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-these 'powers to examine persons upon oath,' and to enforce the 'production of records'—thus largely and solemnly conferred by the Crown in the very highest of its functions, were proved by the breath of a town-clerk to be neither more nor less than FUDGE! 'I can' said the braggadocio who thought himself a conjurerI can call spirits from the vasty deep :'

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and so thought the Lord Chancellor—

'I can CALL town-clerks with their musty deeds,' without thinking that he incurred the old retort'Why so can I or any other man!

But will they come when you do call for them?' Of such an affront to the royal dignity-of such a mockery of the highest forms of the law-of such a ridiculous mystificationwe are confident no previous example can be found.

It was, however, an appropriate prologue to what was to follow. The next step was the selection of the Commissioners. It might have been expected that an inquiry into such institutions as the Corporations of England would have been intrusted to men of the highest and purest character in the legal profession, and whose position in that profession would have been at once a test of their capacity and a pledge for their fairness. What was the fact? Twenty gentlemen were named in the commission-nineteen of whom, we take upon ourselves to say, were, as barristers, nearly unknown in Westminster Hall-some of them even were strangers in that little nook of the building in which the counsellors indue their wigs and gowns. Two exceptions to this general obscurity there were-Mr. Blackburn, the chief commissioner, had been occasionally heard of as a respectable man of very small practice-and Sir Francis Palgrave, though not, we believe, a practitioner, was advantageously known by several valuable publications relating to the legal and literary antiquities of England. But of the other eighteen names

George Long,

Sampson Augustus Rumball,
Thomas Jefferson Hogg,
David Jardine,

John Elliott Drinkwater,

Thomas Flower Ellis,

Henry Roscoe,

Edward Rushton,

John Buckle,

Fortunatus Dwarris,

George Hutton Wilkinson,
Peregrine Bingham,

Richard Whitcombe,

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we ask our readers and the public, whether they had so much as heard of any one of them as a man of any professional practice, or even pretensions? They may be, for aught we know, gentlemen of the best private characters, and some of them may even

have fair professional prospects-but, we repeat, is there one of them who had, at the date of the commission, not merely such a degree of public reputation as to justify his appointment, but any reputation at all? We might almost ask whether any one had ever

heard of their names?

The causes of such an extraordinary selection were probably three-fold.

First there were, we are well aware, certain private interests to be conciliated, and certain little political debts to be paid. We are not such Utopians as altogether to proscribe the influence of such motives-but for so great a trust, for functions of a judicial and almost inquisitorial nature, we could have wished that political partiality had selected some more prominent, responsible, and trustworthy subjects.

There was another advantage in the selection of these unpractised hands. The old proverb of NEW BROOMS sweeping clean' had lately received a striking illustration; and as nothing is so bold as ignorance, it was reasonably thought that none could be found so fearless and so fit to sweep away all the old institutions of the country, as those who knew nothing about them.

But there was a third still more important point to be secured. The Test laws had, down to 1828, excluded Dissenters from all the corporations of the kingdom. It entered into the Ministry's idea of fairness, that the inquiry into such corporations should be mainly conducted by those men who had been so long excluded from them, and who, therefore, must naturally have felt the most inveterate prejudices and the bitterest hatred against them. A considerable proportion of the Commissioners were of course Dissenters, and it became, therefore, expedient that such members of the Church of England as the Whig and Radical parties could supply should not be of such weight and character as to thwart, impede, or resist their dissenting colleagues in their predisposition to find everything wrong in institutions from which they had been so long and, as they thought, so intolerantly excluded. We mean neither imputation nor offence, and admit, with perfect sincerity, that such a predisposition on the part of gentlemen of dissenting persuasions was natural, and no doubt conscientious-but for that very reason they were the very last men who should have been employed in such an inquiry. It is in human nature-and it is, indeed, the common objection against exclusive institutions-that sectarians must be actuated by re-active prejudices. It was bad enough to have composed the Commission of men who (without, we believe, one single exception) were considered as belonging to the political party that had already denounced and doomed the corporations-it was monstrous to superadd so large and, above

all,

all, so influential a proportion of religious hostility. Every page of the Report and of the Appendix testifies the existence and. force of these unhappy prejudices, and justifies, if not the fairness, at least the foresight which prompted such appointments.

But there is another circumstance very characteristic of this transaction. There were twenty commissioners-so great a number might seem a kind of security against flagrant partiality, personal prejudices, and individual error. But will it be credited that the affair was so arranged, that no one corporation (exceptLondon) was visited by more than two commissioners, and that no less than 137 corporations were delivered over in each case to a single commissioner, by whose partialities, if he was prejudicedby whose errors, when only mistaken-by whose uncontrolled power and unassisted capacity-their fortunes and fate were to be decided. To Mr. Peregrine Bingham were committed 19 towns; to Mr. Edward John Gambier 17; to Mr. James Booth 16; to Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg 14, and so on,

'Through twenty more such names and men as these,' down to Mr. Fortunatus Dwarris, whose remarkable and auspicious name we think we have seen in several of these lucrative commissions, but who appears on this occasion as the autocrat of only two boroughs. Not that this is any reflection on his activity or intelligence, for he seems-Julio et Cæsare Coss.-(Mr. Augustus Rumball being no better than Bibulus)-to have been intrusted with the important and critical district of Durham, Northumberland, Yorkshire, and Westmoreland,-and to have had the examination of certain places illustrious in the debates on the Reform Bill Gateshead, Sunderland, Appleby, Kendal, cum multis aliis. Fortunate MALTON' was also within the district of Fortunatus Dwarris; but fortunate in all ways-MALTON, as well as TAVISTOCK, happening not to be municipal corporations, were exempted from this inquiry, and of course from all the pains, penalties, disfranchisements, and-worst of all-the enfranchisements, which the Bill may impose on less fortunate localities.

