The Sun.
London, England, 1839-01-19 00:00:00

*cannot eCad, or reading cannot understand, the few lines of
pl yin English which he quotes'from our columns of yesterday,
there May be more of folly than of knavery in what he has been
so " delivered over to himself" as to write. We said that the
c'uty,itany, should be a fixed duty, that it must not of course
.he ilprotecting duty, and that it ought not, we thought, to be
-.--n-Auty for revenue. To this Sawney answets, 4' Now a fixed
duty, as far as it goes, must necessarily either be a protection
to the landlord or a source of revenue, and if moderate
it would be both." Indeed! Now, we say that if the new
duty be a protecting duty, we make mere patchwork of the
matter, and retain that feature of the present Corn-laws
which is the most indefensible of the whole. The main
principle involved in this question is, whether one class
bhall be protected at the expense of the rest of the com-
munity. There may be many opinions respecting matters of
detail, but upon this principle there can be but two—ay or no;
and if the new Corn-law is merely to substitute one protect-
ing duty for another protecting duty, then it would be better
to let matters remain as they are, because in that course
there would be no humbug—no room for playing the Whig
game of thimble-rig. We insist, moreover, that the chief
necessary of life ought not to be taxed for revenue, unless the
exigencies of the state absolutely require it. This is what
we meant when we said the duty ought not, we think,
to be a duty for revenue :" and if we are wrong in that
opinion, we have at least the satisfaction of knowing that
we have erred in common with the most distinguished
authorities. At the same time, we bore in mind that it
may not be possible to spare from the revenue the amount
of those taxes which the agriculturists now pay, and width
they may fairly claim to be relieved from when they are de-
prived of the protection they now enjoy. We said, therefore,
that the duty ought to be sufficient to cover the amount of
those taxes, and all the writers we have read upon the subject
ha e drawn a distinction between this sort of duty and a duty
for reie,iue; so that we have used no fanciful or new-fangled
phraseology—though in strictness it is quite true that a duty
which p-events loss to revenue, has as much the character of
a duty f)r revenue as a duty which gives actual increase to the
income of the State. The distinction betw: en the two, how-

ever, is very obvious in principle, and in regard to amount
they wll to found to be very different things in prac-
tice. But that which has galled- the Ministers and !h. it
hirelings of the press most in what we said yesterday, is
to be found in the concluding sentence of our article. It
ran thus We shall just add, that the manoeuvres
now set on foot, and actively prosecuted by the Queen's
Ministers to degrade this vast national question into an instru-
ment of their own factious and jobbing selfishness, will recoil
upon them fearfully before they arc one month older." For
this we are assailed in each Government print with certain s( n-
tences of abuse which arc evidently as much Ministe-
rial "circulars" as Lord John Russell's invitation to the tall
to be up in time to vote upon the address. They prove to us,
moreover, that the Ministers perfectly well understand our
meaning, and that they anticipate the exposure they so richly
merit. We believe it was Hobbes who said that in forward-
ing any good work he would not refuse the assistance of the
Devil himself: and what Hobbes said of the first Whig, so
say we of that first Whig's representatives now in office ;
but still we are not thereby precluded from pointing out,
as we detect it in their motives and their measures,
the cloven impress of the founder and patron of their
party. We turn with pleasure from such antagonists
as these, to answer the question which has been put to
us by a Contemporary of a very different character. We al-
lude to the Standard, whom we are sorry to number among
our opponents on this question of the Corn-laws. Our Con-
temporary, alluding to the observations we made yesterday re-
specting lands now under tillage, but which ought never to
have been taken out of pasture, says—" Now we bee re-
spectfully to ask, what was it that caused such a breadth of
pasture land to be laid under the plough ? Nut the Corn-
laws, for they notoriously did not exist when the great agriculs
aural change was effected. It was the war—ths war which
threw England upon her own resources, and left to her the
lesson that a nation which will be independent must have the
means of self-support. If those foreign supplies now promised
as an equivalent for our voluntarily ruined tillage, should we
ruin it, were available thirty years ago, why was so great a
breadth of land converted, at an obvious present sacrifice,
from pasturage to tillage, and if they were not available
thirty years ago, what reason is there to suppose that they
would he available in any future war ? This is a question
we require to have answered, and if the answer be, that as
pasture land was in the late war from necessity turned to till-
age, so it may be again, we would remind our answerer of the
enormous cost of the late war, caused in no small degree by
the high prices which this change rendered necessary, as it
was prompted by still higher prices." Supposing the
assertions by which these questions are accompanied to
be correct—and contenting ourselves with merely reminding
our Contemporary of the vast change which has been
effected since the war by improved tillage in Ireland and
Scotland—we beg, in our turn, to ask, why it is more prudent
or more necessary to maintain now the agricultural system
that was permitted during the war than it is to keep up our
naval and military force at the war point ? Let us ask, too,
Nether anything short of the high prices which prompted
the turning of those lands to tillage can continue them in til-
lage—whether as prices have fallen they have not always been
thrown out of tillage—and whether this state of things must
not continue as long as fluctuations in price occur ? As to it
being necessary that a nation, in order to be independent,
must have the means of self-support, if that be true
in regard to raising Corn, it must be true of every thing
else, and there is no such nation under Heaven. But it is no
more necessary that one kingdom should have the means of
self-support (in the sense in which our Contemporary uses the
words), than it is that each of the counties of a kingdom should
have the means of self-support : and so far from concurring
with the Standard on this subject, we have always been of
the opinion so well expressed by Lord Grenville In the protest
entered on the journals of the House of Lords in 1815
" To confine the consumer of corn to the produce of his own
country, is to i efuse to ourselves the benefit of that provision
which Providence itself has made for equalizing to man the
variations of climate and of seasons." It is not only sufficient
for a nation's independence, but -it is essential for a nation's
independence, that it should be able to • procure by purchase
or exchange those commodities which it stands in need of,
and which other nations can supply better and more cheaply
than it can produce them. How much longer we may be able
to do this will materially depend upon how much longer one-
tenth part of the community shall bo allowed, by means, of
Coen-laws, to lay a lax of 9,000,0001. or 10,000,000/. a-year
upon the public at large.— Times.

