The Sun.
London, England, 1837-12-12 00:00:00

guish ; and that the only support, after all, they have
to expect in England, is the bluster of a newspaper, and
the twaddle of Sir Francis Burdett. We have, how-
ever, no consolation to offer these gallant, but unfortu-
nate gentlemen—
" When Tory Colonels stoop to folly,
And find too late that PEELS betray,
What charm can soothe their melancholy ?
What art can wipe their grief away ?"
—Morning Chronicle.
It is not new to the people of England, that the
Whig Ministers of the present day have never had
more than a single object in their contemplation—viz.,
their own maintenance in office, no matter at what
cost of credit to themselves, or of solid welfare to the
country over which they exercise dominion. We beg
leave humbly to admonish them, however, that it is
time they should enlarge their view, were it for no other
purpose than to see, and measure more accurately
than they have yet done, the real dangers which 'sur-
round those selfish interests, to which they hare here-
tofore exclusively directed their apprehensions and
anxieties. The Ministers have had recent, and not very
pleasant experience, of what some of their professed
friends were inclined to do within the walls of Par-
liament. We recommend them to look out a little
beyond those walls, and observe what thair quon-
dam partisans, converted by the necessary course
of things into foes and persecutors, are attempt-
ing with regard to them—what a bed of roses
they are in the act of preparing for the
Whigs. No man in his senses has denied—the Mi-
' nisters themselves have repeatedly been forced to ac-
knowledge—that the existence of Lord Melbourne's
Government depended on the votes of the English
Radicals and of the Irish Papists. Should either of
those factions, or the half of either, run restiff and
refuse to draw but for an hour, the lumbering wag-
gon of the Ministry, over the axletrees in mud, could
not be moved forward by any skill or power that re-
mained at the disposal of its unhappy masters, but
must at once be evacuated and abandoned. Now,
, when two bodies of men set out with confessing that
their ultimate objects were not merely unlike, but in-
consistent each with the other, it became obvious that
a partnership for general purposes between them must
be the most precarious thing in the world, and that
its dissolution, at an early day, was inevitable. As
between the Whigs and Papisto-Radicals the question
was, not alone what pace they should conjointly
drive at, but what would happen when the whole
caravan should reach that anticipated point, from
which one section of it had already in the beginning
declared that it would not advance a step further,
while the other section had been all along proclaiming,
that to proceed only so far was nothing worth, for that
every thing which they deemed of the slightest value
lay beyond it ? It is manifest under such circum-
stances that one of three things must happen—either
the party disposed to stop short must go forward, or
the party for advancing must remain at rest, or, both
continuing stetlf.ast to their purpose, a separation must
take place ; one dependent on its actual resources, the
tither trusting to those deducible from its future enter-
prises. At that point, therefore, it is now palpable
that Whigs and Radicals have in fact arrived. If the
declaratiJns of Whig Ministers meant anything—a
bold hypothesis we admit—enough has been said by
them within these few days to satisfy the country,
that if there be no separation from the Radicals,
the fault will not lie at the door of her Majesty's
advisers, inasmuch as they, through Lord John Rus-
sell, have pledged themselves that in matters of funda-
mental principle they will go no further, and that they
will not yield to the clamourers for revolution, by
granting either short Parliaments, rabble suffrage, or
the ballot. But " what if she should break her
word r Now for the Radicals. Let us turn to them.
What symptom have they shown of a disposition to
maintain the alliance by making a burnt-offering of
anarchy ? Not much. They have already baited the
Whigs into a flagrant violation of their own most un-
ambiguous and solemn engagements regarding the
Pension List. They have bullied the Whig Ministers
into a support of that nefarious fraud originating with
Mr. D. O'Connell, and by him engrafted on the new
election law of Mr. C. Buller, whereby petitions of
which the groundwork was laid under the existing law
of .theland—namely, the Grenville Act—are to be tried,
if the plot succeeds, by a tribunal which never before
was heard of—through the medium of an ex post facto
law. But these are slight illustrations of that system of
Radicalism which in principle and design goes straight
to the ruin and subversion of the Monarchy. The
whole business began, be it remembered, with " Par-
liamentary Reform :" it was to be no " revolution"—
no such thing, but a mere " restoration" of our re-
presentative Constitution to its first principles—a mere
washing away of impurities and correction of abuses.
