THE RECORD COMMISSION. * Be it known unto thee, most patient and indulgent of readers, that there are two professing Christians named Francis Palgrave and Nicholas Harris Nicolas, both styling themselves Esquires and Barristers at Law, who, however little thou mayest hitherto have suspected the singular fact, actually exist at the present moment in this world of sorrow and strife. The one, indeed, accuses the other of having ungenerously attempted to reduce him "to a kind of abstract idea" (Remarks, p. 5); but if he really be what his learned opponent is here charged with asserting, he is indisputably the most wearisome and unsatisfactory creation of the sort that ever essayed, since the confusion of tongues, to usurp possession of a mortal pericranium. These two personages, then, or "abstract ideas," for we would not at any price enter into a verbal controversy with either, are, it seems, very cunningly versant, proportionally of course to the rushlights of their respective understandings, in the curious devices, and, up to this blessed hour, imperfectly revealed mysteries of antiquarian lore. They have each, according to their own several representations, dived deep under the uninviting surface of writs, records, and parliamentary summonses, and in the course of their mole-like, and, we should imagine, little-to-be-envied, adventures, their solid and singularly fashioned repositories of wisdom, happen, unfortunately for the indolent enjoyment of their tempers, to have come into rather violent and passion-exciting collision. Whilst the "abstract idea" or human being, prefigured under the uncommon, and we must say somewhat startling, name of Palgrave, is an Editor, it is asserted, who receives liberal golden acknowledgments for superintending a republication, now in progress, of certain national muniments said to be extremely important; Mr. Nicolas is an assiduous labourer in the same "pleasant land of drowsy-head," and is yet obliged to content himself, and fatten his ten interesting children, with the unprofitable eulogiums of a few "leaden-eyed" friends. In part at least therefore, we, perhaps illnaturedly and with injustice, suppose "hinc illæ lachrymæ." But be that as it may, Mr. Nicolas took up his testimony against the comfortable and unsuspecting Mr. Palgrave in a pamphlet, of which the title stands at the foot of the page, and which was published about the month of November, 1830. This production is a following up of the recent exposés of Mr. Babbage and Sir James South, and reveals to the paying public sundry exceedingly rotten places in the Society of Antiquaries, in the Tower, and other repositories where historical documents are preserved; and above all, in the management of the Record Commission, which was appointed 1.-Observations on the state of Historical Literature, and on the Society of Antiquaries and other institutitions for its advancement in England; with remarks on Record Offices, and on the proceedings of the Record Commission; addressed to the Secretary of State for the Home Department, by Nicolas Harris Nicolas, Esq. Barrister at Law.-Pickering, 1830. 2.-Remarks submitted to the Right Hon. Viscount Melbourne, Secretary of State for the Home Department, in reply to a pamphlet addressed to him by Nicholas Harris Nicolas, Esq., and entitled "Observations, &c.," by Francis Palgrave, Esq., of the Inner Temple, Barrister at Law.-Hatchard and Son, 1831. 3.-Refutation of Mr. Palgrave's Remarks, &c., &c., with additional facts relative to the Record Commission, and Record Offices, by Nicholas Harris Nicolas, Esq.Pickering, 1831. by Parliament to develope, by the diffusive aid of print, whatever was interesting or important in the MS. archives of the state. Ostensibly, in furtherance of the laudable object which the soi-disant representatives of the nation contemplated, money has been lavished, literally by the imperial measure, to a "rabble rout" of individuals rejoicing under the various imposing denominations of editors, co-editors, correctors of the press, compilers of indexes, transcribers, and bag-bearers; to Messrs. Playford, Illingworth, Vanderzee, Luders, Raithby, Caley, Bayley, Holbrook, and other curiosities of the same order, whose names, we will venture to say, were never before heard of, or even imagined, by any regularly-baptized and instructed human being, with the single exception, peradventure, of the incautious anti-Malthusians that begot them. But positively nothing has as yet been accomplished, or is ever likely to be, under the present system of management, in the true spirit with which the publication was originated, and should have been conducted; for instead of separating the wheat from the chaff, in the way that prudence would dictate, every particle of good seed has been absolutely overwhelmed in the compilations of our government employés, under a grievous cruelty-to-animal waggonload of utterly unproductive and indescribably loathsome rubbish. The only point in which these pearl-divers of history have been pharisaically scrupulous, is in charging for their invaluable, and truly not-to-be-appreciated, labours, as the following succinct tables, which we borrow from Mr. Nicolas, will much more clearly illustrate than an hundred pages of merely verbal detail. 