voters? Does it follow that the only course is to suffer the middle classes to be nullified by the lower, and the only representation to be that of the national ignorance? Certainly not; and Lord John Rus sell never made a more glaring mistake (and he has made many) than in thinking so. Enfranchise those £6 rent-payers if you will though in this form the representation of labour is a crude one; but keep them sepa rate from the existing voters. Enter them on a roll by themselves. And let them have representatives for themselves. There are plenty of burghs to be disfranchised. Take ten or eleven of the members thus set free, and set them apart for the new class of voters (rural and urban) thus called into existence. Let these voters be arranged in districts: say two members for the south of England, two for the central district, two for the northern; one for the west of Scotland, one for the east ; one for the north of Ireland, one for the centre, one for the south. Several indirect advantages will accrue from such a division. As the election process will be spread over a large area, and be centred in many different foci, there cannot be much hustings work or popular agitation; and the candidates will have to trust more to wellknown character and printed addresses, than would be the case under the present system. A dozen representatives is no mean gift to a class never before enfranchised, especially as these members (unlike those elected by an ordinary constituency) will be all their own.

Then as to the representation of general intellect and worth. At present it is notorious that local whims or interests suffice to secure the rejection of any candidate, however gifted. Not to come too near home, we see the anti-Maynooth pledge made a sine quâ non in some parts of Scotland; in others, as in Glasgow, the interests of the publicans and sinners are paramount, and must be attended to; and so on in more glaring instances in other parts of the empire. Petty points or selfish interests prevail over questions of statesmanship. First-class thinkers will not debase themselves to humour such constituencies; and few men but those accustomed to tumult will face the party-turmoil, and, it may be, violence of the hustings and electionmeetings. To secure our end, then, let us once more make a seizure of seats rendered disposable by the disfranchisement of some of the burghs marked out for destruction by Lord John Russell. Take twenty of them, and (this idea is not a new one) convert them into imperial members—i.e., not elected by local constituencies, but by a general voting all over the kingdom. For this purpose, let it be optional for any voter belonging to the £10 and upwards class to withdraw his name from the local register, and to enter it upon the imperial one (or, if subdivision be desired, let England, Scotland, and Ireland each have a general registry of its own). In this case, still more than in the proposed representation of labour, it is obvious that the ordeal and agitation of electioneering will be avoided, and well-known celebrity and printed addresses will be the chief passports to success. Firstclass men of all kinds would not hesitate to address themselves to such a constituency; and the fact of having one's claims to distinction ratified by so wide and (we should expect) calmtoned a tribunal, would be deservedly accounted one of the proudest honours a citizen could win.

We shall not enter further upon de

Chatham, from 1,348 to 2,910; in Blackburn, from 1,357 to 3,302; in Ashton, from 990 to 2,371; in Liverpool, from 15,506 to 62,126; in Rochdale, from 1,183 to 4,029; in Salford, from 4,183 to 11,335; in Lincoln, from 797 to 2,047; in Shrewsbury, from 1,111 to 2,943. The return shows that in England and Wales the number of persons already on the list of Parliamentary electors in boroughs is 363,000; and the total number of persons rated to the poor at sums exceeding £6 is 260,000. In other words, the new voters, having less than a £10 qualification, would number about three-fourths of the present constituency, and in many boroughs, as we have seen above, would greatly outnumber it.

tails. As we have pointed out some of the defects of the Reform Bill of 1832, we have likewise desired to indicate the general course by which it seems to us that these defects may be, if not removed, at least lessened. We shall be glad, also, if the moral of the story we have been drawing from Sir A. Alison's pages be not lost sight of. At the sight of so much trouble and danger safely passed through, we may take comfort, and feel reassured amidst our present embarrassments. We shall be glad, also, if our statesmen lay to heart the truth, that it is misgovernment, want of wisdom in the rulers, and consequent suffering in the people, that is the real parent of political discontent and desire for change. It will be lastingly for the good of the empire, if, by

the example of the past, they learn to beware of great changes in the constitution, seeing how seldom even the foremost men of the age discern the true tendencies of the measures which they originate. And from the terrible crisis of 1830-2, when the inflammatory harangues and political agitation of the Whig chiefs brought the country to the very verge of civil war, and hurried themselves into a position from which they would willingly have receded, may the leaders of all parties learn moderation and a truer patriotism; that so the country, in those crises and changes which await it, may be agitated by no factitious passions, and be spared the calamity of having itself tortured and blinded to suit the purposes of party.

POLYNESIA.

