The Sun.
London, England, 1830-12-31 00:00:00

maintenance of gaols and pitseentions have lately increased
tolhe farmer magnitude of the poor rates ; and the poor
rates have advanced to an equality with the whole revenues
of Government, no longer ago than the accession of
George 111. That concurrently with the borough•owner,'
the tithe-owner has pressed forward with his claims, not
only on the produce of the earth, but on the produce of
industry, capital, and improvements, brought from other
parts, with a keenness unjustified.l; reason, and uncoun.
tenanced by former custom."
Mr. Beaumont observes that the invention of
funding changed the character of, the House of
Commons, by giving the owners a deeper interest in
expendinp; loans, than in resisting taxation borne by
them, only in common with the public. After de-
scribing the delightful progress of loans, contracts,
dePreciation of currency, &c., he observes—
The borough-owners were delighted with things as '
they were.; they offered the sacrifice of their lives and for-
tunes in upholding them ; and villitled, slandered, and de-
, notinced as enemies to their country, those simple citizens
whb mourned over the waste of millions iu unnecessary
wits and despotic objects, and predicted that the incessant
borrowin9s and wasteful expenditure of the Ministers of
GoVernment, would, as with other spendthrifts, speedily
exhaust their own resources, while it spread distress and
misery upon all who were involved in the consequences of
their prodigality."
Mr. Beaumont estimates the Government, Church,
and Local Taxes at 76,000,0004, and the whole
rental of real property us scarcely more than the re-
turns of 1804,,1. e. 38,000,0001. He supposes that
not more than five millions of men in the twenty
millions are employed in productive industry;
and taking the annual earnings of the productive
labourers of the United Kingdom at 87,250,0004
sterling, those who live on the taxes and tithes ab-
sorb nearly as much as the whole of the value of the
industry of those who work. Mr. Beaumont's ac-
count of the premium in favour of crime in this
country is admirable :

"A different cause of distress and of irritation against
superiors is to he found in the vast accumulation of power
of interference with the working man's free agency, which
has grown up in the hands of magistrates amUocal autho-
rities. Law after law is passed to extend the discretionary
power of magistrates, until the people are almost mad-
dened with the restraints of petty tyrannies
But, if the working man lay aside his honest industry and
turn thief, or pauper, these persecutions cease, and the
humane sympathies of the authorities then begin. So
much pains have been taken to make punishments eons-
fortable, that the culprit asks the Judge for a lengthened
term of imprisonment as a (*sour; and the pauper is so
used to the officiousness of his superiors, in managing his
affairs, and providing for his wants, that if these things
be not done handsomely, and according to kis notions,
while be stands by in'idleness, he is ready to break out in
rebellion. The last point to which taxation can be ear,
ried may be conceived to be, when the taxes by direct and
circuitous operation take so much away from the produce
of those who work,, :ax to reduce their families below
typhus proof, and their oivn condition below that which
is provided at 04 public expeuce for the sustenance of
idlers and thieves in workhouses and gaols, and "which,
therefore, incline them not to work but to idle, or steal,
that they may enjoy the better fare offered to paupers and
felon."

Reduction of expenditure must be accompanied
with the ►►prooting " the great cause of the irrita-
tion, of the outrages, the loss of protection for pro-
perty, and the anarchy in which we are now unhap-
pily involved." As our overwhelming taxation
has been brought on us ►hrough the degeneracy,
and corruptness, and wastefulness of the House of
Commons—" Corruption (he observes) hath now
eaten up corruption those who have fattened on
the loans and taxes, now find out that the Govern-
ment can no longer feast them as they did formerly."
" All parties are at length so well satisfied that no-
thing short of Reform can pacify the country, or
avert a revolution, that a Reform of some sort will
take place. We shall in a future number examine
Mr. Beaumont's plan of Reform—Morning Chron.

