The Sun.
London, England, 1837-01-26 00:00:00

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LONDON,
THURSDAY EVENING, JANUARY 26, 1837.
The Great Protestant Meeting, which has so long
been announced, took place at Dublin on Tday
last. As far as mere numbers are
concerned, itues was
Unquestionably a great Meeting, for almost all the Irish
bigots of any note made a point of giving ther at-
lendance. Foremost among them was old Lord Ro-
LEN, who, by way of enhancing the dignified solem-
uity of the scene, entered the e
assembly holding an
Oran
g pocket handkerchief to his aristocratic nose,
for which graceful ebullition of party zeal, he was ho-
toured with three distinct rounds of applause. We
do not state this fact for the purpose of throw-
ing ridicule on his Lordship ; for we think the
aPPlication of a kerchief. to his nostrils was; under the
circumstances, not:only natural, but necessary—Orange
Mobs being not more remarkable for the odour of
sanctity, than they are for other- odours of a
less
" sweet-smelling" character. The speeches delivered
at this flagrant Meeting were of. the true bigot com-
plexion, each orator vicing with the other in the fur y
of his denunciations against Popery, Lord
M(IL-
CRAVE, the KING'S Ministers, and DANIEL
O'CON-
NELL. We will venture to say—and the assertion we
are aware is a daring one—that such an awkward squad
of blundering, blood-thirsty Intolerants never before
assembled in Dublin. So desperate was their spirit,
ao deplorable their infatuation—we should rather
say,
their sheer madness—that they actually refused to
acknowledge the existence of Catholics as Catholics,
and insisted on their being called " Papists ;" just as
if---the fools !—their quarrel was with the word, and
w 4. the creed In a similar petty, puerile spirit,
ai their allusion to O'CONNELL. When one of
their crack speakers mentioned the name of the
Member for Kilkenny, the whole skull-cracked
assembly roared out, " No, no, the Big Beggarman' ---
a phrase,. by the bvc, with which we arc by no means
disposed to quarrel, for Mr. O'CONNELL has begged
tri.ore, and got more, for Ireland from an English Mi-
tl4trY, than all the Protestants that ever professed to
lite• .
her welfare at heart.. DAN begged Catholic
41▪
4aacipation and got it. DAN begged Irish Reform
Iriset iteANIELs now
kng
unicipal Reform, and will get that too.
I,I7iNIY then he is a big Beggarman—an exceedingly
till jicefsg4rinan—and we hope will never cease begging
entitier obtained for his country all that she is justly
a 8 'tre we
to. Lord GLENGALL'S speech was just such
Peer re prepared to expect from him. This sprightly
0
ace wrote a comedy ; he here spoke a farce ; and
We are •
the la considerable doubt to which of his effusions,
written or the spoken one, we should assign the
Palm of dullness. Both were prodigies of ineptitude and
prolixity; and both equally set truth and sense at defiance.
But no, we arc mistaken. One observation his Lordship
made at the Meetin
correct g, which was most unquestionably
. " Domestic tyranny, said he, "exists to
deal "
such an extent that
neither landlord nor tenant can
to al
with their lands as they please." In the Pro-
parts of Ireland this is literally the case, in
proof of which we need only refer to the proceedings
Colonel BRUEN had the rare
of the Orangemen at the last Carlow election, which
luck to make infinitely
more notorious, by his clumsy defence of them in
Parliament. We have no doubt the Protestants ex-
Peet that this, their " greatest Meeting"—for so
Lord PtODEN styles it—will have the effect of setting
all Downing-street in convulsions ; but, alas, their
hopes will prove to have been erected, like the fool's
palace,: on the sands ; for a protest has been entered
against their " exclusive Meeting," signed by the
majority of the most influential Noblemen and Gentle,
irnen Ireland ; and more than this, a great Re-
ar!) Meeting is
bein
which in g held this very day in Dublin,
numbers, not less than in rank, character,

anti influence, will form an edifying contrast to the
beggarly show of pseudo-patriots, got up with such
difficulty at the Mansion-house. And here, while on
the subject of Meetings, we cannot refrain from no-
ticing a remark let drop by the Times this morning,
to the effect, that the late Conservative Meetings have
uniformly been distinguished by sobriety, and tempe-
rance of language ; and the Reform ones by qualities
diametrically the reverse. Now, to say nothing of the
Dublin Protestant Meeting, where the assembly acted
just as if they were all frantic, has our Contempo-
rary no recollection of the Devonport Conserva-
tive Meeting, where the assembly acted just as '
if they were all drunk ?—where half the toasts
were compelled to be omitted ; where the Chair-
man was inaudible throughout the latter part of
the evening ; and where the assembly were confessedly
so " excited"--this was the language of one of their
own local organs--that the stewards were compelled
to break up the party, and beat a speedy retreat ?
Had the Times remembered this and other facts of a
similar nature, which, had we time, we could recall
to his recollection, sure we are he would never have
dreamed of giving utterance to such a disastrous boast.

