The Sun.
London, England, 1839-03-12 00:00:00

resolved, we will not form such hard thoughts of-
them, for that implies that they are thoroughly in=
sensible to the distinction between right and wrong,
and careless if they provoke just rebellion by avowing
a hatred of rectitude and a love of crime. On their
decision hangs the fate of this country. If they
decide one way, we may see the revival of prospe-
rity, the cessation of hostility between landlords and
manufacturers, between capitalists and labourers,
possibly the re-installation of authority ; if they de-
cide the other, starvation, decay, open strife, and a
thorough contempt for every thing assuming the
name of legislation, will overwhelm the land. A
more awful responsibility at this moment hangs on
the Commons of England than ever yet weighed
on any Representative Assembly.
At the meeting of the Delegates at Manchester,
Colonel THomPsoN, without much disguise,
pointed to open resistance to the law-making land-
lords, as the consequence of their resisting the just
demands of the people :
" All parties in the State were in fact now put upon
their trial.—( Cheers.) Those who attached great im-
portance to things as they are, must urge upon their fel-
lows the necessity of demonstrating that things as thy are
were sufficient to aford us justice.—(Cheers.) These
who were for cautious and timid change, must show us
that such change was competent to putting down the
public wrong we were here met to complain of.—( Cheers. )
We must try this string, till it either gained their end or
broke ; but if it broke, what next? Why, if it came to
that , the Delega,es must, as the soldiers say, sound the
disperse, and then fill in again.—( Loud cheers.) No
man, after trying what his own politics would do, could
quarrel with other men for trying theirs.—( Cheers.) If
at last it came to this, it was clear enough in whit road
things must go. There must be an approximation between
the two parties whose want of union had caused the pre-
sent failure.—( Loud cheers.) Each party must come
down somewhat from its present position and meet in the
middle."

For our parts, supposing legislative authority
to be founded on reason, not on brute force,
and not merely on prescription and custom, we
see no good grounds which the injured manufac-
turers, the starving labourers, and the poll-taxed
people, will have either to respect or obey the
Legislature.
It is true that very few, even of those who ad-
vocate the abolition of the laws, seem exactly to
share our views, or to be duly impressed with the
importance of the subject. They seem to imagine
that a Legislature, unlike individuals, may handle
Fitch and riot he defiled ; that it can play with
wickedness and catch none of its contagion—that
it can commit the enormous crime of plundering
large masses of human beings, and starving hun-
dreds and thousands out of existence, without being
guilty of robbery and murder. Such is not our
view. The laws of right and wrong are the same
for Legislatures as for individuals ; and if it be
wrong in a single landlord to take away every day
half the loaf of a poor family, and prevent them
exchanging the fruits of their labour with another
family in a neighbouring village, so that they can-
not replace the half loaf, and thus to doom the
parents to hunger and the children to speedy
death from insufficient nourishment, it must
he equally a crime, in a combination of landlords,
to effect the same ends by means of a Corn-law.
If those who, like Mr. STURGE, and the bulk of
the Delegates, take a view something like ours, and
demand the total repeal of these laws, are, in ever
so slight a degree, censurable for the excess and
sternness of their justice, those, in our estimation,
are infinitely more worthy of blame, who pre-
tending to he advocates of this great cause, palter
with it, and encourage the landlords to go on in
their career, by expressing doubts whether to cease
from robbery be expedient. Such half-and-half
friends who recommend a ten-shilling duty, to be di-
minithed a shilling a year till it becomes five shil-
lings, then to remain fixed, admit the sconndvi
principle against which we earnestly contend ; AS(I
plead, under the pretext of justice, for the continu-
ance of a little theft. According to them a tax on the
people's bread would be expedient by enabling the
Government to increase its revenue, and to relieve
the people from some onerous taxes. But in the name
of humanity and political economy, what tax is or
can be so onerous as a tax on bread, which, in the
supposition of a fixed duty of 10s., might put a mil-
lion a year into the coffers of the State, and would,
by augmenting the prices of everything grown or
borne by the soil, cause perhaps one hundred
millions to be taken from some membe-s of the
community, and given to others ; and which, en-
hancing the price of all the necessaries of life, im-
pedes interchange, cripples industry, and renders
the payment of any taxes, however small, an intole-
rable burden ? With those pretended pleaders for
justice, but advocates of wrong, who, in the name
of the people, give up their cause to the landlords,
we have nothing in common. We demand the
• total abolition of the Corn-laws ; and it is for those
who contend for those laws, not for those who

contend against them, to propose something short
of complete success. That the people cannot
have what is tight, is what the Ministers,
in forgetfulness of their high functions, have un-
happily said, and they have thereby stimulated the
landlords to adhere to the Corn-laws.

We do not wholly despair, though the Liberal
Ministers have deserted us, even of the present
House of Commons, for we are riot Chartists.
We remarked at the time—and well we remember—

that Sir R. PEEL on one occasion reproached the
manufaiturers with wishing to injure the agricul-
turists. He, therefore, only resists the abolition,
from supposing this will be injurious to the farmers.
He, in common with all statesmen, embraces

the creed that all the interests of a gteat commu-
nity are inseparably linked together, and he must
therefore admit, that to injure the manufactu-
rers, is also to injure the agriculturists. But
there cannot be the shadow of a doubt

that to prevent the manufacturers buying in
the cheapest market, and selling where they like, is a
grevious injury to them. It must be admitted,
therefore, unless the whole basis of modern states-
manship, the community of interest is a lie, that
that Corn-laws are injurious to the agriculturists at
well as to the manufacturers. Nor is evi-
dence wanting that such is their effect. We have
over and over again proved that to enhance the cost
of raising corn here so far above the cost of raising
it in the surrounding countries, limits our farmers
to our own market, and prevents the possibility of ex-
porting corn in fruitful years. We have shown that
no more certain method can be fallen on when tea,
coffee, sugar, rice, sago, fish, and a variety of other
things, come into habitual competition with the pro-
duce of our own soil, of doitig itljtlry to the farmer
than to raise the Cost of his production by a law which
renders the competition disadvantageous to him,
and gives a bounty on the consumption Of the
foreign produce. Snell; too, Seems to have been
Mr. flusittBsoN's views towards the close of his
life, and from what he said on one of the last occa-
sions when he spoke of the cl—orn-laits; we hale no
doubt that had h lived till now he would have been
our side. When the present Act was first pro-
posed in 1828, he spoke thus of the
.Corn-laws of
1815, the then most apprc,v,iri.tettriWire Code:—
. " He wonld 16-nly that Hon. Member, that he
%%eat& from the bottom of his soul, the- mass of evil
and misery, and the destruction of capital, which that law,
in the course of its twelve years' operation, had prodneed?
and he did believe that he cottld nialo it distinctly appear;
if the moment vvert h pm:Ter one, that the effect of the
Bill, at kr as regarded the agriculturist thlemselltA; had
been to keep the-prices Of pralkelotiier, fol' thole twelve
years, than they *ould have been it the trade in corn had
been entirely open."
But the law passed in 1828 has turned,.. out no
better than the law which kept dorin
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t;ornmons of England will per-
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A good
the gentlemen or Lngia:nd now act so Will the peo-
ple do, and their decision on the great eitieStiOn will
either restore amongst us the de!itit'il6n of justice or
establish fraud and violence as the rules of out lives;
Awful, we repeat, is the responsibility which now
rests on the Commons' House of Parlisinoti