The Bane and Antidote

In one way or another the Tories always contrive to turn public abuses to their profit. Sometimes the abuse is extremely lucrative in itself, and then they advocate and support it lustily; sometimes the advantage of the abuse is counterbalanced, in their eyes, by the popular excellence of the system which has contracted it, and then they find it more for their interest to employ it as a screen for their attacks upon the system.

On a comparison of their own interests in the abuses of the Irish system of registration with the popular interest in some of its main features, they found the balance upon the whole adverse to them, and forthwith they started up violent registry reformers. They reasoned that it would be a fine thing both to gain a character for aversion to fraudulent practices, and use those same practices as a colourable basis for a measure depriving the people of Ireland of their franchises.

Out of this honest policy grew Lord Stanley’s Bill, the malignities and hypocrisies of which, or the chief of them, we have already perhaps sufficiently exposed. Our design in now returning to the subject is to place in juxta-position with so unprincipled and mischievous a measure another which professes to remedy the same disorders, and is so framed as to do so without simultaneously disfranchising the country, by making the difficulties of registration almost insuperable.

It was well observed by Lord John Russell on Thursday night—

“The question of registration is a most important one. Much depends on it; and while it was possible, on the one hand, to admit voters not entitled to the franchise, it is just as possible to institute a vexatious system which will narrow the franchise in the greatest possible degree.”

The broad distinction between the Ministerial Bill and Lord Stanley’s is the distinction between annual revision and annual disfranchisement and re-registry. Lord Stanley’s measure would disfranchise Ireland once a year. That of the Irish Government is properly confined to a mere revision upon certain specified grounds. It limits the power of objection, which in the Tory Bill has no bounds, to the cases of—1, Deaths—2, Loss of qualification—3, Personal disqualification—4, Fraudulent personation—5, More than one registration for the same property. These heads will be found to comprise all the cases of abuse that have been alleged to exist or flourish in the system now established.

Providing for these cases fully as effectually as the Tory scheme, the Ministerial plan affords protection to the honest elector, and contemplates the duration of the franchise for eight years, not its fluctuation annually at the mercy of barristers, attorneys, judges, and landlords. The Tory Bill protects nothing but the instruments of annoyance and the powers of oppression. It makes nothing so perishable as liberty, and nothing so permanent as litigation. The design of it is to rip open once a year the question of the elector’s title, and investigate once a year the value of his qualification,—contrary to the principles of natural equity, and contrary to the practice of British law. The Ministerial Bill, on the other hand, conformably to those principles and that practice, proposes to communicate some weight and durability to the decisions of the legal tribunals on points like these, so as to give the electoral system some degree of fixity, and set a limit to litigious and vexatious opposition. The period of eight years is that assigned by the present law as the term of an elector’s right, and clearly the popular tendencies of the Reform Act ought to be maintained, if they cannot be extended.

We have thus to choose between a plan of reforming without destroying, and one that far less effectually reforms than destroys. On one side is a temperate but adequate correction of abuses; on the other an indiscriminate havoc of wrong and right. On one side annual dispossession and unsettlement; on the other a sober but efficacious annual revision. Here a power of objection and vexation without stop or stint; there an equitable limit to objection, nicely drawn between the principle of preserving the purity of the register on the one side, and keeping the approaches to it open and easy on the other. The Whig Bill respects the Reform Act; the Tory Bill characteristically sets it at nought. The Whig Bill regards established rights of individuals; the Tory Bill serves the elector with an annual ejectment from his constitutional holding, the elective franchise, in the hopes of at last exhausting his means of resistance and powers of endurance, and sinking him again into the state of villeinage out of which the law so lately raised him.

The Ministerial Bill, beside empowering the assistant barristers to expunge names from the register in the five cases already enumerated, directs them also to strike off the names of persons registered more than eight years, and not re-registered within that period. Thus every eight years it is proposed to put the elector to the proof of his claims de novo. This is done to conform to what the law prescribes at present; but, as the measure proposed by Lord John Russell for England exempts the voter for life from any such general re-investigation, we should have liked to have seen the same immunity claimed for Ireland, let the chance of obtaining it be ever so small.

