The Sun.
London, England, 1837-06-03 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

Lord Denman gave notice last night that on Thurs-
day next he will submit a motion to the House of
Lords respecting the resolutions adopted in the House
of Commons on the subject of privileges in Parlia-
ment. Lord Ellenborough suggested to the Noble
and Learned Lord that before he gave such notice he
should bestow on the subject his most mature conside-
ration, as he saw great difficulty and inconvenience
that might result to the House if it adverted to those
resolutions ; but the Noble and Learned Lord declared
that he had given to the subject his most mature con-
sideration, and he felt that in the situation which he
had the honour to hold he had not the least choice,
and that he should desert his duty as one of the
Judges, and as a Peer of Parliament, if he did not bring
this matter under the consideration of their Lordships.
Lord Denman is adopting a bold course : we doubt
its prudence. We are, however, in no great appre-
nension that the House of Lords will on such aground
enter into any collision with the Commons. The dis-
tinction taken by the Noble and Learned Lord between
printing reports for the use of Members, and the
recent practice of selling them, is evidently imma-
terial, because both are publications in the eye
of the law. Nay, it has been held that the mere put-
ting a letter into a Post-office is publication. The
question, therefore, raised by Lord Denman, involves,
not the mere mode of distributing the Reports and
other Parliamentary Papers, but the exercise of the
powers most essential to the House of Commons. Were
the Lords to adopt Lord Denman's views, and to pro-
claim that the privileges of the Commons ought not
to protect their officers in printing and publishing the
evidence taken before Committees, their Lordships
would be closing an avenue through which they them-
selves receive most valuable information. With what
face could they declare that the officers of the House
of Commons might be punished for publishing such
evidence, and yet send messages to the Commons re-
questing that it might be communicated to them-
selves ? The question must, however, be set at rest.
Stockdale has already found imitators ; and indeed
every functionary who dislikes inquiry into his conduct
will endeavour to set the House of Commons at de-
fiance.—Morning Chronicle.
There's nothing like the worldly zeal of a saint.
Sir George Sinclair is one of the pure—stout in his
attachment to the magnificence of Bishops, and burn-
ing in his hatred to rate-disliking Dissenters. His
fervour is great. He has rescued Sir Francis Burdett
from the hands of the ungodly, and may be said, in
conjunction with Mr. Croker, to merit all the honours
of that Baronet's conversion. But new laurels court
his brow. He hates with all the bitterness of the
pious, and the party he hates is in office. A blow
may be struck at that party. How ? By merely ex-
citing and alarming the public mind, in this, we grieve
to confess it, rather critical moment—by attempting to
propagate a panic as much beyond the circumstances
of the case as apathy and neglect would be below it—
by talking idly and ridiculously, but pompously and
spitefully, of ruin, insurrection, and national bank-
ruptcy, and blaming the Government (by parenthesis).
What for ? Promoting, causing, any of these evils ?
NO ; the Honourable Baronet would not venture
on any such direct charge ; but for not, for-
sooth, bringing on the Budget. And this is
the mighty peg on which he thought proper
to hang all his solemnly-pronounced and male-
volently-intended prognostications. Sir George Sin-
clair is impotent in effecting the mischief be desires ;
the country laughs at him as the House does. But
his will is good ; and at all events he merits the glory
of readiness towards exciting any alarm throughout
the country that might be favourable to his own bigoted
and narrow-minded party politics. So much for Sir
George, the minor Ajax, over whom the great Ti-
dydes, the immortal Richards, at last threw the dignity
of his protection. This gentleman was not so mea-
sured ; he accused the Ministry of every and any-
thing ; but just the moment when alarm and expecta-
tion, excited by his eloquence, were at their height—
when there seemed everything to dread, and nothing to
hope for—the Gallant Member for Lincoln, in one of
those impassioned bursts resembling Mirabeau's ap-
peals to the National Assembly, dispelled every doubt
and banished every apprehension by calling on the Go-
vernment to resign, and testifying a readiness to direct
the fate of that unhappy country whose destinies are
trembling in the balance.
" Immortal Statesman, thrice is Britain blest
See Europe saved, while S- stands confest.' "

The greater part of the evening was subsequently
occupied with the Irish Poor-law, the most important
discussion on which was that relating to out-door
relief. Mr. O'Connell's line was singular enough.
Give me no workhouses, he says ; but if you do give
me workhouses, let there be a superabundance—give
me no legal relief, but if you de give me legal relief,
let it be of the most extensive kind. The danger of a
Poor-law is the confiscation of property ; if you con-
fiscate at all, do the thing handsomely. Let it be on
the amplest and the noblest scale. This, if we mistake
not, is saying simply, I would oppose a Poor-law alto-
gether if I could, but as I cannot do that I will oppose
this Poor-law by showing it is not sufficient. The
House supported Lord John Russell by a great majo-
rity.—Morning Chronicle.