We recollect that, about the beginning of lust
winter, some of those London Journals that pre-
tend to a superior portion of philosophic illumina-
tion made it a point to decry private charity, as be.
ing only an inventive to vagrancy and idleness, in a
country in which the law had provided atut no man
should die of starvation. Before the winter termi-
nated, however, we had to report many of those
melancholy cases of death from distress, which
proved that the actual state of facts was greatly at
variance with the theory of the law. Several in-
stances occurred then, and others have occurred since,
both in the metropolis and the country, of persons
being found dead under circurnstances which betrayed
the last degree of human destitution, and which
warranted Coroners' Juries in returning verdicts of
" death by. starvation." Thus unhappily are the
records of judicial inquiries opposed to the benevo.
lent maxim of the law—the humane fletion—that
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no man can die from want of food in England. The
' " philosophers" of the Press found apt and docile
pupils in same of the Police Magistrates of the me-
tropolis, who took occasion, whenever a case of pe-
culiar wretchedness was brought before them, to
retail, for the edification of parish overseers and po-
licemen, the harsh and cruel sentiments which they
had imbibed from the pages of those enlightened in-
structors who have undertaken to unteach mankind
the erroneous impressions which they receive from
the feelings of eature and the virtues of Christi-
anity I Philosophers and Magistrates of this stamp
seem to consider it no small preof of advancement
in political wisdom that they had discovered help-
less poverty to be the worst of crimes, and desti.
tuto human beings to be the most atrocious of
all offenders; but, if they were capable of view-
ing their own conduct through any medium but
that of absurd self-admiration, they would find that
it required nothing but a hard heart and a
flippant tongue to decry that spirit of benevo-
lence which, next to the gift of reason, most ex-
alts man above the " beasts that perish." There
is no country in the world where charity has a larger
field in which to exercise those feelings which pro-
duce the finest gratification of which the human
heart is susceptible than England at the present
day—for there is no country in which, opulence and
destitution, luxury and distress, are to be found in
more prominent and painful contrast. A cold and
heartless self-sufficiency may reduce to a system the
maxims of sordid pride and selfish enjoyment, but
that knowledge is of a higher moral source which
preserves, amid the business, the cares, and the
pleasures of the world, the warm feelings of charity
as a "salient spring of living and generous uetion. '
Public and compulsory charity, such as that esta-
blished by our poor laws, though it has many ad-
vantages, has also great defects. Its machinery is
cumbrous, and often so slow its movement, that un-
happy objects, who have an indisputable claim
upon its saving interference, perish before they can
receive relief. Wu reported the other day the case
of a woman, who, with a helpless daughter, in a
state of utter indigence and nakedness, died of
absolute want upon a truss of straw, in a car-
ter% shed at Oxford, where she had begged a lodg-
ing to save her from the necessity of lying deism
with the cattle in the field. !lad there been a
" good Samaritan" to have poured " oil and wine
I into the wounds" of the suffeier, without trusting
to the tardy sympathy of the Levites of the Pool
Laws, the quick instinct of his humanity would have
snatched a victim of famine from an untimely grave.
Our modern philosophers would have blamed him,
no doubt, for having anticipated the statutory bene-
volence of the law, but he would be more than con-
soled for such censure by the approbation of his OWII
heart, Let any one read the case of the poor Irish
sailor, and his four Wretched companions, who were
foetid its a state of indescribable misery, on the in-
clement night of Christmas-day, huddled together
on a little straw, under one of the land-arches of
Loudon-bridge, in a companionship of wretchedness
and despair, dying by inches in this Christian
land, while, within a few hundred yards of them,
thousands- were revelling in all the luxuries oh
life. -Let any our, we say, read this case, end then
tell us if the prompt intervention of private charity
is supeulluous at all times under our boasted system
of poor lOwi. What was the statement of the
officer that found them ? Hear* yea whom "
plea-
sure, Wealth, and affluence sorroutui I" Ile said the
poor ?creatures had gathered together a little straw,