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

broad and philosophical system of legislative Reform would
sweep away any necessity for occupying public attention
with the consideration of subordinate and piecemeal Re-
forms. As in every logical process of inference, the minor
proposition of improvement would be included in the ma-
jor. A statesman-like and philosophical grasp of the whole
system of our legislation would at once, by coupling vote
by ballot with an equitable extension- of the suffrage,
absorb all the minor measures into its own intensity,
and advantageously get rid of the intermediate dis•
traction of public attention from the considerations of
other objects of equally urgent and paramount import-
ance. A system of National Education such as that
proposed by the Hon. Members whose notices of motions
we have made the text of these improvised remarks, is in
fact linked by a family affinity with the preceding ques-
tion, and would get rid of those Hydra vices of electioneer•
ing curruption against the multifarious and poisonous heads
of which the heavy and never ineffectual club of the Hon.
Member for Middlesex is pertinaciously directed. Is it not
most disgraceful that after the Reform Bill, the bitter sar-
casms on the character of Englishmen, conveyed by Ho-
garth's well-known election prints, should possess almost
the same point-of point of scorn and ridicule as they did
in 177.5. A national system of education constructed du-
ring this long interval out of those educational funds, which
a State Church has fraudulently misappropriated, would
have torn up the whole of these unclean, degenerate, dis-
graceful, and infectious vices by the roots. Education
would have taught an English freeman and an elector to
spurn the offer of any bribe, the object of which was to
make him less than a man—a beast caught by the most
humiliating bait of gluttony or drunkenness—or to make
him worse--a political prostitute; for wo hold that there is
no difference in point of disgrace between the man who sells
his manly opinions for money, or the woman who for the
same money prostitutes her honour. He is equally unmanned
and equally despicable, nor ought he to dare to look in the
face any honest upright elector who spurns the dirty temp-
tation—who feels that the suffrage he exercises belongs to
his countrymen and to his family—and who is therefore
justly prompted to resent the proffer of a bribe for his pros-
titution with the same promptitude and effect as he would
a personal blow. A corrupted freeman would in the midst
of a highly educated people be regarded with loathing as
something less than man, as an hermaphrodite, or a monster.
An offer to corrupt would be received as an ancient Spartan
gentleman—trained to despise money, would have received
the calumnious imputation of possessing money,—with a
knockdown blow. Such is the omnipotence of education.
That loathing of dishonour, in fact, will be the feeling pro-
duced by establishing such a system of education as we, in
common with the Ifon. Members for Bath and Liverpool,
recommend—that feeling once engendered, there will be an
end of all future offers of btlbery. Corruption, like the
robber Cacus, will be dragged from the foul and dark hiding
places of his polluted den, to perish in the light—amidst the
full blaze of the intellectual day. What injury has the
State Church not done by its disgraceful misappropriation
to this moment of the educational funds intended to effect
this' benificent object ? The weight of this social crime
alone is enough to sink that " scarlet mother of abomina-
tions" fathoms deep in the sea, beneath the mill-stone of
public indignation, and the choral execrations of mankind.
Nor is it only to legislative practice that the broad and
philosophical principle which we advocate applies. It applies
more directly to the whole system of criminal jurisprudence.
We should require none of the silver tooth-pick reforms of
Sir R. Peel in the Criminal Code if a sound system of national
education were permitted to diffuse a clear and just appre-
ciation of man's individual, social, and national rights.
There would be no occasion for such a painful exhibition as

that now preparing for to-morrow before the debtors' 'door.
Seals are, while we write, in (;fie act of beidg purchased, as
for a theatrical spectacle ; and the tenants of the adjacent
houses are renting their windows like stalls and private
• boxes in a theatre. The Draconian criminal code might be
purged of its sanguinary and self-defeating absurdities at
once. The punishment of death might be safely reduced
to the single instance of premeditated murder—and ulti-
mately, as we have urged before, be superseded by the soli-
tary confinement for life of the criminal, as a madman no
longer to be trusted with the possibility of injuring his
fellow men, and which, philosophically speaking, there cannot
be a question that both morally and physically he is. So-
ciety, by omitting timely education,:revenges its own wrongs
-upon its own victims. Having the power to train others,
it trains murderous propensities, and punishes them. We
take an extrenfe case, in referring to Pegszvorth—in order
to enforce and complete our argument, as to the paramount
necessity of a universal system of national education. In-
vested from that armoury, Christian legislation might safely
obey the great mandate of the scriptures in the instance of
the first example of murder—which denounces sevenfold
vengeance on him who dares to take vengeance on the person
of the murderer, and by doing so, to take away that life
which man can neither give nor restore.—Morning Ad-
vertiser.