England has run through many sorts of Govern-
ments—good Governments and bad, harsh Govern-
irents and mild, feeble Governments and strong, pa-
c .fic Governments and warlike, corrupt and conscien-
ious Governments—but it was reserved for the present
crisis that this great country should show herself to the
world without any Government at all. A Govern-
ment is that power which carries on the public business
of a nation ; but under the existing " Government" of
England, all the national affairs are, if we may judge
by. the declarations of its members, completely at a
stand still. The men who assume the title of King's
Ministers have pledged themselves repeatedly and so-
lemnly to the fact, that this United Kingdom is in ab-
solute want of certain changes in the laws, by which
power and privileges of sundry kinds are distributed, and
by which property, ecclesiastical and municipal, is held.
All these changes they, the Ministers, declare to he in-
dispensible, and some of them " vital," to their own
existence. At the same time they assert, and profess
to believe, that the nation generally is desirous of such
changes, and bent upon seeing them accomplished.
They began with introducing one for a pronounced
disapproval of which they had cashiered a former Mi-
nistry. It was a Bill recognizing a certain definite
principle—namely, the expediency of alienating pro-
perty which had been in possession of the Church for
many centuries, to purposes in which the Church had,
no concern. The present Ministers, before their ac-
cession to office, and after, proclaimed aloud that they
would make the enforcement of that one principle the
test of their policy, and the hinge of their existence
" as a Government." They attempted to carry it
through Parliament, and were beaten. Their conti-
nuance in office was not more favourable to the suc-
cess of that " vital principle," than the retention of
office by the Conservatives would have been. Why
did they not either—lst, resign—or, 2d, which
would have been more logical, dissolve the Parlia-
ment ? It will be answered, why dissolve a Parlia-
ment, when the majority of the House of Commons
was in their favour ? We reply, that their con-
stant boast has been that the people out of doors were
with them, that the constituency was with them, that
public opinion was with them ; then, we repeat, that
had they -been men of logical action, believing in the
truth of their own premises, they would have drawn the
practical conclusion from them, and resorted to the
sense of the people out of doors, by dissolving a Par-
liament wherein the Opposition were so nearly on a
level with the Government and its partisans as to
numbers, and the majority by consequence so scanty,
that no reasonable man could expect the adverse senti-
ments of the House of Lords to be in the least degree
reconciled thereby to the course which Ministers had
adopted. It has been agreed by individuals on both
sides, that the House of °Lords would at all times be,
morally speaking, compelled to acquiesce in any political
measure which had been sustained by a large, steady,
and continued majority of the Representatives of the
people. If, then, the Whig-Radical Ministers were
really honest in their statement of the importance
which they attached to the resolution by which they
had forced the Conservative Ministers to resign in
1835, and to the principle which that resolution 0143*

bodied—if, moreover, they believed that the country
was with them on the same question of the Irish
Church, and that it required nothing more than a free
expression of the popular feeling through the House
of Commons to insure the concurrence of the
Lords in support of that very Irish Church
question, we assert broadly that the Melbourne
Whigs must be the most helpless and pitiable of
created beings, or the most profligate (which you will)
to leave untried the obvious means of carrying a mea-
sure, paramount, on their own showing, in its national
advantages, and vital, on their own acknowledgment,
to themselves as a Ministry, by a dissolution of Par-
liament and an appeal to the people. But there is
something further worth remark in relation to that
measure for stripping the Irish Church. They were
defeated last year by the House of Lords, and
feared to dissolve the Parliament. What have they
done this year? Have they yet carried it? No.
The month of June has arrived, and have they
carried that Bill, or an equivalent for it, even
through the House of Commons ? No such thing.
Their majority in that House on the question even
last session had been alarmingly reduced. This
session they have been manifestly afraid to bring it
forward. They put off the second reading in pre-
tended spite, but real terror, to the 9th of June, the
day fixed by the House of Lords, many weeks ago,
for the consideration of another of the Whig-Radical
" vitals"—viz. the so-called Irish Municipal Bill ; and
on being pressed last Thursday evening by Lord
Stanley, Lord J. Russell coolly avowed that he
would postpone the second reading of the Irish Tithe
Bill from the 9th to the 12th inst., and not merely
that, but he confessed his inability to inform the House
on what doll Lord Morpeth would move that resolu-
tion which went to impose a tax of 10 per cent. upon
the clergy He did more—his Lordship, in the most
complaisant manner, waved all competition as to prio-
rity in favour of Mr. Joseph Hume, who threatened
the House, for the Sth of June, with one of his slop
motions about household suffrage, or the identity of
black and white, or some such physical phenomenon—
as also in favour of Lord Dudley Stuart, who was to
find a mare's nest near Cracow, although his own mo-
tion concerned the grand question of Church-rates.
This ostentatious indifference of the Noble Leader of
the House of Commons to the progress of measures
which he and his Cabinet have always represented as
of high and urgent importance, proves simply that
they are afraid to take the field in defence of their own
projects—that they are conscious of an utter incapacity
to carry on their own professed scheme of national
policy—that they feel themselves not to be an effective
Government, but only a band of wretched, powerless
placemen,—and that the only motion about which they
can be made sensible of a sincere or genuine interest
would be that of Colonel Sibthorp for reducing the
salaries of office, or of any other Member of Parlia-
ment for putting off quarter-day. If, with regard to
the Irish Church, it be plain that Great Britain is
without a Government, the case will be still clearer
when the public attention shall be turned to the
Church-rate Bill. Why, on that question, where their
majority was but five, did they not instantly dissolve
the Parliament ?—Times.