What is the thing desired now? Do but listen to
these hypocrites. A Radical paper of last Sunday
inserted a letter from that sleek, speculative purist, the
momentary sitting Member for London, Mr. George
Grote, addressed to a gentleman in Liverpool, and
accompanying that especial humbug, the Benthamite
ballot-box of the Hon. sitting Member, which contains
these significant, but not at all surprising, words :
" Now is the time for a consentaneous effort, by which
we may obtain the Ballot—the first step which is
needed to effect a change in the CONSTITUTION of
the House of Commons." Not a word more about
" reform" of the House of Commons do these rabid
Republicans now condescend to utter ; that which was
ever the secret object of their machinations—the real
but undiscovered, though conjectured, key to the cipher
of all their political projects, is now unblushingly and
daringly avowed. The Ballot too, the Ballot itself, is
but a first step—no resting-place is the Ballot ; it is
but the beginning of an end—but an " instalment" of
the great debt of " justice to England," of which a
second instalment—that, mark ye, being no more
than an instalment—is a change in the constitution
of the House of Commons 1 Do the wretched Minis-
ters yet open their eyes upon the gulf towards
which these men are dragging them ? Have they
not yet found out that the gulf has no bottom ?
Mr. Grote is but one of the legion. The Bir-
mingham democrats have come forth with their
manifesto likewise—the " new movement'. manifesto,
wherein it is laid down that Government by property
is an abominable grievance, and that it must and shall
make way for " Government by numbers !" Then,
we ask once more of Ministers, where is this to end ?
When reform of abuses is laughed to scorn, as a state
of things under which the nation groans—when
nothing but organic change is talked of as meriting the
name of Liberal policy—when universal suffrage is
set up as the standard of " inalienable right," and
power stated to be the birthright of all, whether all
have or have not capacity to wield it otherwise than
for evil—we demand of you once again, ye Ministers
of the Queen of England, have you linked yourselves
for aye to such fanatics and anarchists as these, or
have you now, at the eleventh hour, soul enough to
burst your fetters and be free ?—Times.

the constitutional illegality of arrest on mesne process
—(inasmuch as no post facto statute law can invali-
date the common
_law of the land, as embodied in
Magna Charta, and its confirmatory statutes) that
the highest officer of the Crown (the Attorney-Gene-
ral, Sir John Campbell), in a speech which he made
last year, announced that he took the same view, (in
common with Lord Bacon and Sir Edward Coke)
and pronounced arrest to be illegal. In making that
speech the Attorney-General referred also to the
two instances brought forward by Lord Denman, in
proof of the dangerous mode in which the present
operation of the law may be forced to violate personal
freedom, and to jeopardy commercial faith. We have
little to fear for the ultimate accomplishment of this
excellent measure—however it may be delayed—with
such authorities on our side, and such authorities op-
posed to it. Can anything be more absurd than the
argument of the Duke of Wellington, who—while
he admitted that the power of arrest injures com-
merce, by the creation of bad debts—by. the usurious
victimization of entrapped improvidence—and by the
creation of a rotten system of fictitious credit—ar-
gued that it was both the cause and the consequence
of the great
_commercial prosperity of the country ?
This is the common argument of the Tories. The
country is prosperous, and therefore its prosperity has
arisen in consequence of its abuses, on which they have
fattened, instead of having arisen in spite of those
abuses, and of being likely to derive accelerated
augmentation from their removal. We draw rather
inauspicious auguries from the opposition made ; and
we trust that the Select Committee, which the House
has agreed to, will not be converted into another form
of postponing andfinally shelving this most important
measure. We trust with the Lord Chancellor that
the Committee is not for the purpose of accumulating
additional evidence on the mass of evidence already
attained and extant. If so we may bid adieu to the
remedy of the grievance for two sessions to come, or
prepare for its postponement sine die. But it cannot
be practically postponed in the teeth of the exposure
which has been made of its illegality. The law of
arrest cannot be much longer enforced. No law can
survive the extinction of its authority in public opi-
nion. To conclude with the words of Lord Denman
—" the principle must stand henceforth recognised,
that the law of arrest is abolished."_Morn.Advertiser.