A very clever pamphlet, entitled " A Voice from
Ireland," has just been published by RIDGWAY. The
writer takes a plain, honest, straightforward view of
the abuses that exist in the Government of that
country, and shows, by the incontestable evidence of
facts, that proper and sufficient remedies must be
promptly applied, if Englishmen intend to render the
Union between Great Britain and Ireland more sub-
stantial than a sheet of blotted parchment. 'Till the
Irish people be allowed the full and rightful enjoyment
of the same laws and the same institutions as the in-
habitants of Great Britain—till an equal respect be
paid by the Legislature to the moral and religious
feelings of the majority of the Irish nation—till the
Government shall have learned that the will of the go-
verned is entitled to more respect than its notions of
what is abstractedly right or wrong, he maintains—.

very justly, in our opinion—that Ireland never will be
tranquil, or her people happy. In the foremost ground
of Irish abuses that require an immediate removal,
the writer places—or rather points out as already
occupying such a position—the Irish Church Estab-

lishment. To attempt to prolong its existence in any
other form, and under another name, he contends is
useless. The times for a reformation of this Institu-

Lion, as a dominant, tax levying, religious hierarchy, are
gone for ever. The doom of the Church as a political
State ally is scaled. Opinions, whether religious or
political, must henceforth stand on their own merits,
and draw support from the voluntary suffrages-of those
who hold them. The political fiction which supposes
• .

the interests of fifteen hundred Protestarit clergymen
to outweigh the moral and religious feelings of seven
millions of their fellow-countrymen must be for ever
erased from the Council-book of the British Legis-
lature. The right of the people of to believe
whatever religious tenets they please, is one of the
first boasted blessings of Protestantism ; and to
tax them for so believing is persecution in its
most hateful form. This doctrine, though new
and unpalateable to the bigoted partizans of eccle-
siastical abuse, • is recognized as the only rational
and safe basis of future legislation by nineteen-
twentieths of the people of England, Ireland, and
Scotland.

But great and manifold as are the evils which hourly
flow from the dominance of a State religion in Ireland
—a religion detested by thirteen-fourteenths of the
whole population—their eradication would go but a
short way towards removing the mass of misery that
like a moral leprosy disfigures the entire face of that
country. The removal of the hunger and nakedness
of the people.ought to precede every plan for the re-
moval of grievances originating in sectarian feelings.
Before we legislate for Irishmen as Roman Catholics,
let us bethink ourselves that they are men—that they
are human beings and fellow-subjects, without a neces-
sary supply of food or raiment—and that many of them
are without a roof under which to lay their heads.
The first great duty of Parliament is to take care to pre-
vent the famishing poor of Ireland from perish-
ing for want of food. To delay. any longer the
giving of a good Poor Law to Ireland is to become re-
sponsible before Heaven for the lives of the thousands
that annually perish from sheer want of bread. There
is no longer room for equivocation, or for an affecta-
tion of ignorance upo❑ this question. The man who
has seen Ireland, or who has studied her condition in
the Reports of the Poor Law Commissioners, and
who has yet his opiniOns to form respecting the neces-
sity of a legal provision for the Irish poor, must be so
stupid or so dishonest, that it would be a waste of time
to argue the question with him. Longer delay in the
passing of some measure for the legal support of the
poor of Ireland will be understood as indicative of
dishonesty on the part of the Legislature. And what
is more important still, if a Poor Law be not speedily
established in Ireland, machinery is in course of pre-
paration which will deprive the landlords of more than
would be levied upon their estates by the heaviest
poor-rate. The landlords may rely upon it, that if the
pool be not provided for during the next Session of
Parliament, they will be the first to suffer from a state
of things far from being modelled to promote their
pecuniary interests.
We have not room to-day for any extracts from
" A Voice from Ireland," but we shall take care, on
a subsequent occasion, to make our readers sufficiently
acquainted with the more important opinions and poli-
tical convictions of the writer. We only wish that he
had laid more stress upon the necessity--the imme-
diate necessity—of a good Poor Law for a country so
overrun with wretchedness, produced by famine. With
a Poor Law, Ireland may continue to have many
grievances to redress ; but without one, she never can
be prosperous or happy. It is the only measure that
will convince landlords that they have other duties to
perform, besides spending . incomes wrung from a
starving people in sloth and dissipation in foreign
countries. It will convince them that their very ex-
istence depends upon the prosperity of their tenantry ;
and that to quadruple their incomes, they will have
only to foster industry, and to encourage enterprise.
Their own moral improvement will not be less marked
than the speedy change which will become apparent in
the Physical condition of the cultivators of their estates.
They will delight in performing thosegood offices to their
tenantry which art now so generally neglected by them ;
and in return the people will look up to them as their
natural protectors, instead of regarding them as op-
pressors and tyrants.

