The Sun.
London, England, 1863-12-26 00:00:00

ANOTHER ACCOUNT.

A man who was present on the spot when the fire broke
out, and who remained till all was over, states that the fleet
alarm of fire was given by two young men who used to fre-
quent the house, and wio happened to be passing up the
street at about half-past four o'clock. The landlord,who was
sleeping in the back bedroom on the first floor, got out by
the window. He had nothing on but his shirt, and seemed
to be half mad as he ran about the street, calling for some
one to help to save his wife and children. A crowd soon
collected, and a young man brought a ladder, by which
Mrs. Gameson was enabled to get out at the window.
Nothing could be done fur the other inmates, who were
all sleeping in the attics, as the fire had taken the
stairs, and thus cut off all access to the upper part
of the house. The servant girl jumped out of the window,
and before doing so was heard to say, " Jump for your life,
Tilley," to Matilda, the eldest girl, but the latter was afraid
to do so. When the fire engines arrived the house was one
mass of flame from floor to roof. There was a fair supply
of water and a stream was soon being thrown on the burn-
ing building both from back and limit, but it was nearly an
hour, and in the intense excitement of the moment appeared
to be many hours, before anyone could go into the building.
Many people volunteered to do so sooner, and the landlord
had to be held back by main force from rushing to what
would have been a certain death in a hopeless attempt to
save his children, but those in authority on the spot refused
to allow it. When the firemen could go into the building
the attic rooms presented a horrible sight. The bodies
were much burnt and charred, but from their appearance
there is reason to believe that the unfortunate people had
died from suffocation before the flames had reached them.
The first body brought down was that of the old lady visi-
tor, and then there was the baby, the girl Amy, the little
boy, Betsy, and Matilda.
It is easy to understand how flab fire originated. There is
nothing left of the furniture of the back parlour, which is
directly opposite the staircase, from which it is only divided
by a narrow passage. When the people went to bed,a good
fire was left in this room, and a large kettle full of water
was placed on the hob, so that there might be warm water,
ready when they came down in the morning. It is evident
that the fire must have begun in this room, and at once
been conveyed the whole height of the house by the stairs,
which acted as a chimney to it

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SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS,