1. A Statement sheving, at one view, the whole amount expended on each of the Works published by the Record Commission from 1801 to 1829. This is only part of the expense of this work; the remainder being paid previous to the institution of the Commission. + Query if this be the whole cost of this work? 2. Total amount expended by the Record Commission from 1801 to 1829. Salaries and temporary wages in England and Scotland, from Printing, binding, and stationery, in England, from 1801 to Transcribing, binding, and securing records in England, from Printing, binding, paper, warehouse room, insurance, advertising Paid, as wages, to editors, collectors, transcribers, &c. for literary 101,719 16 5 : Deduct sum produced by the sale of the works printed by the Record Commission, from 1812 to 1827 5,237 17 Returned expenditure up to 1829 £403,096 15 Assuming that the English Commission has spent, or contracted to spend, the same sum since March, 1829, as in the year preceding, there will be, from March, 1829, to March, 1831, about 4 63 26,000 0 70,000 0 Assuming that the Irish Commission has proceeded at the same Conjectured expenditure since 1827 £143,000 0 0 The sum total which appears to have been spent on the public records in England, Scotland, and Ireland, between 1800 and 1830, is £546,096 15s. 63d.!! A person named Caley alone has pocketed, according to the returns-in the various characters of editor, co-editor, secretary, and keeper-the enormous sum of 14,6297. 10s. of the public money; and our ideal friend Palgrave, who turns out to be infinitely less etherial in his appetites than we had fancied, has actually been receiving, during the long space of seven years, the very comfortable pension of 500l. per annum, for the ingenious labour of collecting and clipping certain enigmatical bits of paper, and arranging and fashioning them into two unwieldly folios, termed "Parliamentary Writs and Rolls of Parliament." Honest Francis, if he be not an "abstract idea,” which he indignantly denies, There is great difficulty in ascertaining what sums have been spent by the Commission, between March, 1927, and 1829, as no general return for those years has been made. The statements relative to that period are taken chiefly from Return No. V., but there may have been other disbursements. and we now believe, possesses an admirable idea and plan of abstracting a pleasant modicum of the national resources. On adverting to such gross abuses of the public interests and patronage, and looking back to what we have written in our introductory remarks, we must candidly confess that we have there treated Mr. Nicolas with some considerable injustice. Joking apart, he is really by far the most intelligent and practically useful of our modern antiquaries; and under any circumstances he deserves the best thanks of his country, for the well-timed exposure of mismanagement in his peculiar department of knowledge with which he has distinctly and satisfactorily presented us in his pamphlets on our table, at the expense of much labour and personal obloquy from the Sloths in office, who chanced to be affected by his honest criticisms on their hopeless incapacity and humbug. THE REFORM BILL. THE first summons of Parliament on record bears date from the 49th Henry III.; it extended to the counties and a few cities; shires were first summoned in the 18th Edward III.; the first regular returns for cities and boroughs appear in the same year. At the accession of Henry VIII., at which period the worser corruptions of the House of Commons may be said to have commenced, the cities and boroughs that sent representatives to Parliament were 108 in number. Henry added 5 boroughs; his son, Edward, or rather his son's council, 24; Mary 12; Elizabeth 32: James I. 12; Charles I. 9; Charles II. 2; making in the whole, 206. The 24 Welch representatives were added by act 27th Henry VIII. The Union with Scotland in 1707 brought 45 cannie northerns "to herd them with the English epicures ;" and, lastly, the Irish Union in 1800, sent over 100 of the natives to bother John Bull with emancipation, vestry acts, grand juries, home-grown tobacco, and the ten thousand other causes of fire and smoke, that have agitated, do agitate, and will agitate poor old Ireland, as long as there is a finger to stir, or a breath to blow. The House of Commons is at present made up of82 knights 50 citizens 332 burgesses 5 4 16 barons 12 knights (Wales) 12 burgesses ditto 15 burgesses ditto 64 knights (Ireland) 36 burgesses ditto 658 returned by 40 counties and shires, York county returning 4. 24 cities; London returning 4. 166 boroughs, returning 2 each. 5 2 universities. 8 cinque-ports. 12 counties. 12 districts of boroughs. 33 counties. 15 districts of burghs. 32 counties. 