In the session of last night Lord John Russell brought before the House of Commons his motion for the removal of some disabilities of Her Majesty s Jewish subjects. The motion was carried by a majority of 29. Thus the question is again settled in the House of Commons, but there is no doubt that it will be once more unsettled in the House of Lords. The exclusion of Jews from the House of Commons,: after the spirit of usury has so long presided. in the British Parliament, is unquestionably an absurd anomaly, the more so as they have already become eligible to all the civil offices of the community. But it remains no less characteristic for the man and for his times, that instead of a Reform Bill which was promised to remove the disabilities of the mass of the English people, a bill. is brought in by Finality John for the exclusive removal of the disabilities of Baron Lionel de Rothschild. How utterly insignificant an interest is taken in this affair by the public at large, may be inferred from the fact that from not a single place in Great Britain a petition in favor of the admission of Jews has been forwarded to Parliament. The whole secret of this miserable reform farce was betrayed by the speech. of the present Sir Robert Peel. The proceedings on election-petitions have commenced. The elections for Canterbury and Lancaster have been declared null and void, under circumstances which proved the habitual venality on the part of a certain class of electors, but it is pretty sure that the majority of cases will be adjusted by way of compromise. On the 21st inst., Lord John Russell resigned the seals of the Foreign Office, and Lord Clarendon was sworn in as his successor. Lord John is the first Member of the House of Commons admitted to a seat in the Cabinet without any official appointment. He is now only a favorite adviser, without a place and without salary. Notice, however, has already been given by Mr. Kelly of a proposition to remedy the latter inconvenience of poor Johnny s situation. The Secretaryship of Foreign Affairs is at the present juncture the more important, as the Germanic Diet has bestirred itself to ask the removal of all political refugees from Great Britain, as the Austrians propose to pack us all up and transport us to some barren island in the South Pacific. Allusion has been made, in a former letter, to the probability of the Irish Tenant Right agitation becoming, in time, an anticlerical movement, notwithstanding the views and intentions of its actual leaders. I alleged the fact, that the higher Clergy was already beginning to take a hostile attitude with regard to the League. Another force has since stepped into the field which presses the movement in the same direction. The landlords of the north of Ireland endeavor to persuade their tenantry that the Tenant League and the Catholic Defense Association are identical, and they labor to get up an opposition to the former under the pretense of resisting the progress of Popery. While we thus see the Irish landlords appealing to their tenants against the Catholic clergy we behold on the other hand the English Protestant clergy appealing to the working classes against the mill-lords. The industrial proletariat of England has renewed with double vigor its old campaign for the Ten-Hours Bill and against the truck and shoppage system. As the demands of this kind shall be brought before the House of Commons, to which numerous petitions on the subject have already been presented, there will be an opportunity for me to dwell in a future letter on the cruel and infamous practices of the factory-despots, who are in the habit of making the press and the tribune resound with their liberal rhetorics. For the present it may suffice to recall to memory that from 1802 there has been a continual strife on the part of the English working people for legislative interference with the duration of factory labor, until in 1847 the celebrated Ten-Hours Act of John Fielden was passed, whereby young persons and females were prohibited to work in any factory longer than ten hours a day. The liberal mill-lords speedily found out that under this act factories might be worked by shifts and relays. In 1849 an action of law was brought before the Court of Exchequer, and the Judge decided, that to work the relay or shift-system, with two sets of children, the adults working the whole space of time during which the machinery was running, was legal. It therefore became necessary to go to Parliament again, and in 1850 the relay and shift-system was condemned there, but the Ten-Hours Act was transformed into a Ten and a Half Hours Act. Now, at this moment, the working classes demand a restitution in integrum of the original Ten-Hours Bill; yet, in order to make it efficient, they add the demand of a restriction of the moving power of machinery. Such is, in short, the exoteric history of the Ten-Hours Act. Its secret history was as follows: The landed aristocracy having suffered a defeat from the bourgeoisie by the passing of the Reform Bill of 1831, and being assailed in their most sacred interests by the cry of the manufacturers for Free Trade and the abolition of the Corn Laws, resolved to resist the middle-class by espousing the cause and claims of the working-men against their masters, and especially by rallying around their demands for the limitation of factory labor. So called philanthropic Lords were then at the head of all Ten-Hours meetings. Lord Ashley has even made a sort of renomm e by his performances in this movement. The landed aristocracy having received a deadly blow by the actual abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846, took their vengeance by forcing the Ten-Hours Bill of 1847 upon Parliament. But the industrial bourgeoisie recovered by judiciary authority, what they had lost by Parliamentary legislation. In 1850, the wrath of the Landlords had gradually subsided, and they made a compromise with the Mill-lords, condemning the shift-system, but imposing, at the same time, as a penalty for the enforcement of the law, half an hour extra work per diem on the working classes. At the present juncture, however, as they feel the approach of their final struggle with the men of the Manchester School, they are again trying to get hold of the short-time movement; but, not daring to come forward themselves, they endeavor to undermine the Cotton-lords by directing the popular force against them through the medium of the State Church Clergymen. In what rude manner these holy men have taken the anti-industrial crusade into their hands, may be seen from the following few instances. At, Crampton a Ten-Hours meeting was held, the Rev. Dr. Brammell [of the State Church], in the chair. At this meeting, Rev. J. R. Stephens, Incumbent of Stalybridge, said: At the great Ten Hours meeting, at Burnley, Rev. E. A. Verity, incumbent of Habbergham Eaves, told his audience among other things: The motive, that has so suddenly metamorphosed the gentlemen of the Established Church, into as many knight-errant of labor s rights, and so fervent knights too, has already been pointed out. They are not only laying in a stock of popularity for the rainy days of approaching democracy, they are not only conscious, that the Established Church is essentially art aristocratic institution, which must either stand or fall with the landed Oligarchy there is something more. The men of the Manchester School are Anti-State Church men, they are Dissenters, they are, above all, so highly enamored of the 13,000,000 annually abstracted from their pockets by the State Church in England and Wales alone, that they are resolved to bring about a separation between those profane millions and the holy orders, the better to qualify the latter for heaven. The reverend gentlemen, therefore, are struggling pro aris et focis. The men of the Manchester School, however, may infer from this diversion, that they will be unable to abstract the political power from the hands of the Aristocracy, unless they consent, with whatever reluctance, to give the people also their full share in it. On the Continent, hanging, shooting and transportation is the order of the day. But the executioners are themselves tangible and hangable beings, and their deeds are recorded in the conscience of the whole civilized world. At the same time there acts in England an invisible, intangible and silent despot. condemning individuals, in extreme cases, to the most cruel of deaths, and driving in its noiseless, every day working, whole races and whole classes of men from the soil of their forefathers, like the angel with the fiery sword who drove Adam from Paradise. In the latter form the work of the unseen social despot calls itself forced emigration, in the former it is called starvation. Some further cases of starvation have occurred in London during the present month. I remember only that of Mary Ann Sandry, aged 43 years, who died in Coal-lane, Shadwell, London. Mr. Thomas Peene, the surgeon, assisting the Coroner s inquest, said the deceased died from starvation and exposure to the cold. The deceased was lying on a small heap of straw, without the slightest covering. The room was completely destitute of furniture, firing and food. Five young children were sitting on the bare flooring, crying from hunger and cold by the side of the mother s dead body. On the working of forced emigration in my next.
Karl Marx in the New York Tribune 1853