On this page
-
Text (1)
-
Untitled Article
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
-
-
Transcript
-
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.
Untitled Article
deemed necessary . And it is rather amusing to see them now , ir > all the strength of power and popularity , lift up their hands in in liocent surprise at Tory flagitiousness . With few thinking men tvho are sincere friends to Parliamentary Reform , as the means of good government , has the subject of the Ballot gained any additional importance by the events of last year . JLittle was said about it , because Ministers would not include it in their Bill .
and the aim of all sincere reformers , and their most imperative duty , obviously was , whatever the Bill might leave undone , to get it passed as soon as possible , for the sake of what it would accomplish . If the subject last year was not worth an argument , it was not because enlightened men had forgotten its importance , not because it had ceased to be the best , most probably the only mode of meeting the specific evil to which public attention is now directed , but because the circumstances of the times afforded
an opportunity of which it behoved all honest men to avail themselves , of putting down other evils by means of the other remedies which the Reform Bill provided . Anterior to the diversion of public attention from this branch of the subject by the introduction of that Bill , a conviction of the desirableness of the Ballot had spread very extensively through the country . The powerful article in the Westrninste
rReview for July , 1830 , commonly ascribed to the historian of British India , and the pamphlet entitled , ' A Discussion of Parliamentary Reform , by a Yorkshire Freeholder , * attributed , and not unworthily , to Mr . Bailey of Sheffield , were surely not altogether beneath the notice even of an Edinburgh reviewer . To us Southrons these men do not seem mere pigmies for the Northern giants to overlook disdainfully . We know not exactly where to
look for their betters in political and moral philosophy , and are sure that if we did , we should not find men by whom their opinions and reasonings on such a topic would be treated superciliously . The fact is , that the question of the Ballot was an integral portion of the Reform controversy , until it was separated
by the Whig ministry . It had been so for years . From the time when popular demonstrations in favour of Parliamentary Reform seemed crushed by the Manchester massacre , in 1819 , and the passing of the Six Acts , or Code Castlereagh , in the session of parliament which followed , until it became , in the hands of Henry Brougham , the means of destroying the Wellington administration , in 1830 , almost all who advocated Reform
advocated the Ballot also . Nor was there any novelty in this identification . It existed at the very commencement of a desire for Parliamentary Reform . There is an excellent chapter on the subject in ' Burgh ' s Political Disquisitions / published in 1774 , in which , amongst other things , it is mentioned that a bill for electing the Scotch peers by ballot was moved in the House of Peers , a . d . 1734 , and its rejection protested against by many
Untitled Article
76 ] The Edinburgh Review and the Ballot .
-
-
Citation
-
Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1833, page 76, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2608/page/4/
-