AN OVERLOOKED LEGISLATIVE DIFFICULTY.
How can any Legislature make or mend laws in accordance with. the opinions and wishes of the whole community ? It could more easily legislate for its own. class in foreign countries. Our enormous community is so divided, that one class can hardly judge of the feelings, opinions or manners and customs, of the others. Our Police reports teletales of horror—to us : are the facts always so shocking to the classes concerned ?
At Lambeth this week, Thomas Kingsbury, a costermonger, was accused of violently assaulting Mrs. Susan Clayton, the wife of a bricklayer • who related the circumstances under which she was assaulted. Mrs. Clayton and Kingsbury are neighbour lodgers; there was a great disturbance in Kmgsbury's room, and Mrs, Clayton went up-stairs to interfere ; she found. Kings-
bury beating "his young woman," who was lying on the floor exhausted and faintly calling for help ; on which Mrs. Clayton exclaimed, "Don't kill her, don't kill her ! she don't deserve it!" The defence did not consist in any denial of this account, but in a counter-statement. It was affirmed on Kingsbury's behalf, that Mrs. Clayton herself was not mild in her form of intervention ; and the fact that she had accidentally left in Kingsbury's room a poker which she had carried up-stairs to assist in her mediation strongly confirmed the account of her vivacity. But there was another circumstance. Since the dispute, she had been invited by Kingsbury's mother to attend a wedding, at which both a son and a daughter of Mrs. Kingsbury senior were married ; in this wedding ceremony Mrs. Clayton took part, and she appears to have been handsomely treated as a guest. The son that was married was no other than the hero of the combat ; and the bride was the young woman whom he had been banging—as she said at the Police-office, it was "a lover's quarrel." Mrs. Clayton's husband, however, thought that she was bound to persevere with the charge.
Now what man living among the classes which are represented there can enter into the feelings of the society in which Mr. Kings- bury and Mrs. Clayton live, where combats, weddings, and police litigation alternate ? It is impossible. The only way to legislate for traeh a class, on strict representative principles, would be by direct representation ; letting the class form an electoral college of its own, to send in its own Member—probably Thomas Kings- bury, Esq., M.P.
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