HERALD.—Notwithstandieg all that has been
written in the recent controversy upon the law of
entail and primogeniture, we are not aware that
anything has been put forward on either side ex-
planatory of that law. It may be useful, therefore,
toinquire what its effects really are, and what would
be the consequence of repealing it. Now, the law
of entail does not, as a great many even educated
people and nearly all uneducated people suppose,
enable any man to tie up his land in his family for
ever; that law has been abolished for centuries.
All that the law now permits is, that a man shall
tie up his property to a tenant for life, and after
his death to his sons successively, till the first
son entitled shall attain 21. That is the utmost
limit; for after the death of the tenant for life the
son then entitled may, on attaining 21, cut off the
entail, sell the land. and do what he likes
with the money; or keep the land if he
likes, and do what he likes with it. Nay
more; if the tenant for life is living when
his son attains 21, the two, if they agree about it,
can cut off the entail, and sell the land or divide it
into as many shares as they like. So much for the
terrible law of entail. As to the law of primoge-
niture, it is simply that, if a landowner dies intes-
tate, and under no other circumstances whatever,
the land goes exclusively to the heir-at-law, a con-
sequence which every man may prevent, and which
nine-tenths of all landowners, and ninety-nine
hundredths of all considerable landowners, do pre.
vent by making wills or settlements. How, then,
it would be asked by the anti-entail school, does it
happen that estates are perpetuated in the same
families for many generations ? Simply because
the owners of considerable estates almost always
like and choose to resettle their estates, when they
might sell them or subdivide them. Landowners
have a fancy for making what is called " an eldest
son"—or, in other words, they do not like their land
to be divided. Their taste may he very bad ; it
might be more patriotic—though we do not at all
concur in the opinion that it would—to subdivide
their land among their children, and so on from
generation to generation till we should reach the
blessed millennium of every man owning, as lord in
fee simple, his acre or his half-acre of land. We
are not going to discuss this question of political
economy. M. Chevallier, no mean authority on
such questions, has discussed the effects on agricul-
ture in reference to the law of France, which forci-
bly subdivides land ; and we will leave that ques-
tion where he has left it. But be the choice and
taste of English landowners good or bad ; be their
consequences beneficial or the reverse, it is the
choice and taste of English landowners, as a body,
to keep their lands together as much as their
circumstances will permit. On what ground then
should that choice and that taste be forcibly in-
termeddled with by Icw ? It is said the result
of entail is frequently s,:,ffering any privation to
younger children. Equal;l7 so is extravagant
living on the part of any pa."ent yet scarcely
even Mr. Bright and Mr. Cob den would on
that ground ask for an act of 1-i'rliament to
confine the expenditure of every man within a
fixed limit. Then it is said that during m:norities
the result of entailing is to suspend the powL'r of
improving land, and to cause inconvenience
tenants; but that is the result of every minority,
whether under an entail or otherwise; and yet Mr.
Bright would scarcely propose that a man should
not be allowed to leave his property to children be-
cause they are under age. The great objection, how-
ever, made to the law of entail—and that is its real
sting—is that it tends to accumulate too much
power in few hands. But the same might be said
of the absence of any restriction upon the accumu-
lation of money. A lord with 120,000 a year in
land is no doubt a very powerful person. But so is
a cotton spinner or a banker with half a million of
money, and yet though the Bright school appears to
think the law of entail should be abolished, in order
to prevent lords having £20,000 a year of landed
property, we never heard that they propose any
direct or indirect limitation of the fortune that a
cotton spinner may acquire, nor any compulsory
meddling with his right to settle or will it as he
pleases; and unless they can show some very good
distinction between money and land, some good
reason why merchants should be at liberty to keep
their fortunes in brick and landowners should not,
their warfare against entailing seems unfounded.
But there is another thing to be considered. Sup•
pose the power of entailing and the right of primo-
geniture were abolished, while the taste of land-
owners continues the same, what would the aboli-
tion do ? Just nothing. Instead of entailing, a man
would by settlement or will give his eldest son his
land absolutely after his death ; and the eldest son
would repeat the proceeding with his eldest son,
and so on, and the land would remain undivided
as much as ever. So that really one must go the
length of saying that, for the benefit of the corn •
mon wealth, we will abolish the right of every
malt°. give his property as he likes, either during
his life or after his death ; we must make, as the
French law does, a compulsory division of land
on a man's death, if the object is to prevent the
supposed evils of lands being kept together in
masses. Of course, if that were the law as to land,
it ought equally to be the law as to money, for
there can be no good reason why a man should do
as he likes with his money, and not do as he likes
with his land. Both money and land, in different
ways, confer power on their owner; the mischiefs
arising from that power are just as much mischief
with regard to money as with regard to land. We
do not apprehend, however, that either the prophets
or the alumni of the Bright school would like to be
told, " when you die you can only leave half your
mill and machinery and half your money as you
like—the other half must be divided equally be-
tween your children, whether you like it or not."
One word more, and we have done. It is quite a
mistake to suppose, as Messrs. Bright and Cobden
so often appear to do by their speeches, that the
desire of creating entails is a purely aristocratic
disease. Nothing is commoner than to find entails
of very small estates in the hands of quite humble
people. A man with a few freehold cottages almost
always gives them by will to his eldest son, or dies
intestate, so that he shall have them; he has no
mare notion of splitting up his humble landed estate
than a duke or a lord has, and as strict an entail as
we ever saw was made by a small country tailor of
land worth about £6OO.