The doings of the mobocrats of the Marylebone
vestry surpass, in the cool assurance of " liberal"
jobbing, almost anything of the sort that takes place
in any other nest or den of unclean " patriotism" in
the kingdom. The latest of the exploits of those
worthies was to dictate to Lord Chancellor Cotten-
ham a list of fifteen persons to be appointed Magi-
strates of Middlesex, as our readers have seen from a
report in our columns of certain proceedings connected
with that affair, serving to throw much light upon the
some r
popular working of that great Radical principle—the
democratic election of the magilset(rlachyy.
parish () Off
patron-
age
of
atlgiee ewleecktfinfioweennottihliunsg,d'i)usttinguisl
w
e dare say they are
as respectable as those who are less obscure. Tquite
hat,
however, is not the question ; we have to do with
principles rather than with persons. It is of great
public concern that the appointment of magistrates
should not only be pure, but above suspicion. But
what can be said of magisterial appointments, when
promotion is derived through so impure a source as that
of a parochial junta of jobbing democrats, who would
naturally select for office those only who obsequiously
courted their favour, and who, in their opinion, would
make the fittest tools of their petty power ? It is true
they might sometimes be mistaken in this latter res-
pect, but that makes no difference as to the real me-
rits of the question. The administration of the law,
even in its lower departments, of more or less the
interests of all classes of society. It is too important—
too sacred a trust to be made the reward of persons who
qualify for such distinction by earning the approbation
of the lowest demagogues, and courting that vulgar po-
pularity which " comes without merit and is lost with-
out a crime." But in the particular instance of the
Marylebone parish, something much worse has occurred
than a bona fide popular recommendation of a list of
names to the Lord Chancellor for county magisterial ap-
pointments. The majority of the vestry have been
tricked out of their supposed privilege by three of their
own body, who having been commissioned with some
others as a deputation to wait upon Lord Cottenham with
a memorial, praying fur the appointment of additional
county magistrates, took upon themselves to give in a
" pocket-list" of their own, without being authorised
by the vestry to recommend any particular names
This usurpation of their power the vestry have natu-
rally taken in dudgeon ; but the magistrate making
triumvirate, when called to account, brazened the
thing out with the true demagoguish assurance. In-
deed, according to the report of the proceedings, the
despotic triumvirate at Somerset Hoes could not treat
a remonstrant " Board of Guardians" with cooler
contempt than the Marylebone vestry was treated by
the usurping fraction of their own deputation, who,
emulating the fame of the " three tailors of Tooley-
street," issued their conge d'elire to the Lord
High Chancellor of England to appoint county
magistrates, with as. much dictatorial solemnity
as if it commenced with the startling announce-
ment, " We, the whole people of Marylebone."
This incident illustrates, as we observed, the prac-
tical working of the principle of popular appointment
or designation of the magistracy. A jobbing two or
three of the most pushing and least scrupulous of the
political intriguers of the parish or borough generally
contrive to get the thing into their own hands, and in-
stead of appointments of magistrates upon the responsi-
lity of the high officer of the crown—a gentleman and a
man of education—we may have the great seal employed
to register the edicts of some law intriguing junta, with
whose obtrusive recommendations the English public
have as little connection as the people of Timbuctoo
In the case of the Marylebone hoax upon the first
judicial authority in the realm, we observe that
Mr. Young has, in a letter to the Lord Chancellor,
denounced else impudent imposition, for the learned
Lord naturally supposed the list of names had been
authorised by the vestry. Though Lord Cottenham,
politically speaking, belongs to a party upon whose
principles and opinions we set very little value, yet as
the head of the law, as the keeper of the Queen's con-
science, and as a Judge of pure and unsullied reputa-
tion, he is entitled to a degree of public respect which
we would by no means wish to see diminished. After
what has happened we cannot anticipate that such a
man will degrade the office of Lord High Chancellor
of England by allowing himself to be made the
cat's-paw" of the little knot of political jobbers in
Marylebone, whose attempt to impose their own
nominees upon him as the popular choice, Mr.
