The Sun.
London, England, 1864-12-17 00:00:00

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SPIRIT OF THE 31,10 XOTTIi ,itilit.
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TIMES.—Lord Palmerston at 11.0=14 p
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isediee ofL
t-tose ic
tures of English life and politic s that we may some day
value the more because we no longer have them. The Pre-
mier walks out of Broadlands, and in a fow minutes is in
the New Corn Exchange of the neighbouring market town,
among the gentry and farmers of the neighbourhood. As
the chief man thereabouts, he opens the building, presides
over a dinner, proposes the toasts, and makes speeches. The
day's work is what may fall to the lot of any English gen-
tleman, and Lord Palmerston is only doing what any one
of 10,000 squires may have to do next week. But of couree
tie does it well, and we all naturally care to hear what
'fee
guys, because we are at home with him, understand hire,
arid know that ev-n a short speech will give us a point or
two. The chief point is one which every farmer ought to
receive with respect from a man who, spending much of his
time in the country, and hevieg his eyes always open, Las
been 'coking about him for near 70 years. In the eousee 05, that tine ho tells the agriculturists of Romsey he has we-
ticed an immense change in husbandry. No doubt the pro-
gress has been quite as great as during any other 70 years
of the 2,000 that have elapsed since our ancestors depended
a good deal on acorns and beech nuts. It is only 30 year a
since whole counties were nightly lit up by the destroyers
of thrashing machines. Yet it was not because fleil-thraeh-
ing was a light, or agreeable, or healthy occupation—for
what with the heat, the draught, and the barn due`, it wus
believed to have ruined many a good constitution, and
was left to men with more sinew than wit. Yet such is
the change, as Lord Palmerston observes, that the men
whose fathers went about . destroying thrashing machines
now insist on their use, and hold the fleil:too hard work for
man. The inference his lordship draws is that the etearne
plough will one day become as familiar. No doubt it will
and must. The price of corn must adapt itself to the,
cheapest methods of productions, and they who cling to thee
dearer will find themselves beaten, like the hand loom
weavers and all the crafts that persist in hand labour. The
inference, however, does not rest here. Agriculture is a
progressive science, and they who expect to succeed in it
must keep pace with every improvement. Sir Robert Peel
had to make many apeeehes at Tamworth, but we cannot
recall that ho ever confined himself to such plain advice as
to tell the farmers to do their best, to keep ahead, and im-
prove as much as they could. That is Lord Palmerston's
recommendation, and, as it is evidently beyond the means
of many farmers and beyond the scale of their farme to haves
steam ploughs of their own, he suggests that it may I 0
worth while to keep steam ploughs on hire, as thrashi cg
machines are kept all over the country. Landlords Limy
lead the way by lending the steam plough, but such assist.
ance can be but temporory, and must soon give way to more
businesslike arrangements. Another change Lord Palmer..
ston notices, with an eye to the future as well as the past,
and that is the preposterous weight and solidity of the carts
and waggons formerly in use—in days, no doubt, when
the condition of the reads and state of the ground made
strength the first consideration. But when egriculturists
complain of short crops, as, indeed, many have done this
year, it is excusable to notice that a good deal of the strength
of the soil still goes in weeds. When a field is all red with
poppies, or all yellow with charlock and the many other
weeds that wear that livery, we may venture to ask whether
it must always be so, and how it comes to pass. It has not
escaped Lord Palmerston's eye. We confess to sharing his
suspicion that the presence of weeds tells a tale of neglect.
Surely they may be extirpated at last, by continuous cares
for though thistledown is borne on the wind any distance,
thistle is not the worst foe to the crop. The most numerous
and most inveterate enemies are those that deposit their
seed under their own stem, and are reproduced in future
years upon the very same spot. Surely at length they may
be destroyed, and it is one gain of machinery that it releases
a good deal of manual labour from such operations as the.
destruction of weds. It does not require a man to be a
professed agriculturist, or a farmer in any sense, to see the
harm done by weeds. Ho may see in five square yards of
garden, or even in a flower-pot, the universal fate of a
plant choked with weeds in ever so small a degree.
We wonder whether Romsey appreciates the disc
thaction of having a man of world-wide fame to
open its public buildings, and to preside over
its entertainments, and to be associated with it in history.
The county of Hants evidently holds that honour cheap,
and has taken another measure of its quality in its represen-
tatives. The University of Cambridge, too, has provided
in its own way for its public credit and Parliamentary influ-
ence. Bat Sir R, Peel, by the time he had worked his way
to light and truth, was not member for Staffordshire, or for
the University of Oxford, or for any considerable consti-
tuency, but fur Tamworth. Such, then, are the localites
ennobled by the greatest names of our age,—Tamworth,
Romsey, Tiverton. It is a matter of accident where a man
is born, or from what old town or ruin ho derives his title,
but it is not accident that our great statesmen seem to
make their most familiar and most pleasant appearances at
small country towns, which but for them would bo as little
known as many hundreds more. Romsey has its fine old
Norman abbey, Tamworth has its castle. Both objects are
interesting to residents and visitors, but there ends the
claim of either town to national interest, excepting only
that it is associated with the name of a great statesman, with
many an amusing speech, or important manifesto. A time
may come, perhaps, when these associations will be classic,
and when names of merely local interest in these days
will recall to the student the virtues, the talents—possibly
too the liberties--of a former age. A time may come, per-
haps, when there may not be this plain speaking, nor will
it matter what a man can say when he will be able to do
nothing. We now find everywhere, as if from the soil of
Old England, free and generous utterances. We reccgniso
the voice of nature in the talk of men face to face, or the
somewhat more composed words of the man rather greater
than his fellows in his little Parliament of social peers.
Parliament itself can hardly match what is said in these
almost rural:haunts. It will be a sad day for England if
these local associations disappear from her political annals,
and the grand story of British life be reduced to one long,
dull, angry controversy.

