The Sun.
London, England, 1839-09-23 00:00:00

METROPOLITAN POLITICAL

SUMMARY.

The Globe of Saturday has the following remarks
in a leading article on the subject of certain scandalous
weekly periodical;which subsist only by slander :
". 'I, he most profitable part of their trade is derived from
the sums they extort from the weak and timid, whom
they threaten with " a show up" in the --, unless
4. sum named is paid for suppression. The threat is
too often successful ; and the wretches, compared with
whom houmbreakers and pickpockets are honourable and
honest members of the community, share the wages of in
famy,and employ their scouts to discover new victims.
The only safe course to be taken is to firmly resist the at-
tempt at extortion; to treat letters with contempt ; and if
application be made or followed up in person, to give the
party into custody, charging him or them with an attempt
to extort money. The public against this part of the
nuisance have the remedy in their own hands. Every
one who complies with such a demand is inflicting a
serious injury on the community, by encouraging
a species of robber of the most revolting kind ;
while those who are the means of its detection and pu-
nishment confer a benefit on society greater than by
the extermination of the most noxious reptiles which
nature has endowed with venom. Extortion is not the
only branch of the horrible traffic carried on by means
of these pestiferous publications. They are used by
wretches grown grey in iniquity to incite the passions
and corrupt the morals of the youth of both sexes,
and thus to spread vice as a pestilence on every hand."
The Courier has taken courage and was rampantly Tory
on Saturday. " No one can be surprised," says our
apostate Contemporary, " that the few remaining sup-
porters of the present weak and incapable Ministry
should writhe with convulsive efforts to avert the cata-
strophe which is impending over them. After having
lost the confidence of the House of Commons, and the
general voice of the country having been raised against
their incompetency to carry on the Government, and
against their selfishness in retaining office with-
out power to do good, or to prevent others
from doing harm, they have now adopted in their
despair, as their last rallying cry, Would you
hare a Tory Government.' They know very
well that there are no Tories to form a Govern-
ment. It is thus that they attempt to delude, or rather
to continue their delusions on, the country. Well know-
ing, and, during the last Session of Parliament, pain-
fully feeling, the increasing power of that great party in
the State which, although styled Conservative, might
more justly be called National,' they essay to blind
the people as to their own designs and to the real ob-
jects of the Conservatives, by endeavouring to fix on
them a nickname which neither accords with the
opinions which the Conservatives profess, nor with
the acts of the public men who are among their
leaders. They would wish to confound the
obsolete party of those Tories, who would
oppose (if there are any such), all improvements
in our political and social institutions as dangerons in-
novations of ancient usages, with that national party
who, with Conservative opinions but of Liberal princi-
ples, are ready to assist in removing any abuse, where
abuse can be shown to exist, and adopt any change that
can rationally be made to appear an improvement."
The Standard concludes a furious attack on Mr.
O'Connell's letter to the people of Ireland, with the
following specimen of High Tory rant, of which the
Agitator will be the first to profit :—" Let the rabid
mendicant howl, with all the energy of which ha
is capable. The more addresses like the one to
which we have here alluded he puts forth the better.
What measure of fraud, falsehood, and chicanery,
of which the most abandoned agitator can be guilty,
has not already been resorted to by the managers of
Popish constituencies? Let them proscribe Protes-
tantism to their hearts' content--let them revile and
vilify the English people as much as they choose ;
no deadlier enmity, no fouler malevolence than is at
present cherished by the Popish party in Ireland can
be excited against us. But the sword is double-
edged, and cuts both ways. In endeavouring to
excite the hatred of the Irish people to their Pro-
testant neighbours, Mr. O'Connell will raise a watch-
word among the electors in all parts of the United
Kingdom, which will not prove very propitious to his
cause. If he persuades his deluded adherents to treat
the Protestants of England as enemies, he will assist in
verifying his own lying assertions, for he will make
them so. Let but the Conservatives of Ireland fol-
low the advice of Sir Robert Peel, and the Popish
helots who now do the bidding, and assist in filling the
pockets of this profligate agitator, will in many instances