EXPLOSION OF GAS AT MANCHESTER.—On
Tuesday afternoon, about half-past four o'clock, an explo-
sion of gas took place, the report of which can only be com-
pared to a piece of heavy ordinance, or as though a barrel
of powder had exploded on the premises. This catastrophe,
it is painful to admit, appears to have arisen more from ex-
treme carelessness and inattention, than from any danger
attendant on the common use of gas. It appears that in
one of the tellers of the shops, some men were employed in
making certain alteration in the apparatus ; and that to ef-
fect this, it was necessary to cut off or sever the service
from the main pipe ; and that when this was effected, pre-
caution was not taken to stay the emission into the pre-
mises. The men employed were, it is said, absent for a
short period, for the purpose of obtaining a candle with
which to complete their work ; at the moment of their re-
turning the exact admixture of hydrogen gas with the at-
mospheric air had just been effected, so that an explosion
was inevitable. It is scarcely possible to conceive the
destruction of property more complete. Most of the shop-
floor, the chamber-floors, roofs, chimneys, and side walls,
all in one common ruin ; only a little of the front preserved.
At the time of the explosion the two Misses Winks,
daughters of Samuel Winks, Esq., were in the shop of Mr.
-, confectioner ; and providentially the chamber floors
fell at such as angle as to prove a safe shelter for them, from
the falling tiles and bricks. They were both slightly, and
but slightly injured. There was also an elderly lady on the
premises, and who was rather more seriously injured, though
by no means dangerously hurt. The Misses Winks were
standing near the door, and the shop front was preserved
for about eight feet. The owner of the property, at the mo-
ment, a Mr. Hodgson, was superintending the repairs of
the buildings, occasioned by the late storm, but who pro-
videntially_ escaped without the least injury. The bricks
and tiles were thrown to an immense height. There was
not any one killed.

THE COAL TRADE.—On Tuesday, the Lord
Mayor and the Lady Mayoress gave their first State din-
ner for the season to the Court of Aldermen and their
Ladies. There were present, eighteen Aldermen and
their Ladies, the Recorder and the Hon. Mrs. Law, the
Sheriffs, Colonel Moberly, Sir Frederick Roe, Mr. and
Mrs. Pownall, the Common Sergeant, the Secondaries, the
four City Pleaders, the Hon. and Rev. Mr. Eden, &c.
About seventy sat down to dinner. The Lord Mayor and
Aldermen wore their scarlet robes, the officers of the Cor-
poration their official dresses, and the rest of the company
appeared in military or Court costume. In the course of
the day there were unusually large fires kept up through-
out the building. His Lordship stated that there was
not, in any grate in the house, a single coal that had anv
connection with the combination, and that he had purchased
the article at the very fair price of twenty-two shillings per
ton !—that the fires burnt as well as any combination coal
fire at 345. per ton, there was no doubt whatever. There
will, we understand, be two dinners per week, given by
the Lord Mayor and the Lady Mayoress, until the whole
of the Corporation shall have been feasted; and his Lord.
ship has given orders that not a single combination coal
shall be burned in the Mansion-house, until the whole of
the ten tons of the twenty-two shillings a ton coal shall
have been consumed. The grates in the Mansion-house
are now called anti-combination grates! Most unques-
tionably, if the public can get such beautiful fires as those
which the Lord Mayor burns, and at as cheap a rate, the
northern monopoly is likely to be broken up sooner than
its most zealous enemies anticipated.
MISAPPLICATION OF THE CITY MONEY.-At
a late meeting of the City of London Corporate Reform
Acsociation, it was stated, on the authority of Mr. Charles
Pearson, that during fifty years ending 1830, more money
had been paid for the furniture, repairs, and decorations of
the Mansion-house than had been expended during that
time for widening the streets of the city, and for the im-
provements connected with the comfort, security of life and
limb, and for the convenience of commerce of the whole
metropolis.