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204 THE LEADER . [ No . 310 , Saturday ,
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borough notables who would gladly join in a measure to drive away the thieves more effectually , dislike the idea of driving away the votes ; and thus , under cover of resenting central authority , they join the county members ; love of votes sympathising -with dislike of rates . If the true motives to the resistance were avowed it would be more respectable . We could imagine a very refined style of argument vindicating the policemen ' s right to vote at elections , and proving that by giving the sway over the choice of members in -the Town
Coun-SADLEIR OUR WITNESS . "It is an exceptional case , " they say , when we point at any particular instance of the results to which the present temper and custom of " good society" lead . When a Sir John Dean Paul , chairman at so many religious and moral meetings , is found out , " the case , " they cry , "is peculiar ;* ' when the gentlemanly Mr . Strahan is detected , they say , " he has been led away ; " when the Honourable Francis Veuliers levants , " they affect astonishment at
xn the case of the nobleman , whose estates have long ago been impounded for more than their value , who still has goods from his tradesmen at three years' credit , and borrows on the security of the land that has done duty so many times over to defraud the tradesman , or to screw money out of some friends and relatives that combine to compromise his affairs and conceal his disgrace . The substance of the fraud is in all cases the same . It consists in taking money out of the pockets of the unsuspecting-, by telling a lie , and substituting a counterfeit for a reality .
The great excuse is the maxim , " Caveat emptor 1 '—let the buyer beware . We are all of us so wide-awake that if we are taken in it is our own foolery , or our knavery over-reaching itself . " What is this but to say that every Sadleer is surror-nded by Sadleirs ; that we are all of us more or less familiar with the stratagems that he uses , and that in fact he is not the exception that he is represented to be ?
We haveia right to assert that he is a type . The class is not always so completel y developed ; but he is only taller than the plants in the same bed . Such practical and material contradictions of truth could not exist , if it were not for what appears to us to be at this day the ruling vice of society . It is not the drunkenness of the last century , the Don-Juanesque profligacy of the previous century , the royal tyranny of the age before , the priestcraft or baronial turbulence of an earlier acre .
It is not the commercial depravity , ^ vhich is only the ultimate symptom on the surface , though it threatens to undermine our commercial strength , by taking away nationally that character for the " sterling ' which we have lost individually . It consists in the habit which has grown upon us of having a set of morals which we profess to uphold in public , and "betray in private . The code of society decrees certain laws ; the open infraction is punished , the open denial is treated as infamy ;
yet the veiled avoidance is winked at , and the wholesale infraction is tolerated , so that it be not avowed . We preach a law of marriage , while Regent-street swarms with the walking proofs that the rule of theory is not the rule of practice ; but the habit of slighting the conventional law begets the habit of observing and respecting no law at all ; and those who would have chased Mary Wolstonecraft into exile
are guilty of debaucheries , of unblushing infamies , and cowardly betrayals , at which Tom Jones himself would have blushed . We profess rigid commercial exactness : a committee of Parliament now sits to explore a system of wholesale fraud by adulteration ; the leading men of the Turf are debating checks upon wholesale cheating in " debts of honour ; " courts are established to deal with wholesale and
habitual bankruptcy , which earns judicial praise when it just escapes fraud . Thus our commercial classes learn habitual laxity of dealing s by the universal slight of laws which everybody professes to uphold , The only wonder is that a Sadleir could not have hit upon some more bold and ingenious mode of transferring his own bankruptcy to unsuspecting strangers than common forgery or fraudulent sales ; and that he should not have blushed to seek refuge in so foolish a device as suicide , aa if a man should break his heart or hide his head because
he has deceived all round and brought rum upon others . The true shame in our day is for the deception to fail and the ruin to reach ono's self . But no man who will keep his outlay and his professions going—no man who can ride in a carriage , and speak moralities from " the chair , " needs yield to the vulgar f ate oi confession , solf-oondemnation . Look round you when the highest in the land axe mustered
" so remarkable a case ; " when an Arthur Gordon is brought before a criminal court , compassion is felt for the friends and associates , who are so unlike him ; when James Sadleir , an ex-lord of the Treasury , avows forgery and frauds of many kinds , they tell us tha % " Such a case has never happened before . " Now , how do tliey know ? If Mr . Sadleir had succeeded in all his manoeuvres , he would
have made large sums of money ; he would have redeemed the property that he has risked or counterfeited , he would have netted a fortune over and above his liabilities , and he would have been the millionnaire , " commanding" a high place in the House of Commons , if not in . the Upper House : for the claims of wealth are distinctly recognised in this country . How do we know that there is no Sadleir that has not failed ? How that there is
no Sadleir who , although failing , has not found friends to assist him in veiling his disgrace and their own ? Do we not see advertisements in the paper , continually telling A . B . that he " may return , " that ¦ " all has been arranged ; " and if this in most cases applies to run-a-way apprentices , does not the language sometimes suggest the belief that a manager or director may be the fugitive whose place of concealment is kept so secretly ?
