PALMERSTON PERPLEXED.
If the energetic Home Secretary had only mentioned to us—confidentially of course—that he contemplated inviting everybody who can use a pen—every goose, in fact, possessed of a quill—to write to him on the subject of any and every grievance, we should have dissuaded him from the too adventurous act. The daily, and indeed hourly contents of our letter-box would, if set before his Lordship, have convinced him, that the corrector of public abuses will find himself continually buried under a Mont Blanc of foolscap, and enveloped in a mist of envelopes. Lord Palmerston will have less labour thrown upon him by his official post, than the Penny Post will consign him to every hour of the day.
We, however, remind his Lordship to lay down a rule excluding all anonymous letters from the number of those to which he is ready to give attention. Already one enormous hoax has been played upon him by a wag, who, under the signature of "Observer," has made a complaint against the City Police of "charging the public with drawn swords" on Lord Mayor's Day, and turning the Poultry into a sort of Peterloo. The Home Secretary has already demanded an explanation from the civic authorities; but it has turned out that the horses which rode over the people belonged to a mare's nest, while the only charge upon the public by the City Police is a charge of so much in the pound by way of rate, which is, no doubt, rather a heavy one. We certainly acquit the police of the massacre imputed to them by Lord Palmerston's anonymous friend, who seems to have a little of the assassin in his own composition, for he does his utmost to murder, by a stab in the dark, the characters of those whom he is too cowardly to assail in a straightforward manner.