THE HUMORS OF THE FRANCHISE CAMPAIGN.

Evening Star, Issue 6711, 1 October 1884, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE HUMORS OF THE FRANCHISE CAMPAIGN.

Sir Wilfred Lawson bids fair to become a popular hero in denouncing the action of the majority of the Peers. He lifted the meeting off its feet, and displayed a sinewy vigor and savage earnestness that will enable him to play a leading part in the agitation of the autumn. He is a Bplendid demagogue. Sir Wilfred Lawson never told a befr.sr story than when he compared Lord Salisbury to the Jew whom the Spanish mob encouraged to go to the stake by crying "Stand firm, Moses!" lest they should be cheated out of the spectacle of the aula da ft by his recantation. " Stand firm, words of the campaign. In onn respect Mr Bright certainly carried off the oratorical honors on the Liberal Bide last Saturday. Everyone seems to have been looking up quotations to express the attitude of the House of Lords in rejecting the Franchise Bill they "loved BO well." Lord Hartington did not carry the search very far, and trotted out the hackneyed lines of KembJe :

Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love, But why did you kick mo downstairs'.' Mr Mundella's effort was, as befitted a Minister of Education, more classical. It seemed, he said, that the Tories had been suffering all this time from suppressed love of the franchise. They had voted steaoily against it, but only to conceal their passion for it. They reminded him of the lady in " Twelfth Night" : She never told her love, But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, Feed on her damask cheek.

Lord Salisbury called the present House of Commons a servile one; but certainly it had nev<rr been servile to him, while he had three times eaten the leek which the House of Commons had presented to him. Better in every respect was Mr Bright's quotation from Rob the Grinder in "Dombcy and Son": "Can't you be fond of a cove without a-squeedging him and a-throttling him ?" Mr Bright was always remarkable for his command of apt quotation from well-known English authors, and in this respect at least his tongue has lost none of its cunning. Sir John Lubbock added two happy phrases to the sarcastic literature which is accumulating on the subject of the passion of the Peers for the Franchise Bill. George Eliot, ho said, describes one of her characters—a certain boy—as being very fond of birds ; "that is to say," she adds, "of throwing stones at them." Such was the fondness of the Peers for the county franchise. "In some partß of Australia we are told that when a man marries every one of his bride's relations gives him a good blow on the head with a club, by way of a warm welcome into the family. This is the sort of way in which the Lords have welcomed the Franchise Bill."—'Pall Mall Gazette.'