e hare received, translated from the German, A
Geographical, Statistical, and Commercial Account
of the Russian Ports of the Black Sea, the Sea of
Asoph, and the Danube, with an official report of the
European commerce of Russia in 1835. These is no
Power in the world that better understands how to
turn the most trifling feature in the national character
of an ally to her own advantage than does Russia. As
the English ore proverbial for their respect for estab-
lished institutions, and their matter-of-fact—or rather
matter-of-money-modes of estimating the worth of ex-
ternal changes, Russia overwhelms us from year to
year with accounts of her growing settlements Jon the
Black Sea, and with statistical tables, intended to per-
suade us that we are vast gainers by her improve-
ments. She is careful not to say one word about her
right to the newly=established ports ; her object is
achieved if she can prevail upon England to regard
then as her's now beyond all dispute : and to silence

THE SUN, LONDON, THURSDAY, JANUARY 26, 1837.

all opposition on the part of those disposed to respect
the rights of nations, she adroitly points to the Bri-
tish Merchant's ledger, and triumphantly asks, if the
balance of trade be not in his favour ? Russia would
accustom us to the idea that the Black Sea belongs
to her, in order to prepare us for her ultimate seizure
of the entire coast right and left of the Crimea. She
would persuade us, that we owe to her beneficence the
privilege of carrying merchandise in waters which Eu-
ropean treaties have recognised as subject to the do-
minion of the Grand Porte, the better to prevent any
alarm consequent upon her seizure of Circassia—the
prelude of course to a grand attack upon the metro-
polis of the Ottoman Empire. Finding that she can-
not just now seize upon Constantinople by the way of .
Silistria, Varna, and Bourgas, Russia moves in an
opposite direction, where she has reason to believe her
operations will escape the notice of Western Europe.
Once possessed of Circassia, in which she is now
waging a most cruel and unjust war, most of the diffi-
culties that oppose her progress will be removed. But
she is well aware that extreme caution can alone screen
her vast projects from observation ; and that were the
drift of them rightly perceived by England and France,
these Powers would soon unite to check her in an in-
famous career of conquests achieved, not by the sword
alone, but by the blackest treachery. Every engine,
therefore, is set at work to deceive foreigners respect-
ing her political and social institutions. The Ear-
PERores love of civilization and 'zeal• for religion are
everywhere cited as the motives for acts which, if.

rightly understood, would fill the public mind of Eng.
land with horror. To save appearances hundreds o
thousands of wretched families are annually draft&

from the interior of the empire, by virtue of an Impe•
rial Ukase, to inhabit desolate stations on the coast o.

the Black Sea, in order that Western Europe may be
humbugged with accounts of the flourishing state of
the Russian acquisitions in that quarter. This is a
most important fact of which the people of England
appear to have no knowledge whatever. It is enough

for them to be told that aTtown was built some few

years back, and that its population has amazingly in-
creased, to jump at once at the conclusion that it must
be a very flourishing place. But population increases
and decreases in Russia after a fashion unknown in
free countries. The EMPEROR populates and depo-
pulates at his pleasure, without troubling his loving
subjects about the matter. No mistake can be greater
than that of supposing, that because the Russian
ports on the Black Sea are rapidly increasing in popu-
lation, such increase is a consequence of the happiness
of the people, and a proof of the superiority of Rus-
sian over Turkish civil institutions ; and yet this is
an error into which all English travellers constantly
fall. Whatever we witness is intended to deceive us ;
our national vanity is flattered by an outward semb-
lance of candour ; our common sense is perpetually
appealed to ; the EMPEROR'S love of peace, civili-
zation, and universal happiness is continually rung
in our ears by officials appointed for that purpose ; and
we return to England lamenting that any portion of
our fellow-subjects should so misconceive the benevo-
lent designs of so paternal a Monarch as the Emperor
NICHOLAS.

As the Tract before us is entirely of a practical
character, and is addressed exclusively to comteercial
men, we recommend it to the notice of all merchant's
engaged in export or import trade with Russia on
the Black Sea. The description which it contains of
the several harbours on the coast cannot fail to be of
immense service ; and as out enjoyment of the privi-
lege of vexing the waters of the Black Sea with Brkish

keels may be of short duration, the wisest thing our

[nerehants can do is to make the most of the boasted

Tuesday to receive two projects of law, the one intro-
duced by M. BERNARD, Minister of War, for regu-
lating the futitre trial of soldiers accused of conspi-
racies against the State, and the other bl,, M. P ozA-
NEL, Minister of Marine, for the establishment of
a convict colony in the Island of Bourbon, the climate
of which he described as " salubrious—nav, delicious,"
amid the loud laughter and cheers of the Deputies.
The object of General BERNARD'S project of law is
to substitute trial by Court-martial for trial by Jury,
in every case where soldiers are mixed up in a treason-
able accusation with civilians. The latter will con-
tinue to be tried by the ordinary tribunals ; the former
in every instance by a Court-martial.

