Freeholder And Commercial Advertiser (Newspaper) - May 3, 1852, London, Middlesex AND MAY PRICE THE COUNTY THE motion of Locke the member for for the extension of the franchise by giving the right of voting to all occupiers of tenements of the annual value of has been rejected in the House of as all such questions invariably Last year the Protectionists did not care to oppose and for a wonder it was carried in conse Lord John Russell This year the case is The men who did not care to oppose it last are the foremost to do so Such is the contemptible morality of the statesmen of our To agree to a but to object to the is no new method of quietly extin a proposed The it is no on Tuesday night prac with some success by the present leader in the House of Commons of her and by the late leader of her Both Lord John Russell and Benjamin Disraeli are prepared to give their best attention to the extension of the Both admit that the settlement of the matter by the measure of 31 can be but Lord Johns reasoning was un usually Against Locke Kings motion he could urge All that he could say that more required to be done than Locke King proposed to Cer tainly a fair argument for doing but a poor one for doing nothing at What said as to the extension of the franchise by the Chancellor of the Exchequer was mere We know what to expect from any Ministry of which Lord Derby is the According to concession has reached its limits Is be who im said for he shall not be disap This blessedness the people may thanks to Lord Derby enjoy in no ordinary Of the shortsightedness of Conser his lordship is an illustrious He fears the tide of fears the ancient landmarks will be swept thinks concession has reached its It is a pity his lordship cannot see that if there be that danger should lead to the exten not the of the Thus the danger is Thus you get inside the pale of the constitution men otherwise better Thus you make friends when otherwise you would make In the present state of things there is The enlargement of the county franchise would be one step towards improve There is no need that a line should be drawn between county and borough or that the qualification required for the one be higher than that required for the The that is drawn is almost as ab surd and ridiculous as can well A man may be any rate sufficiently so as to be on a par with an elector of Harwich or he live in a country house for which he pays less than fifty pounds a As a tenpound householders in counties are more respectable than a similar class in Many professional men are thus excluded whilst merely from the accident of living in a the most ignorant ass that ever wore may waddle up to the poll and vote for our glorious constitution in Church and The it has always been is favourable to medita borrowing from tells God made the and man made the If there be a line drawn at it should be in favour of the country We how against any such distinction being A man who pays ten pounds a year as rent in the country has as much right to a vote as the man who pays a similar rent in a parliamentary The chances are in favour of the former being in every way superior to the Lord John Russell should have been the last to oppose Kings motion for King merely seeks to do what the Whigs did for Surely the amount of intelligence and respectability in England is at least equal to that which may be found in the Green We fail to understand why a concession granted the Irish is denied the In common we may demand for the one what is given the after Parliament did right in reject ing Kings Till we have the the extension of the suffrage is a mockery and a We have already too many dependent tradesmen and In the the people must avail them selves of the freehold land and en franchise In a short time the movement will tell with tremendous We shall soon have the freehold land societies at We shall soon have honest electors returning their own in opposition to and and We shall soon see the peoples men in what at present is in no way the peoples neither Kings motion nor Humes will be deemed to go far enough and if this be the manhood suffrage be demanded and the democracy Lord Derby so dreads triumph in the land amongst those who will have done most for this end will be the majority that rejected Kings modest That decision tells the people they have nothing to hope for from Whig or That decision shows Lord John Russell and Benjamin Disraeli alike prepared to oppose the most reasonable reform alike in spite of and and and to oppose all con cession till their obstinate resistance shall have created an antagonism and and which they must and against which they shall be weak as rotten CHURCH secular and amongst worldly minded it is generally admitted that the proof of the pudding is the The House of Commons It is notorious that the Church has with all broad England taxed for her with every parish set apart for with to use a and appropriate phrase a linger in every the verge of Till the Tractarians be came everywhere in its borders was spiritual Indifference and lethargy were visible in every Its spirituality was but a It was a body without a soul As a a pervaded the Men and women were left to die and worse to live with out faith and The remedy for this to an impartial observer we should have The Church has failed in its Let give way to a higher and holier Its bishopric let another Let it no longer stand a stumblingblock in the way of Christian Let its emoluments and powers be given into other Let it cease to shear the sheep it confesses its inability to Not argues the Marquis of Bland The admitted failure of the Church is an argument in its Extend and a change will come over the spirit of its It will no longer be an organization in most cases powerless for It will become a veritable With an energy it never yet it will grapple with the nations wants and It will convert the national heart and Christian virtues shall bud and bloom where now grow with rank luxuriance degradation and vice in their direst Alas to us this conclusion is not so very We see not how more power would give to the Church a purer creed or a loftier lifting it above the State should endow it with more Christian In Popery we see priestly pride can do and Popery is but priestism Power less as the Church asserts itself to it has been active enough in sowing the seeds of religious and crushing religious When the Highest lived and walked this earth of Paul won a way for the reception of the truths he before the first martyrs for the Christian faith faded away a mythology which philosophy had received and poetry had State no State rewarded the converts made in the face of the worlds scorn and still the Christian creed is and still its trophies may be Let the Anglican clergy return to the practice of a purer Let them lead apostolic and imbibe an apostolic and preach an apostolic and a nations regeneration shall be their rich So long as they refuse to do we may not trust them with powers the history of the past teaches us no priests may safely But the House of Commons affirms