ADVERTISER.—The Duke of Cambridge, in dis-
tributing the prizes to the cadets at Wcolwich,
addressed to there young gentlemen some observa-
tions which indicate on the part of his Royal High-
ness a due appreciation of the important duties he
had undertaken to discharge. He reminded the
young gentlemen who were about to receive com-
missions in her Majesty's service that they must
not consider their education completed—that when
they left those walls they would enter on a career
which demanded of them to continue their education
and endeavour to keep pace with the spirit of the
age. It was essential if they desired to be really
efficient officers to make themselves acquainted with
the improvements and discoveries that were con-
stantly arising. He knew many officers who had
made themselves truly scientific after obtaining
their commissions, and he hoped that the cadets
present would on a future occasion emulate their
example. We regard this utterance from the illus-
trious Commander-in-Chief as highly appropriate
to the position of the officers in the British army in
the present day. There have been periods when this
address might have been regarded as a well-merited
censure on too many of our British officers rather
than as a word of encouragement to our cadets. Per-
sons who were gentlemen by virtue of their rank were
singularly in need of learning, but remarkably in-
disposed to labour for its attainment. Very scant
were their libraries, but quite large enough for men
who never intended to read, whose days were spent
in the routine of the parade ground, and in lounging
idleness, while their nights were consumed in the
orgies of the mess, The Royal Corps of Engineers
being excepted, it would have been difficult to find
any class of gentlemen who were less acquainted
with the discoveejes of science, or who knew the
value of a book, except as the means of whiling away
the hour in which they were waiting for dinner.
We have raached a much b,:qter era, and one in
which his Royal Highness is fully justified in
epeaking of highly scientific officers 'Cho haveNbve;
a ra , n:sgdftohragvei
nnotgsltenacdoiens-n-
-come so after obtaining their commissions.
their
have in our army gentlemen, who, besides
knowledge of the subjects essential to their fags_
Pesion, are distinguished for their scienti „,___ of
ments, and for their literary emineneeite
inAL"'-'2"
them holding high positions
although in
tinguished authors of their day;
rough favour
tributed largely to varioussy
ture. It is not now as ea .
adsepita
was
aments of iiiera-
to find their way into the
glad to find that
some circumstances
s into positions they
pushed themselves were very
rs 1 t.
haveis.h army,
th
we should be
unworthy to fill, and-
all circumstances every where and in . epees the standard
persoßn
t was] raised much•
of attainment above its present
low level. It may be hoped that while the stan-
dardis being
elevated in the civil service appoint-
ments, the military service will partake of the im-
provements which have extended in every direction
since the competitive examinations
were com-
menced. The timely
observations of the Royal
Duke are the more deserving of attention from the
fact which
we noticed a few days since, that our
military, as Well as naval strength, is not now to be
measured by the amount of our brute force, but by
the extent of our attainments in the science of war,
fare. The mind, the science, the inventive skill of
the great European Powers have the elements now
actively employed in guiding them in the pursuit
of ascendancy, and there can be no doubt that in

-------
any great struggle that may hereafter arise, the
superiority will be on the side of that nation whose
military and naval science has acquired the greatest
development. As we have said in reference to out
naval rivalry, the b,•.ttle is fought in the dockyard
and in Vie gun foundry. So we may say in referenc.a
to armiqs, that the foundations of victory are lava
in the military school and in the studies of officer.f
and those who are assisting to give effect to theft
ideas. 'We shall not be understood to deny the
necessity of personal courage and bravery in Our
officers and men, as without these qualities rile,
most powerful implements of war would be forgeu,
in vain. We know the value of the prudence and
spirit. which distinguished every general by v711°131,
a victory has been gained, and we know too rlly
bravery has always proved as necessary as
We suppose, too, that we may be, in any fuLll"
engagements,. somewhat on a car, in these respects;
with any nation with whom we may
into collision, or anticipate defeat as inevirsllle.
All these things we assume when we are 81)601,1
of the necessity of military skill in our army; but
all these things being present, personal courage'',
good generalship, and numbers equal to the engegto
ment, it still remains true that we must exPeet.ais
fail if our skill in the art of war and its mateerl"„,
should prove, inferior to that of the enemy. 1 er
allow their rifles and their cannon to be of 810138
again coin
range than our own ; if we should employ all,
sea 'Warriors less strongly clad; if on the fi6l" weco
should be found relying on weapons which llehe
become in any degree antiquated ; if we should "as
engaged in our experiments when the enemy on
successfully concluded his, we may calculate„-,
defeat and disaster as certain. We have there,l%s
to
.regard the address of the royal Duke not only co.
a wise and excellent recommendation which Weeinth's
heartily. commend, but as a fair exposition 01 d'ht
qualifications which the officers of oar army
to possess.. We are as a people concerned bitter
on this subject. We know by recent and yell bit re
experience what it is to suffer the loss of our 10,„,„
countrymen, to have the flower of the British at7i'd
mown down or left to perish from sick of
these
disease, in consequence of the inefficiency of t."-ig
to whom the conduct of our war with Russia far
entrusted ; and if we are to maintain an army
the defence end honour of our nation in the fllt!; ;
we must have for its officers gentlemen who assn
the profession not for ease, or honour, but from oir
enthusiastic
1'
love of its duties, and who spend trirt
time in diligent studies, that in the day of ao'
they may discharge those duties with effect.