`We cannot mince the matter relative to the ministerial
scheme for the settlement of the question of Church-rates.
To use the plainest, and at the same time the mildest
terms that we can use in describing that scheme, we must
call it downright robbery—a robbery in which the injury to
the party plundered is attended with an instrilting putence
of restitution—a restitution out of their own property
or else a robbery of the property of others Either the
Chu, ch or its tenantry arc to be plundered to make resti-
tution for the abolition cf Church-rates, or rather to the
extent of less than half the value of the Church-rates abo-
lished. There is no species of property in this country
that stands upon a higher title, than that of the National
Church to Church-rates. That title is traceable through
all the political vicissitudes of our history to the establish-
ment of Christianity, in connection with the State, under
the Anglo-Aaxon Governments. Of`clourse, this property
belonged to the Church, and was a legal charge upon other
property, long before any of those dissenting sects were in
existence, whose " tender consciences" are to be relieved
by the confiscation of this propety. It used to be the
strongest term of reproach that could be applied to a crimi-
nal in the dock in this country, that he would " rob a
church." We have now a Chancellor of the Exchequer who
sets about robbing all the Churches in England with a cool-
ness of effrontery which the hardiest of those financiers who
are accustomed to raise " forced loans" upon his Majesty's
subjects by other than Exchequer process might envy. Mr.
Spring Rice tells the Church that the Ministerial scheme
of robbery is for its good. We should think the last word
must have been meant in the sense it bears when used in
the plural number. "We be come here for all your
goods," said the Prince, who understood English imper-
fectly. " Ay," said the John Bull bystander, " we have
no doubt of that, and for all our chattels too. Now, Mr.
Spring Rice—the " West Briton," whose own authority
we have for stating that words are often used in a different
sense in West Britain, alias Ireland, from what they are in
Britain proper, when he says he comes to Parliament for
the good of the Church, must mean for its " goods and
chattels !" and, in truth, we do not think that Ireland,
with all its " rogues and rapparees," could have sup-
plied any freebooter who could with more professional
coolness set about this sort of sacrilegious asportation.
The property which the West India planters had in
their slaves, though of a far more recent and doubtful
origin than that of the Church as to its rates, was
acknowledged by the Whig Ministers. Upon that prin-
ciple they legislated, and at first proposed 15 millions of
loan, and next 20 millions sterling, of rso, as a compen-
sation for the loss of that property. 'What would have
have been said if ministers bad proposed that the compen-
sation to the planters should come out of their own pi o-
pcity What would haVe been said if ministers had pro-
posed
that there should be a government Commission to
manage the estates of the planters, and letting them at an
improved value, to squeeze out of the occupiers the amount
of compensation to the owners ? This is what the minis-
ters propose to do in regard to the Church. They propose
to make restitution for robbing it of one species of property
by robbing it of another. If it be right, and no grievance,
in the legal sense of the word, be inflicted upon the lessees
of Churc property, by raising the value of the property
in the market, then the " improved value" as unquestian-
ably belongs to the Church, as the rates do. Ministers
have no more right to give the one than to take away the
other. When Mr. Spring Rice talks of the " tender con-
sciences" of the political dissenters, for whose sake
the rates applied to keep up places of worship for the
poor of the whole kingdom are to be abolished, wlrat
are we to say of the " tenderness" of his own conse.ience,
when he has the face to propose such a scheme of sacri-
legious spoliation, and gravely assert that it '.s all for the
good of the Church and the security of the, establishment ?
We all know—all England knows, 'what Mr. Joseph
Hume's wishes are for the good of `the Church and the
security of the establishment. T o do him justice, he
has taken no pains to disge'..se them. His approbation
of the scheme of the Church-robbing ministers pretty
clearly shows that he thinks tile aforesaid scheme is an
admirable beginning of that system of destructive policy
which is to make an end of the Church. in applaud-
ing the Whig scheme he could not conceal his feelings
of cootomptuous triumph Q`•l the abandonment of Whig