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We should like, by the way, to know why-if these new municipal constitutions are so valuable and so necessary to the good government of the several towns-why places of such consideration as to send Two members to parliament, such as MALTON, PETERBOROUGH, and TAVISTOCK, should not have been included in this general bill. There is, indeed, a clause towards the end of the bill which says, that if the INHABITANTS of any town not now corporate shall petition to be included in the bill,' the King may do so;-but the clause does not say, what proportion of the inhabitants, nor if every individual inhabitant must concur—whether pauper or rate-payer, male or female-nor does in any way what

ever define who, for this purpose, shall be considered inhabitants. So that, practically, this clause must be found an utter delusion-another specimen of FUDGE! and we think we can safely assure my LORD FITZWILLIAM and the DUKE OF BEDFORD that, under its provisions, their tranquil supremacy in MALTON, PETERBOROUGH, and TAVISTOCK will not be disturbed by these new charters of incorporation.

But to return to the Commission. From its general composition, we anticipated what the complexion of the Report would be-we had little doubt that we should find it a Thesaurus of all the gossip and scandal which party feuds and sectarian rancour never fail to generate in small localities, and which it would have required men of unbiassed temper and superior sagacity to have weighed and sifted. Such men we have lamentable proof that these Commissioners were not; and we are convinced, that if the holder of the Great Seal had endeavoured to choose men for this office the most inveterately biassed against those whose conduct they had to examine, he could not have made a selection which could have done his business more to his mind.

Accordingly the key-note to which the whole concert has been pitched is PARTY. All the objections to the corporations, however varied or diversified, end in one point-they are party insti tutions. All the imputations against individuals are reducible to one real offence that they are party men. The gravamen of the censure of any proceeding is, that it was done for party purposes; and, with a gross inconsistency in reason, but in perfect accordance with the feelings of human nature-the remedy proposed for the correction of all these party errors is that the power should be transferred to the OPPOSITE PARTY.

Now let us say a few explanatory words on the subject of PARTY, as applicable to the Municipal Corporations. They were, no doubt, the instruments of what the Report calls Party— but it was the party of the Constitution :-not taken up by the corporators on private views or motives, but imposed upon them by law. Our ancestors, and, above all, our Whig ancestors, believed religion, as professed by the Church of England, to be not only the truest guide to eternal salvation and the strongest auxiliary of moral government, but also the best, the safest, and the most effective preservative of civil liberty. For these reasons the Church of England was established by, and incorporated with, the fundamental law of the land, and the corporations were consequently-by no act of their own-by no special bye-law-by no local or individual influence-but by a general constitutional policy, enacted and enforced by the supreme legislative authority of the state-limited and tied down to admit amongst them none

but

but members of the Church of England. If, then, the Church of England was a party, no doubt the corporations had become, since the enactment of the Test laws, party institutions; but so, in that sense, was the whole protestant constitution of England-so, in that sense, was the great settlement made at the Revolution of 1688-so, in that sense, was the accession of the House of Brunswick;—and, so in that sense, had been-not the proceedings of municipal corporations alone, but-all the policy of our legislation and our administration for the last 150 years-the proudest and the happiest period of English history.

Again: Corporations and all other constituted bodies (except only the supreme legislature of the state) were originally instituted and are legally bound to maintain things as they are, until the supreme legislature shall see cause to alter them. Is it therefore wonderful if we find the corporations doing their sworn duty of keeping things as they are, and for that purpose preferring to associate to their powers (in cases where they had an option) those who agreed with them in their view of their legal and constitutional duties, rather than those who professed contrary opinions? This has produced that system which is now-a-days so decried under the designation of self-election that people seem to forget the principle on which it was founded. Any responsible corporate body must in practice be self-elected. Those who have any legal trusts or duties imposed upon them as a body must have the choice of their associates, or they cannot be responsible for the acts of the body. This proposition would admit of various and important developments and illustrations, but our limits do not allow our doing more than suggesting this general antidote to the vulgar prejudice against self-election in corporations. We are satisfied that it will, on experience, be found that, without some degree of practical self-election, there can be no guarantee for the integrity and legality of corporate proceedings.

Be this as it may, the fault, if fault there was-the intolerance, if this was intolerance, the party spirit, as these Commissioners are pleased to designate it, was not attributable to the Corporations, but to the law!-and whatever reason it might afford for altering the constitution of England, it supplied none at all for annihilating the corporations.

But it may be asked, since the test laws have been repealed, have not the Corporations persisted in their ancient system?-Suppose it were so-is it to be wondered at? The corporators are men, and cannot be expected (unless they were all Whigs of the new school) to change their principles with every season. Some time must be allowed to all mankind to assimilate themselves to new situations. Even the inexorability of military dis

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