The police are more than usually on the alert in
Paris. Not a day passes in which persons are not
dragged from their homes to be examined respecting
regicidal plots and conspiracies. The French begin
to find that Louis PUILIPPE'S safety is likely to cost
them more annoyances than a King is worth in these
times.

There is no other news of any moment in these
papers.

CIIANCERY COURT._ (THIS DAY

The LORD CHANCELLOR, after disposing of all the appeal
motions in his paper, none of which occupied many minutes,
and were of no public importance, proceeded with the part
heard case of Milligan v. Mitchell, which was opened yester-
day, and the question in which related to the right of a Scotch
Presbyterian congregation at Woolwich to elect their minis-
ter. The reading of the evidence on behalf of the plaintiffs
occupied the Court till our reporter left.

munificence of the EMPEROR. That the trade is as

profitable as Russia represents it may be true enough,
as far as regards Great Britain ; but we shall soon

see an end of it, if our Government remain indiffe-
rent to the sinister designs of Russia in the East.

" We perceive, by a statement in one of the Scotch
organs of Toryism, that Lord STORMONT has an-
nounced his intention to contest the representation of
the county of Perth at the next election. We are
likewise indebted to the same sage authority ; for the
important information that his Lordship will be sup-
ported by all the electors, except the Whigs and Ra-
dicals I Who shall doubt it ? We -do not wish to
undervalue our Contemporary's sagacity, but we can-
not help thinking that he might have made this dis-
covery without the aid of the second sight.
But be that as it may, how comes it that Lord
S rwtmoNT has deserted his first love ? After the
vows and protestations of eternal fidelity which the.
Noble Lord has so often made in another quarter, we
were not prepared for so flagrant a breach of his
plighted troth. Oh, faithless swain ! Oh, cruel Lord
SToRmoNT, thus to sport with the affections of one
who has given so many proofs of a devoted attachment !
But a thought suddenly strikes us, that we may per-

'haps be condemning Lord STORMONT unjustly, which
of all things is the last that we should wish to do. It
is possible that the Noble Lord may-have perceived
some symptoms of alienation in the 4uarter to which
we have alluded. There may have been a re-
action in a certain City, by no means favourable
to a continuance of the connexion commenced under

the happiest auspices. Under these circunt stances, the
Noble Lord may think himself acquitted of his en-
gagements, and perfectly at liberty to contract a

liaison elsewhere. Oh, that cursed Municipal Re-
form Bill, what havoc has it not made with the best
feelings of the human heart ? How many good old
Tory ties has it not wantonly and cruelly severed ?
To be serious, however, with Lord STORMONT
and his, foolish abettors in this project to storm the
county of Perth, we would, with all the respect due to
the son of a Tory Peer, ask him how he. can ,be so
silly as for a moment to. suppose qiat:lie .has the least
chance of succeeding in so wild a scheme ? Were:
there nothing else to deter him from embarking in this
dangerous adventure, has he not the fear of
Sir GEORGE MURRAY'S failure before his eyes ?
Lct him not be deluded by the specious plausibilities
of his so called friends in the north. They are not
his friends who urge him on to an encounter that must
inevitably end in his discomfiture, When he is told,
as we find he is, that he will be supported by every
man who has " the independent mind and the
religious principles of a Scotchman," let him recollect
that it was because Sir GEORGE MURRAY'S princi-
ples and conduct were offensive to the independent
minds and religious principles of the electors of Perth-
shire that he wzs rejected by them, and a man of more
congenial principles substituted in his stead. Is he
prepared to be more liberal than Sir GEORGE ? His
public professions say quite the contrary.

On Monday last a dinner was given by the Re-
formers of Exeter, in honour of their excellent repre-
presentative, Mr. DrvETT. The company assembled
on this occasion was both numerous and select. Up-
wards of 520 gentlemen sat down to table—J.
TYRRELL, Esq., in the Chair. The toast

that was received with the greatest enthusiasm was,,
" The health of his Majesty's Ministers," which the
Chairman prefaced by a short but admirable speech.
A very handsome piece of plate was presented to Mr.
DIVETT by his constituents, as a mark of their re-
spect for his character, and satisfaction with his public
conduct. Our limits will not permit us to enter more
into detail at present, but we shall take another oppor-
tunity of noticing this interesting meeting. .

The whole of the Paris Papers of Tuesday have
been received. The Chamber of Deputies sat on