Young has so properly resented and exposed.—Morn-
ing Herald.

On Thursday the ceremony of consecrating the
South Metropolitan Cemetery at Norwood was performed by
the Bishop of Winchester. The Right Reverend Prelate ar-
rived at the ground at two o'clock, and was received by the
board of directors and many of the most respectable inhabi-
tants of the neighbourhood. Had it not been for the severity
of the weather the interesting ceremony would, no doubt, have
been witnessed by thousands.
Early on 'Thursday morning, and nearly through-
out the whole of Thursday, snow fell in this city and neigh-
bourhood ; at one time, the flakes fell " so thick and fast,"
that a deep snow was expected, but the temperature becoming
much milder, a considerable portion of the snow melted on the
ground.—Hereford Times.
CHURCH RATE SALE DEFEATED.—The Dis-
senters of Leicester have achieved another victory over the in-
tolerant and biggotted Church party, not a single article hav-
ing been disposed of at the public sale last Tuesday.
A gentleman inquiring if Mr. D'lsraeli s won-
drous" speech in the Commons, the other night, was his
'• maiden" effort in the House, being answered in the affirmative,
observed, " Ah, I thought it was Virgin on the ridiculous 1"
A retrospect of the last thirty years presents us with
a list of not less than six distinguished Statesmen who have
sunk almost in the prime of life under the turmoil of their
public duties, viz., Fox, Whitbread, Romilly, Liverpool, Cas-
tlereagh, and Canning.
Mr. Ralph Docker has been elected Coroner of
Worcestershire, after a severe struggle. The number of votes
was for that gentleman 248; fur Mr. Waters, 135.
The Postmaster-General has ordered that all post-
towns shall be furnished with dated stamps, so that the place
and day of putting letters into the post may be at all times
known to the receiver.
Messrs. Horsley and Whittaker demanded of the
Hull and Selby Railway Company the sum of 3,0001. for six
hundred square yards of land wanted to complete the railway.
The Company offered 136/., which was refused. On Wed-
nesday, a jury awarded 1021., as a compensation.—Hull Paper.

We have some misgivings in announcing that the
Imprisonment for Debt Bill is now passing the ordeal
of a Select Committee. It will be seen, by the recent
debate, that Lord Denman, as well as Lord Brougham,
takes the same view of imprisonment for debt as we
have taken. Any man's freedom, his Lordship said,
is in the hands of any malignant or unprincipled indi-
vidual who would take a false oath. He gave two
most startling instances of the oppressiveness of the
present law ; its tyranny, as regards the person ; and
its mischief, with regard to commerce.
" Let them reflect (he said) upon the injury which an
imprisonment did to the trade and to the credit of the party
arrested, and let them say whether there was any action for
false imprisonment which could afford compensation. An
action for false imprisonment was no remedy, and often a
party so arrested was injured for life. He trusted that a law
which gave rise to acts of such great injustice as the law of
arrest on mesne process, would not be continued in this free
and enlightened country. He observed that these arrests
generally took place for small sums. Two-thirds of those ar-
rested had been arrested for sums under 301. He ob-
served that parties were placed at the mercy not on!y of
the creditor, but of the low practitioners of the law, who
had no regard except for their own interests. He trusted
that whatever alterations they might make in this Bill in
Committee, and whatever substitute they might adopt for
arrest, whether what was proposed by the Bill in its pr, -
sent shape,- or any other substitute, he trusted that by the
second reading of the Bill that night, it would stand re-
cognized that the principle of arrest was abolished."
We omitted to state when on Friday last arguin

THE SUN, LONDON, TUESDAY, DECEMBER 12, 1837