Lord Cochranerose to present the Petition of the distressed inhabitants of the metropolis and the vicinity, praying for reform, agreed to at Spa-fields, on the 2nd of December last. It was signed, he said, by 24,000 names. It complained of the intolerable weight of taxation, of the distresses of the country, and of the squandering of the money extracted from the pockets of an oppressed and impoverished people, to support sinecure placemen and pensioners. It appeared to the noble lord surprising, how there could be any set of men so cruel and unjust as to wallow in wealth at the public expense, while poor 221 wretches were starving at every corner of the streets. The petition was drawn up in temperate, respectful language—more temperate indeed than he would have employed had he dictated the terms in which it should be conveyed. He was instructed to say, in answer to falsehoods and misstatements that had gone abroad, that the meeting which had voted this petition had not been in the least accessary to the riots and disturbances which alarmed the metropolis on the day on which it was voted. These disturbances originated in the violence of certain persons called the Spenceans, who had adopted the wild theory, that the land of the country did not belong to the present proprietors, but to the government, who were bound to make a fair distribution of its produce among the people. Nothing could be more frantic and absurd than such a scheme; for what would ministers, who had already made such rapid strides in ruining the country, with the means put into their hands, not execute if they could grasp all the landed property of the nation? The state to which we were reduced could only have been brought about by a corrupt mode of sending members to parliament. The noble lord adverted again to his own electioneering experience at Honiton, where votes were openly, avowedly, and unblushingly sold. He could produce the bills of the money, he had paid for his seat, and could appeal to the testimony of a member of the House who saw him discharge them. When he asked who was the favourite candidate, he was told by the electors of this borough, that it was Mr. Most, for they would give their support to him who would pay them most for it. A reform was not only necessary to put an end to such disgraceful scenes of bribery and corruption, but to prevent the government from squandering the public money in procuring the return of members, who, in the first instance, cost the country the price of their seats, and ever afterwards sold themselves to the ministry. He was instructed to say, that every obstruction was thrown in the way of procuring signatures to this petition. Publicans were threatened with being deprived of their licences if they either signed it themselves or allowed it to remain for signatures at their houses. The gas-light men were likewise intimidated by their masters. The noble lord would not pledge himself for the truth of these statements; but when the people were suffering so much, when they were labouring under 222 the most grievous distresses of which we can have any conception, or which any tyranny could inflict, death by starvation being as terrible as suffocation in the black hole of Calcutta, he did think that they had a right to state their complaints, and to command an attentive consideration of them. The petition prayed, as a remedy, for annual parliaments and universal suffrage.—The noble lord moved that it be brought up and read, which it was accordingly.
§ Mr. Grenfellwished to submit to the House an observation or two in consequence of this and other petitions, although he was sensible of how little weight his opinions were. He would not touch the great question of parliamentary reform; but, feeling as he did, the blessings we enjoyed as a nation, venerating the constitution of his country from the deepest conviction of the benefits it conferred and the excellence of the institutions it protected; believing that it secured to all who had the happiness to live under it a greater degree of practical liberty and individual enjoyments than ever fell to the lot of any other nation in any other age, he could not free his mind from some alarm at the disorganizing doctrines that were now so industriously propagated—doctrines which had formerly been propagated in this country, which had been abandoned from a sense of the evils with which they were pregnant, and which he never expected to see again prevalent; doctrines which being wildly followed in a neighbouring country had produced results not only disgraceful to human nature, from their atrocity and cruelty, but destructive of liberty itself. Acting under the impression of danger from the wild schemes afloat, but not relaxing in his vigilance in watching the expenditure, and recommending every practical reduction that might allay popular irritation or alleviate national distress, he was prepared to concur in any measures that might have for their object to resist the machinations of those men, some of them deluded, but others wicked and dangerous, who under the name of reform, were endeavouring to effect revolution, and to involve the country in anarchy and confusion.
§ The petition was ordered to lie on the table.