Besides how is it possible , in this case , that the delinquent can stand alon e ? The actual forgeries that Mr . Sadleir committed may not have been executed with the privity of others ; but the partners in his ban k must have known their own means ; those who had access to the books must have known the risks which their chief was running , with sums supposed to be in the coffers ; and
somebody must have known what was implied when Mr . Sadleir induced the East Kent Railway Company to deposit £ 8 , 000 of its unemployed capital in the Tipperary bank . If unauthorised , the issue of Swedish Kailway Shares was his own unaided act ; does that issue differ very greatly from the issue which chairmen and directors of railway companies have themselves authorised ? Mr . Sadleir
borrowed money on the security of a deed representing landed estate . The deed was a simple forgery , representing nothing ; in what respect did it differ from railway shares representing no capital at all , but simply constituting surplusage created in order that people who had contributed nothing might draw part of the dividends as if they had paid their quota . In what respect does it differ from the tradesman who professes to sell you coffee , and gives you chicory ? In what , from the conduct of a great shipowner , who borrows money upon more ships than ho has
to stake ; who undertakes to make payments without having any certainty of being able to fulfil his engagement ? In all cases there is money obtained by the protended sale of something that is a fiction , a fraud , a counterfeit ; and in all cases the purchaser is cheated ; the only difference being the amount of the loss . It ia the same with a scion of a noble family who professes to make bets under such circumstances , that the other party may lose money and ho may win it ; but that he has not the money to Jose , and his fellow-sportsman cannot win . Nay , there is no difference
cil to the Town Council itself ^ a certain unity is imparted to the borough , conducive to independence , and strengthening it as a State . We can conceive a still more refined style of argument , which would represent that if country gentlemen or bumpkins were completely protected against ticket-of-leave men , returned convicts , highwaymen , and burglars , they would lose that manliness which is characteristic of the Englishman , and be devoid of any practice to keep their hands in against the
Russians , or any other foreign enemy that might invade our country . But the very same uaen who are pleading for local self-government would at > et a Secretary of State if they expected any degree of political disturbance in the country . They would in a moment vote for concentration upon Yorkshire or Somersetshire . Let there be such riots as would follow ; upon a stoppage of the cotton tradej and we should have bbrough magistrates
in a panic , like those of Bristol , placing the whole government of their city at the disposal of a Captain of Dragpons . / Why , then , should the larger third of Yorkshire , or wide districts in Somersetshire , be left at the mercy of the scoundrels that may wander about , a terror to the defenceless , for the simple reason that those who ^ resist do not see an immediate advantage ^ Ja ^ themselves personally , or to their class , in the adoption of the pleasure ?
The fact is , that local self-government is not the real object of the agitators . If it were , we should never have had either this cry or the necessity for this bill . Because times are quiet , and they think that they can " keep down" the working class without much assistance , the country gentlemen and the borough tradesmen are willing enough to do with as little public machinery as they can , and to keep what they have got in their own hands . Sir
George Grey steps in with his bill , only because they have let one of the first functions of local government go by default . If the tranquillity of the times were disturbed , they - would be howling for more force , a sudden recruitment of the police , or an auxiliary army of soldiers . The very men who are calling put for local government and selfgovernment are denying the yight of the English people , to even so much as a vote at
the election of Members of Parliament . It is true that Sir George Grey ' s bills are too much characterised by the principle of centralisation ; but it is because self-government has locally fallen into an apathy . And the class that now resist dare not call forth the true life and spirit of self-government ^ because if they did they would have the million of the working classes loudly asking for their share . They are
allowing the authority to drift into . the hands of the central Government , because when the proper season offered they refused the full share to the great body of the people itself . They are punished by the power which the central Government is acquiring , of inflicting upon them rates and dictation ; and they would be punished again wlxen rougher times come , because they would stand exposed to the just indignation of . the multitude ;
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Citation
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Leader (1850-1860), March 1, 1856, page 204, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse2.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2130/page/12/
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