The Press. — London, England, 1853-08-06 00:00:00

314 side to play into the hands of the Obscurantists. In abandoning his motion for a committee of inquiry on nunneries, the convenient Member for Bath broke down a no longer useful brid e of retreat, while he .dextrously . yielded prestige of victory to the ultrapon allies of his political. fr4pda. 1,0,,tpe secon instance, Lord JOHN RUSSELL, hatiever mindful of the " insolent," couvenien forgot 01 " insidious " part of limb& on ish our unguarded social machinery, when he strove, by a side wind, to destroy the law of superstitious uses, by giving the priestly interest a perpetual exemption from those pro visions of the new Charitable Trusts Bill which were intended to protect all alike against spiritual or temporal fraud, whether practised by Roman Catholic death-bed har pies or lax latitudinarian trustees. The Noble Lord might have regarded this new " sop " to the spiritual reversionists as an &monde, negative and Whiggish, for some of the superfluous insults of the Durham letter; but the amendment of Mr. HEADLAM, limit ing the operation of the meditated licence to two years, was adopted by Lord J. RUSSELL as the sole means of saving his own. Even this amended amendment was too subversive of the object of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act, and of the principle of the general law relating to charitable trusts, to be permitted ; and on Sir FREDERICK THESIOER resisting it " as an " admission that a system was to be applied to " Roman Catholic charities different from that " adopted towards others," there was a very close division (in which, it is worthy of re mark, Lord PALMIRSTON was not available), re sulting in the adoption of this Headlam-on Russell rider to the bill by a majority of only eleven. The effect of the whole affair is to give to the ultramontanist organisers of the money power of the faith a two years' licence for their operations. In the ease of the Irish education system, and of conventual establishments, they are not so fortunate ; being condemned to the tantalising task of continually watching the fluctuating tide of public indignation. PENAL COLONIES. 4 4 ' Tux Government plan for the disposal of our convicts is such as might have been expected from a divided Cabinet. It satisfies nobody, for it settles nothing. It is condemned alike by the advocates and the opponents of transportation ; and justly so, for it is calculated to aggravate the evils of which both those parties have so long complained. The Duke Of NEWCABTLK, it appears, desires to retain the whole of our criminals at home. Lord ABERDEEN holds a different opinion, and hence the present com• promise, by which the defects of the existing system are to be rendered still more intolera ble abroad, while in England we are called upon to submit to an experiment repugnant alike to public feeling and to sound economy. It is to the probable results of the proposed scheme abroad that we would at present direct the attention of our readers. Western Australia is still to be retained as a penal settlement, and to it the great bulk of our con victs are now to be sent. Lord CRANWORTH informs us that from 800 to 1,000 may annually be disposed of in that colony ; and to that extent transportation is still to be continued to Swan River. We must also bear in mind that the convicts so disposed of will consist of the elite, so to speak, of their class. It is proposed that those only who are sentenced to fourteen years and upwards shall in future be transported ; and the whole of these must now be sent to Western Australia. Is it difficult to foresee the results of the con centration of such a population upon such a spot? The progress of the Swan River settlement, as all the world knows, has been singularly low hen compared with that of our o ther ktistmilian colonies. The demand for labour, ,is but limit e d. At th e d a t e o f th e th lataV ire official accounts, we learn that between five ad six hundred convicts had arrived in eniony within the last eighteen months, tiiitt it had been found impossible to ob aaployment -via for that moderate number. 1 1 1 'C t It i rit Wait it %en emplo, tCe - 4._ , • p N. k- - - THE PRESS. And yet, with the knowledge of this fact, it has been resolved not only to augment the convict population to s e . I "nt we have described, but to render: , q , :. of the most objection ait dwrip .. . I are only in future () 49 se (4 Wes ', l A' ~1' • • such of our felo as harib I'' s )I - 3 :hest distinctions l 2 e l. the sc lof . r- . ~ e. Bu . ,t . 's i s , pt The disproportion the iiiies in Ws ' oily has long been , e subject of serious otiiisklaint. We learn from the Report of the Elipgnition Commissioners for the present year that it contained, accord. ing to the latest estimate, 4,523 males, and only 2,444 females. This striking disparity has been urged upon the attention of the imperial authorities by the present governor. He is now to be informed, in reply to his re monstrances, that the evil of which he so justly complains is to be aggravated to a degree which it is frightful to contemplate. In a few years, provided the present project is carried out, the convict population of Western Australia, consisting almost entirely of males, will exceed in number the free inhabitants of the colony. It would appear, therefore, that the experience of the east has been entirely thrown awiq l The terrible disclosures made before Sir WILLIAM MOLESWORTH'S committee, in 1838, and the more recent history of trans portation in Van Diemen's Land, all teach the same lesson. They prove conclusively the folly and the wickedness of concentrating a large criminal population upon any given locality; and yet this fatal error is about to be repeated, in a manner and to an extent more objectionable than upon any former occasion. " But," it will be said, "what remedy, unless "you propose to keel) at home the whole 3,000 " convicts annually sentenced ?" We admit the difficulty. Yet surely a" third course" is prac ticable. Australia is not the whole world— penal settlements may be formed elsewhere. Penal settlements, in our belief, asset be formed elsewhere ; for any attempt to carry out the ticket-of-leave system in an old and crowded country like ours carries with it a