1 each. 34 boroughs and the university, Dublin returning 2. The forms of tenure, on which the exercise of the elective franchise depends, in the several boroughs of England, are almost as numerous as are the boroughs themselves; the greater part of them may, however, be reduced to five heads-first, corporation boroughs, where the right of voting is in the magistrates, and a select body variously denominated; second, corporation boroughs, where the right is in the freemen; third, non-corporate boroughs, where the vote depends on estates freehold or burgage; fourth, scot and lot boroughs, where the franchise is vested in the whole of the householders; fifth, potwalloping boroughs, where it is vested in the whole of the inhabitants. The first class, it is evident, must have been close from their origin; the third and fourth have in many instances become close from accident. The extent of property on which the franchise originally depended was necessarily limited; the whole, or the greater part, has come, by purchase or other conveyance, into one or two hands, who regulate the number of houses and holdings according to their pleasure, and, consequently, nominate the member. The potwalloping or universal suffrage boroughs are few in number; the boroughs where freemen have a vote are mostly open; but the admissibility of non-resident voters renders them nearly as objectionable as the close boroughs. The above general description applies, à peu près, to the boroughs of Ireland and Wales, as well as of England. The franchise in Scotland is peculiar. The burghs* (as the people of the North term them) are arranged in groups of four or five, so as out of 65 towns to form 14 groups, each returning one member; the capital alone returns one for itself. The voters of a Scotch burgh constitute a sort of electoral college, about two-thirds of which are chosen by themselves, and are called merchant councillors; the other third are chosen by the freemen of the incorporated trades; a Scotch burgh council averages about 25 individuals. In electing a member, the 25 councillors choose, first of all, an intermediate representative, who is called a delegate, and the four or five delegates, as the case may be, assembling in one of the burghs (they take it by rotation) choose the member; the delegate of the burgh where the election is holden having the casting vote, in case of an equality. Such is the nature of borough election franchise in the United Kingdom. The vote for a county member in England and Wales is vested in the proprietors and leaseholders for life of freehold property of the clear anuual value of 40s.; in Ireland, by the act of 1829, the qualification has been raised from 40s. to 10. In Scotland, the qualification is 400 pounds Scots, of old valuation, amounting, in the money of the present day, to nearly 8001.; but by a peculiar form of conveyance, called sub-infeudation, the land may be separated from the qualification, so that a man may have a vote without a farthing's worth of property, and, vice versa, he may have a thousand acres of land and no vote. language of Scotch law, the right of the superior or over-lord, which constitutes the qualification, is termed the dominium directum; the right of the feuar, or actual possessor of the property, is termed the dominium utile. In the The great object of the Reform Bill is to exclude partial interests from the House of Commons, and this it is proposed to effect by a threefold process :-First, by disfranchising altogether such boroughs as, from the changes of centuries, or their original insignificance, do not possess a population sufficient to enable them, under any circumstances, to return a member to parliament uninfluenced by the proprietor or proprietors in their neighbourhood; secondly, by restoring, in some cases, and by granting in others, the right of returning members to populous towns and districts; thirdly, by regulating the qualification of voters in such a way as to vest in the community at large the rights which in most corporate towns have hitherto been exercised by small knots of men, nominally for the community, but really for themselves; and in the Scotch counties for themselves, both nominally and really. There are other points in the Bill, but these are the principal. The It has been assumed that householders renting houses of less than 101. are not likely to give a free and unbiassed vote. The proportion between such householders and the population is different in different places; in Cheltenham it is about 1 to 7 in Manchester it is only 1 to 30, and in Leeds 1 to 40; in Blackburn it is so low as 1 to 50. Assuming the average proportion to be 1 to 20, a population of 2,000 would give as a maximum, under the proposed qualification, 100 voters, a number which, under no qualification, is it supposed possible to keep free from improper influence. Bill therefore disfranchises all boroughs whose population falls short of 2,000. To boroughs exceeding 2,000, but not exceeding 4,000 inhabitants, it proposes to give in future only one member, not because 200 voters might not be properly entrusted with the right of returning two, but because two are more than fairly fall to the share of 200 voters, viewing them in connexion with the other voters of the United Kingdom. The number of boroughs which will lose their franchise entirely by reason of this ar The word (brugh, burgh, borough) seems primarily to have signified a circle, and in the northern part of the island it is still used in that sense; derivatively it was applied to a circular fort, and, lastly, to walled towns. |