The Sun.
London, England, 1862-05-21 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, VVEDNESD,A,I7 EVENING, MAY 21, 186►2.

be seen, from Lord WESTBURY'S judgment, a

given elsewhere, in our impression of this evening,
that it was a case growing out of a mortgage to
EYRE, by SADLEIR, of certain estates in Ireland,
and of SADLEIR'S subsequent attempt to obtain, by
the transfer of the estates, an additional £25,000
from the London and County Joint. Stock Bank, to
which SADLEIR was already indebted, to the tune
of £70,000 sterling. Learning that the estates

referred to had already been mortgaged to EYRE,
the Bank refused (not very unnaturally) to advance

- -
the additional sum of £25,000 sterling, upon a
security already beyond SADLEIR'S bestowal.

. .
Thereupon the Arch - Swindler deluded

EYRE, the mortgagee, into executing a

reconveyance of the estates upon his (SAD

LEI t's) covenanting to hand over to EYRE

equally good securities. These substituted secu-
rities being a promissory note of Mr. DARGAN'S

for £12,000, and certain shares in the Royal
Swedish Railway—the promissory note turning out
to be a Forgery, and the shares proving to be

altogether fictitious.

Facts only discovered,

however, when light was thrown upon all
those astounding frauds of SADLEIR by the grey
dawn of that wretched February morning that dis-

covered him lying dead upon Hampstead Heath,
with the silver cream jug beside him from which he
had quaffed the fatal poison.

onour, we ought to say, to the National
Reform Delegates. When the Athenian generals
were unlucky, that fickle people were ever ready
to put them to death, by way, as the great French
wit said, of encouraging the others. The Romans
took the opposite course, and after a tremendous
defeat would thank their generals for not despair-
ing of the safety of the Republic. The latter is
altogether more English, and we think our Parlia-
mentary Reform Generals are every way entitled
to the benefit of it. We shall certainly not laugh
at 'the gathering of delegates yesterday and this
morning. They will be treated to that sort of thing
abundantly by all who are but too happy to think
Parliamentary Reform a vanquished cause. We
do not think so. It is a betrayed cause. It is a
cause kept out of sight by an artful exaltation of
foreign politics to the place domestic politics
ought to occupy, and by the fearfully costly
expedient of filling the imaginations of the
people
it is
with schemes
a beatensfordef usenceseae. Whilegainstfr theiends andin
allies—bat .
tolerable wrongs and inequalities which make our
representation little better than a solemn farce re-
main, Parliamentary Reform may, through political
accidents and political cunning, be little heard of
for a year or two ; but its voice must be heard again,
and heard at last effectually too.
We need not repeat the well-hnown facts enume-
rated by the chairman—such as the majority of the
house being returned by 170,000 voters—th 6 THET-
FORDS, with two or three hundred voters, balancing,
Manchester or Leeds—the ARUNDELS, equally
Cheltenham, and the like. Such facts are already in
the memories of all; and the time will come—no one
can say how soon—whe n
in the ears of our now
theyabnn wn
tiel
abrei
smt
eandr es
etyo, r itni
till
again
step tetwhyaerds wielll beeteeralfrigihntsetinneed. into
The
aquseescto
leand

ful of silver where probably a single florin would
have been a monstrous overcharge, Country Bump.
kin mad Town Blackguard, bow-windowed Pater-
familias and buxom Materfamilias with all their
progeny, young and old,- rich and poor, here the
woe-worn widow, there the fair young bride
quitting her sister-bridemaids to start upon her
honeymoon excursion—all are lost at once to sight
and to recollection at the first glimpse of that haggard
form, of those deathlike features to the right—the
form and features of the Captured Swindler ! It
is the world in little at a glance—the very
type of the distinctive crime of this particular
age of ours, when mercantile swindling has been
carried to the height of a positive science.
At the breathless moment chosen by the artist,
the forger and embezzler is about to step into a
compartment of one of the first-class carriages. One
foot is on the step even—when his leather valise
drops from his hand in horror, at the sudden pres-
sure upon his shoulder of the firm, strong grasp of
the detective. A brother officer of the latter stands
hard by with the hand-cuffs ready. The wretched
young wife (already within the carriage) with a
thrill of despair all over her faded face, sees what has
happened. With a few wonderful touches here of
the artist's brush, how much of the crime and
agony of the age have there not been painfully
epitomised ! It is the visible touch of genius upon
the canvas.

A comparatively short time has yet elapsed since
Mr. FIRTH'S picture of the Railway Station was
first opened to view in the metropolis, when judg-
ment is at last pronounced in the House of Lords
by the Chancellor in the appeal of EYRE tarsus
BURMESTER and others, in connection with one
of the numerous cases of gigantic fraud
brought to light (since his death by poison
on Hampstead Heath in the February of 1856)
against the notorious JOHN SADLEIR, M.P. and
some time one of the Lords of the Treasury. Looking
at the incident delineated in Mr. FRITH'S Picture,
and at the judgment pronounced yesterday by the
Lord Chancellor in the case referred to, we seem to
glance—between the two—down a long perspeetive
of frauds such as we can find no similar record of
in a period of time equally restricted. A complete
catalogue of the names even would be superfluous.
Yet the most infamous among them, from the
suicide SADLEIR downwards, must present to view
at the mere casual mention of them—REDPATH,
ROBSON, PAUL, STRAHAN, cum cceteris paribus—
symbols of a misery altogether as widespreading in
its disastrous consequences as the bursting of the
South Sea Bubble and the dissipation of the day
dream of the Darien scheme, put together, as the
wildest illusions conjured up by the bewitching
knaveries of JOHN LAW, or by the self-deluding
fancies of WILLIAM PATTERSON. And all these
late and accumulated Frauds of the middle of the
Nineteenth Century, the fruit of deliberate Crime
carefully prepared and sedulously cultivated. Hap-
pily we may console ourselves with the thought that
the worst in this way has at length been witnessed.
Fraudulent schemes have been so numerous of late
years, and they have proved so often to be the results
of a marvellous combination of subtlety and audacity,
that it is barely within reason to suppose that the
projectors of any kindred schemes could (at any
rate yet a while) hope to carry them out either
without detection or with impunity. The age has
suffered in this way such grievous wrong, and so
very frequently, that it is at length in real earnest
upon the alert. We can glance back, then'
upon those enormous Frauds of JOHN SADLEIR,
—suggestive as it seemed of kill the others, and in
many respects, surpassing them all—with a certain
sense of equanimity. With a feeling, as already
expressed, as if society had seen the worst (at any
toe aevelopment of the system of over-speculation
The particular case of Fraud here alluded to as
connected with the maze of gigantic Frauds per-
petrated by JOHN SADLEIR, the case, in which
judgment was pronounced yesterday by the Lord
Chancellor in the appeal of EYRE v. BURAIESTER and
Others, is just typical of the scope and bearing of those
most lamentable and appalling transactions. It w