We have often had occasion to contrast the delivery of the Tories in attacking the rights of the people with the inferior spirit of Reformers in their proposals to protect and extend them. The effect of this disparity of vigour in the two parties may ultimately be to impair the Reform Act and the other charters and defences of popular power.

The Irish Registration Bill is distinguished from its Tory rival by the absence of all those monstrous innovations of notices, appeals, and costs, which adorn and so well become the latter. The framers of the Ministerial Bill have wisely abstained from wantonly altering established forms, and from violently creating new jurisdictions. They vest the powers of revision in the assistant barristers, whose competency for the task was distinctly admitted by Lord Stanley himself. As they do not propose to drag the entire constituency every year into court, still less do they enact such an enormity as to superadd a suit at the assizes to the suit at quarter sessions, subjecting every elector to a litigation of his rights twice in the twelvemonth, at the hazard of costs, even with a decision of the registering barrister in his favour.

The Tory Bill gives an appellate jurisdiction to the Judges, in order to bring the Tory construction of the law on the test of value to bear upon the Irish constituencies, and thus defeat the unquestionable design of the Reform Act. The Tories propose by one and the same measure to damage the popular interest and tarnish the judicial character. No other instruments but the chief Judges of the land will serve them in their assaults upon the franchise. On the other side, the expediency of a court of appeal is not denied, and a separate bill specially constituting such a jurisdiction accompanies that which provides for the revision of the registries. We rejoice that the tribunal is not to be composed of the Judges, and this upon higher grounds than any consideration of party interest.

The same Bill includes a declaration of the law on the point of value rendered indispensable by the dissensions of the Irish judicial authorities of all degrees upon that vexed question. The declaration conforms to the undoubted intentions of the authors of the Reform Act, manifested not only by their statements at the time, but by the provisions and language of that measure.

Lord Stanley repeated on Thursday night the hypocritical pretence that his Bill deals with Registration only, and abstains religiously from the franchise. In reply to Sir Denham Norreys, his Lordship said—

“He not only objected to the motion, but, waiving that objection, he also objected to the time when it was sought to introduce it; and the intention to add it to the present bill, because if there was one thing more than another which was understood during the progress of the bill, it was that it dealt with registration only; but that every question affecting the franchise was excluded, as a matter which might tend to prevent its passing.”

Not to speak of the drift of the entire measure, what is the meaning of the appeal against the franchise given to the Judges, if it is not to cut the franchise down to the true standard? This we are told is “dealing with Registration only!” The only difference between Sir Denham Norreys and Lord Stanley is that the former seeks to carry his point openly and frankly, the latter obliquely and by guile, after the serpentine fashion of the first Tory.

The truth is, we are well assured, that the main object of the Tory Bill is to garble the 10l. franchise by the operation of this appeal to the ermined pillars of that party. It is as much a 10l. freehold-disfranchisement Bill as the 16th Geo. IV was a 40s. freehold-disfranchisement Bill. Thus Lord Stanley’s true character is that of a Repealer of the Irish Reform Act, and we may be sure he has just as little bowels of compassion for the English. In meditating this blow to one of the greatest measures of Earl Grey’s Government, of which his Lordship was a member, it is not, however, to be supposed that he is guilty of the Titan-like enormity of destroying his own offspring. Lord Stanley’s aims are “steep” without being “Titan-like:” the worst parts of the Irish Reform Act are peculiarly his own, and he now merely proposes to render its illiberal features more illiberal, and to widen the gaps and chasms which he left in it himself to spoil its efficient working.

We understand that it is the intention of Government to offer no further opposition to going into committee on Lord Stanley’s Bill, and that it will contest, and divide on, the very first clause. This will be a pitched battle, and the result must be decisive.