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HERALD,—Sarah Henderson, about thirty years of age,
now picking oakum in the House of Correction, is in her
way a representative woman. She is " wog known to the
police by the cognomen of the Bloomer ;" she had torn her
clothing to tatters in the Euston.road ; she had again rent
them into rags at the police-station; she has been charged
82 times and convicted 48 times in one metropolitan division
alone, and her ambition apparently is to live out her life in
prison. When placed before the Marylebono magistrate en
Wednesday, she declared herself "sick and tired" of being
sent to gaol for seven and fourteen days, or a month.
sentenced to three months' hard labour, she pa •
titioned for six; and we have now to ask what terror
to such offenders have our correctional institutions ? Here
is an idle, dissolute, vagabond creature, a nuisance of the
streets, who prefers incarceration to liberty, who enjoys th 3
former as safe, comfortable, and healthy, and who only
makes use of the latter to bemire herself with drunkenness
and ribaldry, while raising a clamour of shrieks and
nine rufflinism in the public thoroughfares. Too little
attention has been bestowed upon this order of delinquents.
We have devoted endless speculations to the secondary
criminal, and oscillated between solitary, silent, and labori-
ous systems ; but to what does punishment come when a
wretched creature, only in her 30th year, who is known to
have been condemned 50 times, implores that her term of
imprisonment shall be increased ? They toll us, oracularly,
that a bad person oannot be converted into a good person
by the simple expedient of shutting him up in a cell. The
process may, indeed, render reformation possible, break off
evil habits, and wear out pernicious associations ; it may
prepare the way for further reformation ; but in such cases
as those to which we now especially refer, when the chance
of reformation begins the authority of the law ends, and the
miserable sot is turned forth to the tavern bar, where her
first day of freedom is disgraced by drunkenness and
delirium. Would it be hazardous to prophesy, for cx-
ample,that this branded vagrant, Sarah; Henderson, after her
three months of penal correction, will immediately return
to the degradation of a female savage and pollute the very
kennels with her ignominy ? It is an accepted principle in
our times that justice must be measured out carefully and
upon a well-considered scale; but in this instance the ques-
tion is not so much one of justice as of social right and
mercy. Such a being is not to be dealt with as a criminal,
but as a lunatic, or as
raeninvee herorrig from dailyiblechild. temptationl Vilitlireo
months' imprisonment remove
and the stimulants to vice, destroy her ardour for intoxi-
cated excitement, subdue the violence of her animal apps..
titer, or quench her craving for gin ! Assuredly not. A,
comfortable cell, plenty of food, abundance of clothing,
artifioial warmth and ventilation, medical attendance, a
chaplain and a schoolmaster, render the penalty tolerable.
For the woman Henderson, at all events, prison life has no
terrors—she enjoys it—and what else can society do with,
her? That is the necessary and the difficult question.

DESTITUTION IN BETIINAL-GREEN.7-La9t right
Mr. Jae. George Richards, the deputy, coroner, held
an inquiry at the Bricklayers' Arms Tavern, Cullingwood,
street, Bethnal-garden, respecting the death of David W.
Keefe, aged 25. Catherine Keefe, of No, 22, Wellington,
street, Bethnal-green, a sickly-looking young womar, who
was accommodated with a chair, said that sho was a semi,.
stress, and worked at a sewing machine for ono Of the city
warehouses, but she had been out of employment through
sickness fur 7 weeks. The deceased was aMr dress,.r, but
he was consumptive and unable to work: He had been under
' the care of Mr World, the surgeon, but latterly he had dis..
continued his medicine. On Monday morning last he wished
to go to the Consumption Hospital at Victoria-park for ad-
vice, when she pledged her earrings to get the money for a
distress,go t sso rs worse
but
t(nl
never
rd They were in great
cab, but he could not go, as he besamo so much worse. Ho
a7plWiededfnorespdaaryislhasrtelief. Dr. Llewellyn
of Whiteuhapel-road, said that he found the deceased dead
in bed. There were no marks of violence on the body,
which was very thin and emaciated. Tho cause of death
was disease of the heart and lungs, no doubt accelerated by
the want of proper nutritious diet, which the deceased was
unable through poverty to obtain. The deputy-coroner
said it was to be lamented that the sister had not apphcd
for relief for the deceased, who no doubt had suffered great
privation. The jury returned a verdict in uccordanco with
the medical teethnoey.