manifest ab surdity ; and without the ticket-of-leave sys tem, or something analogous to it, you have absolutely no security for the good behaviour of the discharged prisoner, who is thus thrown upon the world, with a branded name, with the certainty of being refused employment, and without a chance, in ordinary cases, of redeem ing himself in the eyes of the world and his own. But this subject we shall hereafter con sider more at large. THE RUN FOR SILVER. EvinxNcx accumulates by every arrival to corroborate the views which have been pro pounded in the Press as to the phenomena now in process of development, arising out of the altered proportions of the precious metals consequent on the recent discoveries of gold. In 1840 the annual production of gold was 1,290,0001., and that of silver 6,852,274/. In 1850 the yield of silver has been very slightly increased, whilst that of gold has suddenly been multiplied THIRTY-lOU. In every currency in the world a certain proportion of silver and small coin is neces sarily implied in relation to the quantity of gold in circulation, which, as it is mixed with alloy, is necessarily below standard value. But, independently of this, silver and gold, like every marketable commodity, must be subjected to a certain fluctuating value, cal culated on the extent of their comparative production and demand ; and hence the un foreseen abundance of gold, whilst it has tended, and is inevitably tending, to render that metal cheaper, has simultaneously com municated an increased importance to silver, the comparative scarcity of which has already rendered it dearer throughout every country on the globe. Hence the unprecedented export of silver from the United Kingdom is at the rate of weirs million ounces per annum. Irrespective of the shipments of silver to Europe, our ex ports of that metal in 1852 were, to India direct, 1,075,000 ounces; and to Egypt, whence the specie finds its way to China and the Presidencies, 11,600,000 ounces. A similar SATURDAY, commotion is simultaneously disturbing the of 'try in Europe. In • a choice Finance is . gold— cheaper ' silver, ce and alarm of the so profit within the necessary to apply a remedy, by raising the export duty on silver specie, which had been 100 reis, or about 51d. per mark (of eight ounces), to 1,000 reis, or four shilling! and sixpence per mark—an impost of no less than twelve per cent., which it has become essential to enforce, in order to retain sufficient silver for the circulation of the kingdom. But a still more remarkable state of things appears to prevail in Western Mexico, which, though a silver-producing region, has been par tially denuded of its supply of silver coin. So scarce has the minor currency become that retail trade has been absolutely checked by the im possibility of giving small money in exchange for gold ; and squares of soap, stamped with the seals of the municipalities, have come into circulation as coin on that portion of the Pacific coast. Farther south the resources of Chili have received a singular and unexpected impulse from the same cause. The mountains of that region abound in silver ores of a very peculiar quality, inasmuch as the principal metal is found in such combination with copper and antimony that its extraction is a matter of difficulty in any case, but of impossibility there, owing to the absence of machinery and fuel. In addition to this, even the tractable ores have hitherto yielded but an inadequate pro portion of their silver, in consequence of the imperfect system of amalgamation to which they were subjected by the, Chilian miners. The whole range of coast is therefore covered with these hitherto almost valueless products. But since the discoveries of gold at California an entirely new trade has sprung up in Chili, the vessels returning from San Francisco finding it a profitable adventure to drop down to Copiapo and Caldera to load with the in tractable ores and regulus, from which the silver is now being extracted in extensive works upon the Thames, and to bring home the rejected refuse of the Chilian mines for further treatment in England. Still, so insuf ficient are these expedients to meet the rising demand for silver in every country in Europe, that the supply is inadequate to the demand, and the price of the metal, which was four shillings and eleven pence seven-eighths per ounce in 1848, has risen steadily in every year since, and was quoted last week at ss. lid., having already touched ss. ltd. before the Bank had raised the rates of discount, in order to check immo derate speculation. In the face of these accumulating facts, however, our Government still hesitate to take any measure for the relief of our commerc. with India, in which, by the strangest and most indefensible of all anomalies, we carry on a prodigious trade (and one which could be almost indefinitely increased, did we en courage and develop as we might the cultiva tion of cotton in our possessions there), binding ourselves to pay in a metal which we have already a difficulty in procuring, and which is daily becoming dearer so long as the produc tion of gold and silver goes on increasing in a distorted proportion. In October last the Government of the Earl of DERBY relieved our colonies east of the Cape of Good Hope—in which the silver coins of India and the United King dom passed current as an unlimited ten• der—by issuing an order in council that "in Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, Mau " ritius, and Hong-Kong, the coins of our " United Kingdom shall pass current in the " manner directed in the several acts of Par. " liament which regulate the currency of the " same ; and that the silver coins of our United " Kingdom shall not be a legal tender in pay " ment of sums exceeding forty shillings." But this relief, whatever convenience it may yield to currency of every country in Europe France, where the. currency presents a of either metal, the Meister of Fina alarmed ;,t the riOdity ,with which whiehts,4coming '.. .re ihtindant and c: —is b supikrsecling ' : 4roulation of , zr which 41 tweet,- .% owing scare mot.* v4thible. In ' ugal an equal has peen...excit4 lor e rapid drain silver coinage, which it has become so able a sOeculation to export that, witl last month, the Cortes have seen it nec