The political speculators have been for the last few
days circulating various reports relative to the stability
of the Ministry to amuse the quidnuncs at the West-
end of the town. According to one, the life of Lord
Melbourne's Administration would be contempora-
neous with the illness of his Majesty ; his Lordship
was to receive the coup de grace as soon as his Ma-
jesty's physical strength would be sufficiently reno-
vated to go through the ceremony of giving the dis-
missal is due form. According to another, certain
impracticable Irish Members were to break the line,
and vote against the Irish Tithe Bill, not for the pur-
pose of getting a better measure, but solely in order to
perform a practical Irish blunder, with the patriotic
view of handing over their countrymen to the tender
mercies of the Tories. The Spitalfields weavers are
not the only artisans who feel the -pressure of these
peaceful times. The political Cabinet-makers have been
for some time out of work ; but Friday week, the day
fixed for the discussion on the Government Tithe mea-
sure, is looked forward to as a day of hope, which is to
put them into full employment. It may be regarded as
an act of gratuitous cruelty to deprive these enthusiasts
of the pleasure they derive from these pleasing reveries.
Notwithstanding, we can assure them that Lord Mel-
bourne's Government never stood upon more stable
grounds than it does at this moment. The people of
Ireland have full confidence in the sincerity of the
Ministry to do them full and ample justice—the Dis-
senters of England participate in the same feeling, and
fully appreciate the value of the measures brought for-
ward for their relief—they are to a man ranged on the
side of the Government. Lord Melbourne has a ma-
jority in his favour in the House of Commons, elected
under the auspices of a Tory Cabinet. If a dissolution
were to take place to-morrow, that majority would- be
greatly increased. We leave it to the superior calcula-
tions of these wiseacres to make out a case favourable
to their hopes. It is beyond the reach of our ingenpity
to comprehend them. If, however, it should occur, in
the chapter of accidents, that any event should take
place which would remove Lord Melbourne from office,
and that he should be succeeded by a Tory Adminis-
tration, it would not be worth a month's purchase. In
the mean time, however, what would be the conse-
quences to the country ? Confidence would be de-
stroyed among commercial men—trade would be at a
stand-still—and the present depression in the commer-
cial world would increase tenfold. These are conside-
rations which may not find a place in the contempla-
tions of mere politicians, who speculate only upon the
ins and the outs, but they are reflections which must
suggest themselves to dispassionate and practical men.
The effect produced in Ireland requires no comment.—
Morning Advertiser.
The case of Colonel Bradley and Colonel Arthur,
which was agitated in the House of Commons on
Thursday, has been repeatedly before the public, and
its merits have been so frequently and so amply dis-
cussed that it would be scarcely necessary to allude to
it now but for the novel and extraordinary addition
which the foimer officer has recently made to his hn-
putations upon the latter, a kind of supplementary in-
dictment, of which Mr. T. Duncombe, cheered and
aided by Mr. Hume, Colonel Peyronet Thompson,
Major Beauclerk, and Mr. Wakley, undertook to be
the Parliamentary prosecutor. But this additional
charge is of so grave a nature, and is brought forward
in circumstances so extraordinary, that we feel we
should be guilty of a dereliction of our duty if we
neglected any means in our possession of directing to
it the attention, and, which we think must necessarily
follow, the censure and indignation, of the public.
Colonel Bradley's original complaints were, that he
had been unjustly dispossessed of his command at
Honduras by Colonel Arthur, and that in conse•
quence of what occurred upon that occasion he had
been compelled to retire from the army without the
sentence of a Court Martial. We will not enter into
the justice of these complaints further than to say that
competent military authorities have agreed in the opi-
nion that Colonel Arthur's assumption of the chief
command was in conformity with the regulations of
the service, which implies that Colonel Arthur would
have subjected himself to censure and to punishment
had he permitted the command to remain in other
hands than his own ; and as to the hardship of being
compelled to leave the service without the sentence of
a Court Martial, if it be true, as Lord Howick stated,
that Colonel Bradley attempted to instigate inferior
officers to support his authority in the colony, in oppo-
sition to that of Colonel Arthur, the permission to re-
tire, receiving the price of his commission, was not a
hardship, but an indulgence, for which this officer
ought to have been grateful to his Royal Highness
the Duke of York, then filling the office of Commander-
in-Chief. But, whether Colonel Arthur was right or
wrong in assuming the command at Honduras and
whether the Commander-in-Chief was, right or wrong
in dispensing with a Court Martial in the ease of Col.
Bradley, are considerations which have but little to do
with the supplementary accusation now brought against
the latter officer, that ho caused a soldier to be flog-
ged by tap of drum. If so disgraceful an occurrence had
place it was the duty of Colonel Bradley, or of any
other officer in his Majesty's service who was cogni-
zant of the transaction, to bring it under the notice of
the Commander-in-Chief with the least possible delay,
in WV, tgo afford the opportunity of a full and satis-