the ex istence of spiritual We deny the fact in the sense in which the House affirms There are other churches than the Epis and other ministers than those of the Church of Even granting the we deny that the House has any thing to do with the The House of Commons is a political assembly it comprises all shades of religious If it interfere with religion at it ought to interfere to spread the true Now that question the House has not yet Probably the true religion of Fox would savour of heresy to the orthodox Sir Harry If this be the if the House of Commons settle its own one member be a Churchman and another a and a third an it is clear that the House is not in a fair state to decide the religion of the The House mourns the spiritual destitution of the people would be more seemly if the House mourned its The are in a singularly absurd They are compelled to con fess the utter inadequacy of the State Their argument it has notoriously let it be tried They confess the superiority of voluntary They are compelled to confess somehow or it has grappled better with the spiritual wants of man than the cumbrous machinery of a State They are compelled to confess that it has covered pur and peopled our and filled our great hives of in with moral and religious who otherwise would have been left to live and die like brutes and they that as the paro chial in its present won over the people to the a further extension of that system In make parishes for ecclesiastical purposes of not more than will the cviL common saying about the nearer the church the further they hold in merited Hood A daws not reckoned a religious Because it keeps from the steeple but our think With them there is virtue in a As steeples down will go This idea for catching Dissenters is worthy the brain of that eminent naturalist who first re commended catching sparrows by putting a little salt upon their More pigs and fewer said the Norwich Chartists when there was a talk of spiritual destitution More churches and fewer says the House of Com discussing the same To both we More of an unfettered Church strong in its and in that to go forth to the world as did He whose name she the messenger of heavenly truth and THE MONSTER Aw Englishman is accustomed to pride him self on the liberty of his the advanced his national and the freedom of his or How he arrives at so happy a far he may be justified in the it would indeed be difficult to for the working of our Custom House to the test of and ask every travelled citizen for a It will be unanimous in condem nation of after every whilst resolutely asserting the superiority of his rown will always make one in the case of the travelled that exception will un doubtedly be the Custom this is not the only national institution of which the same thing might be said in we know that it is not the only one now attracting much critical and calling for a just and in accordance with the advances of the The inconveniences suffered by travellers in their inwards transit through an English custom house have been over and over again exposed and not only by the im patient victims smarting under the infliction of official but by our liveliest and most attractive with all the ad vantages of coolness and reflection on the sub It is to be demonstrated at any and by multiplied that these incon are as the case may unnecessarily and wantonly that captious frivolous evitable and unmeaning the small greatness of petty official and a lax pecuniary flourish in rank and luxuriance amongst the matadores of the baggage ware house and yet the system lives on from day to from generation to the subject of perpetual grumble and increasing as from year to year the transitory tendencies of our population are more largely yet seemingly as far as ever any chance of vigorous and wholesome The inconveniences of sink into absolute insignificance before the sufferings which our trade and commerce en dure from this withering It would he a great but it would be of immense interest and advantage to our mercantile com to discover the total of annual personal cost of the Custom The extra clerks required to transact the multiplied business of this requiring peculiar qualifi cations and attention the and and consequent loss of encouraged by giving the officers an interest in the booty the elaborate forms and formalities which have to be encountered and provided for at the merchants peril and whenever he comes in contact with the establishment the and forfeitures ever and often irremediable by any amount of care and if estimated in money value would form a startling argument with the citizen for Customs a short arice with its k not so the magnitude of our as at its existence at such bligh ting The more knows of it the greater astonishment same which has achieved our now gigantic in spite of all ob should suffer the inflictions of such a system with so much It is notorious that the British commerce of the nineteenth century is and fre in particular instances by the cumbrous impediment and effete formali ties of a fiscal invented for an age when the policy of the State rather tended to sup press trade than to encourage The Com missioners of the Board of Customs are neither merchants of nor by any previous training for qualified for the duties which they are supposed to There is no sort of supervision or responsi bility to the public acknowledged in their The tribunal is and un less in an Exchequer no charge is ever made only the goods of a offender are and he must state his and make his humble petition to honourable sirs who sit in judgment between him and their own Of the interest of a petitioner in such a case is regarded as directly opposed to their and verdict Litigious and venial officers naturally produce tricky and corrupt A high standard of morality can hardly be expected where the appointments are disposed of as a part of the perquisites of party sup It might often be damaging to the pert flippancy of the if they were obliged to inform the merchant with a written statement in case of stoppage or in that the officer could not shift his as at and so make sure of his It might be inconvenient for the Crown to be subject to costs like common suitors at because some crusty member might select the item occasionally as a speci men of wasteful expenditure consequent on ignorant and stupid and make the most of it in a telling speech on the It might add to the duties of if the responsibility of shipowners were more clearly so that a sulky or malevolent sailor could at any render a with its cargo and liable to seizure and even to for the mere indulgence of spite or as at It might add to the official labour if our transit trade were so regulated as to be relieved from the present irksome and in convenient Much encouragement has been given to British shipping by its em ployment by foreign charterers for the carriage of goods from foreign ports vid England to or America but this transit trade is now rapidly entirely from the obstructions interposed by the Customs the whole cargo though not liable to