give way to men, as impervious to his blandishments as
to his menaces, who will assist in dissolving the unna-
tural compact which has been entered into between Mr.
O'Connell and the Government."
The Times of this morning, referring again to its fa-
vourite grievance—the appointment of Mr. Wyse to
the office of one of the Lords of the Treasury, bursts
out in the following rhodornontade style. The deferen-
tial allusion to John Knox at the close of this diatribe,
is in the truest and most preposterous spirit of bigotry
—just as if the strong, fanatical opinions of the sixteenth
century were to be a guide for the more temperate and
enlarged intelligence of the nineteenth century!—" The
mere circumstance of a Roman Catholic being invested
with power to administer and control the funds granted
by Parliament for purposes of Protestant education (as
is manifestly the case between Mt. Wyse and the Pro-
testant schools. whose claims are partly committed to his
arbitrament) is indecent enough in all conscience. In this
point of view, we always regarded Mr. More O'Fer-
rail's former position at the Treasury as highly anoma-
lous and exceptionable : but that of Mr. Wyse, with
his more bigoted devotion to Romanism, with his more
slavish dependence upon O'Connell, and above all, with
his fanatical advocacy of the leading abominations of
the Central Education Society, is ten thousand times
worse. Mr. Wyse, we are bound to believe, is a truly
conscientious person. Now, with the bitter enmity
which he bears to Protestantism and to the introduction
of any religious instruction into schools, we ask him upon
what principle entitled to the smallest respect he can ac-
commodate himself to vote a single shilling either to the
Church of Scotland, or to the National Schools, or even
to those of the British and Foreign Society? A very pretty
look it has, indeed, to see a determined Papist meting
out, or more probably thwarting, the provisions of
Parliament for the support and extension of Protestant
schools! But the incongruous work which the Whigs
have thus put upon Mr. Wyse, net only deforces
that gentleman's conscience, it also offers an offensive
insult to the Protestant interests, which it places
at his mercy. These wretched tools of O'Connell
know well that to the Churches of England and
Scotland this same Mr. Wyse is the most objec-
tionable school-tinker of the present day. Even Jimmie
Simpson of Edinburgh could scarcely be worse. Yet
the Whigs have appointed this benighted idolator to
exercise a Treasury Lordship over those dishonoured
churches, and have doomed them to supplicate his li-
berality, to kiss his garment, and to lick his spurning
heel. How will the indomitable Presbyterians of Scot-
land brook this affront ? What would John Knox
have said to it ? Why, rather than give it his counte-
nance, he would have poured out his heart's blood."
The Min fling Post, alluding to the defective harvest,
and the probable high price of bread during the ap-
proaching winter, directly mixes up the Ministers with
the subject, as if' they were responsible for the unusual
quantity of rain that has lately fallen :—" The present.
prospects of the country are such as to render it pro-
bable that the grievance of a frivolous and incapable
Government must become day by day more and more
galling and injurious to the British nation. Public

affairs are ominous and threatening. There are many
persons who are accustomed to say that the business of
politics is nothing but the strife of parties, and, there-
fore, it little matters to the practical concerns of the
people what may be done in the political world. But
there seems to be a time coming, and near at hand, when
it will be but too obvious to all that their practical
interests are intimately concerned in the conduct of
the Governmerit. The extraordinary and most unfor-
tunate weather of the last ten days does not leave it in
our power to hope for such a corn harvest throughout
the United Kingdom as will make up for the deficiency
of last year. An enormous quantity of grain must
have been damaged beyond all chance of complete re-
storation even from the best weather that could come
between this and winter. Not a little must, we fear,
have been altogedier lost. There is no room to hope
that bread will not be very dear until next summer.
There is some reason to apprehend scarcity ; and cer-
tainly the bread which may be made from wheat not
yet saved will be of inferior quality."
The Morning Chronicle thus ridicules the Tory out-
cry against Mr. Wyse's recent appointment :—" The
Tories are clever enough to manufacture two fights out
of one bugbear. After duping the timid into one alarm
at the infidel tendency of Mr. Wyse's notions of educa-
tion, the attempt is now made to scare them in the
opposite direction by the alleged papistical tendency
of those same notions. The obvious contradiction of