Blackburn cannot boast of its conduct in this contest, which
will, we hope, be the subject of judicial inquiry ; but it may boast of its Mayor. He talks broad Lancashire,—perhaps on purpose,— but he is a man who can govern. Eighty thousand men attended the nomination, stones began to fly, and in a moment hundreds of lives might have been lost, when the Mayor roared out, " I've got the Riot Act, and if you are not quiet, I'll tell the soldiers behind there to pitch into you." The enormous crowd knew their man, knew also that the soldiers were there, and subsided into perfect order. We trust both parties will join to elect that Mayor again, and so give a practical proof that they prefer order to anarchy. It is not the interest of either Tories or Liberals to renew the scenes of Belfast in every English borough, and they can be prevented only by a resolute determination that the law shall be upheld, if -needful by the bayonet. Some of the Radicals seem to us per- fectly crazy upon this point,—to think it better that a city should be sacked than a life taken by the magistrates. We warn them that every unprevented outrage of the kind makes Tories by the thousand.
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