WE are accustomed, with some slight degree of arrogance, to look upon our own race, the Anglo-Saxon, as the one that has spread most widely and generally over the face of the globe. Considering that the whole of the great continent of North America is almost entirely occupied by this race, and that Australia is almost equally so, that we rule by scattered individuals over the vast empire of India, and that we have colonies, or forts, or garrisons, north and south, east and west, in every portion of the earth's surface, the boast is perhaps not altogether unfounded. Still the Spanish and Portuguese nations, taken together as one race, are almost equally wide spread. With almost all the Atlantic Island, with Mexico in North and with all South America, except the little patches in Guyana, with Cuba in the West Indies, and the Philippines in the East, they occupy and possess perhaps as large a portion of the surface of the earth as the English and Americans.

It is, however, only four hundred years since both these European races

*

were strictly limited and confined within the narrow bounds of their own original territories, mere spots upon the globe.

Long, long years before that-solong that neither history, nor tradition of their first emigration,† nor any memory even of the place whence they sprang, can now be traced there was a great widely spread race of people, whose extension over the globe even now exceeds our own, and equals that of ours and the peninsulars aforesaid taken together, if we regard mere distance, measured by latitude and longitude, and not the area of land included in it. This great race is the MalayoPolynesian. Some ethnologists include in it even the inhabitants of Madagas car. If that be a well-founded classification, the race extends from the east coast of Africa through the Indian and Pacific Islands to Easter Island and Waihou, no very great distance from the west coast of South America, or over a space of 220 degrees of longitude. This is considerably more than half, and very nearly two-thirds, of the

"Polynesian Mythology." By Sir George Grey. London: Murray. 1855.

We do not here mean to refer to any traditions of migration among themselves, from one country or island to another, but to the first origin and primal spread of the race, in consequence of which they became possessed of the general area they now occupy.

circumference of the globe. If, however, we throw aside Madagascar as doubtful, and commence with Sumatra only, we still have 160 degrees of longitude, or four-ninths of the circumference of the earth occupied principally by people of a common origin.*

What do we mean, however, by this term "common origin"? because the reader might say all men have a common origin. We mean, then, that the different nations of the great Malayo-Polynesian race are much more intimately connected among themselves by physical structure and appearance, by habits, manners, and customs, both of thought and practice, by the character of their laws, of their original religion, of their polity, and distinctions of social rank, and lastly, and above all, by their language, than they are with any other nations or races.

Their languages may be divided into two great groups-the Malay and its dialects, spoken in all the islands of the Eastern Archipelago, from Sumatra to the Philippines, and the Polynesian, spoken over all the great Pacific Ocean, from New Zealand to the Sandwich Islands, and from the Carolinas to Easter Island. Even these two separate groups, however, have hundreds of words in common, as may be seen by referring to Mariner's "Tonga Islands." Mariner, an uneducated sailor, who learned the Polynesian language in the Friendly Islands, knew the meaning of several hundred words of Malay, as given in Marsden's dictionary of that language, compiled from the tongue as spoken at Malacca.

We all know how intimate is the connexion between German and English, how many words are similar in the two languages, so that the scholar sees at once that they spring from a common root. But try this test upon them; take an uneducated Englishman, who never heard German spoken, and go through the German dictionary, repeating each word to him, and see how many he will be able to understand and translate, and you will find the number very small indeed compared with the number of Malay which

Mariner was able to understand from his knowledge of the Polynesian. Yet the Malays and the Friendly Islanders have no knowledge of each other, never even heard of each other, and inhabit countries some five thousand miles apart.

No other similar instance among uncivilised nations is known in the world; but there is still more than this. The language spoken all over the Pacific Ocean is absolutely one, and the natives of all the different islands find themselves able to converse with each other

freely whenever they meet, quite as freely as a Yorkshire man and a Somersetshire man can talk together, if not more so. But the distance between the Sandwich Islands and New Zealand is about five thousand geographical miles, while from the northern extremity of the Marshall islands to Easter Island the distance is close upon six thousand miles. This would be about the same thing, so far as space is concerned, as if we were to suppose good English spoken exclusively from the west coast of Ireland into Independent Tartary, or from England along the shores and islands of the Atlantic as far as the Brazils.

But it is even yet more remarkable than those supposed cases would be, because the people thus united by a common tongue are separated by wide spaces of ocean, and inhabit little groups of islands or small isolated islets, that are often very difficult to find, even by European navigators, with all our present resources of nautical science.

It becomes nothing less than marvellous when we consider that these people have contrived to light upon every habitable spot, however small, and however distant from the rest, throughout all this vast space, with their frail barks, and trusting to the winds and stars alone for guidance.

The islands of the Pacific are of two kinds the high islands and the low islands: the former made of ordinary rock, usually volcanic; the latter almost entirely coral islands.

Of these the coral islands are the most remarkable, both for the singu

There is included within the Malayo-Polynesian area the great island of Australia, and the considerable islands of New Guinea, New Ireland, New Caledonia, &c., occupied by a different race of people. The great Malayo-Polynesian race spread round these, having been unable probably to occupy them, from the barrenness of the soil in the case of Australia, and from the numbers and fierceness of the people in the case of the Papuan Islands.

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