The Sun.
London, England, 1853-01-14 00:00:00

LONDON, FRIDAY EVENING, JANUARY 14, 1853.

Now Ready, price 10s. 6d. each, bound (completing the Work),
ITOLS. 111. and IV. of EVELYN'S DIARY
and CORRESPONDENCE.
NEW EDITION, With numerous ADDITIONS and OEIGINAL,

THE REPLY TO STAFFORD HOUSE.

_ -
The following " Addres,s.a many thousands of
the Women of the United-States of America to
their Sisters the Women of England," is published
in the semi-weekly New :York, Courier and In-
quirer :

"A common origin, a common faith, and we sincerely
believe a common cause, urge us at the present moment
to address you on the subject of enormous social evils
which still prevail so extensiveiy„pud, even under kindly
disposed rulers, with such frightful results, in everypart
of your country.
"We approach you to-day, not with fiction, but
with fact--not fact as exaggerated, perverted, and
discoloured by the novelist's imagination, but fact as
presented in its naked simplicity by Parliamentary
do,cuments, or other statistical writings which are
egarded in your land as of standard authority.
It will be impossible for us to, bring now to your
consideration the immense aggregate of evils which are
visited upon the poor and helpless by your husbands and
brothers through the vast extent of youi Sovereign's
dominions. We must forbear to speak of the flagitious
and bloody modes by which those dominions have been
extended' and are now extending in Southern Africa, in
Southern Asia, and through the Southern Seas ! We
can say nothing of the iniquitous war your nation waged
upon the Chinese, or of the untold miseries caused by
the forced imposition of the opium traffic upon that
people ; not even for' poor Ireland can we invoke your
sympathies now—that land which through misrule
has decreased in population twenty per cent. with-
in the last year, and of which one of your own ad-
mired writers—the Rev. Sydney Smith—wrote these
words, as awful as they are true, ' So great and so long has
been the misgovernment of that country, that wa yerily be-
lieve the empire would be much ..-eltronge? if everything
were open sea between England and the Atlantic, and
if skates and codfish swam over the fair land of Ulster.'
Sisters, we suppress our indignation, and touch upon none
of these things now. It is upon evils on your own soil,
in your own communities—evils among which you daily
live and move, and with which you have personally to
do, that we now address you. We wish to speak to you
of the ignorant, and thepoverty-stricken and the degraded
population of your own land, and we shall do it with
faithfulness, yet with kindness.

" Sisters, your land is filled with slaves—slaves to ig-
norance, slaves to penury, and slaves to vice. The ter-
rible truth has been told you by one of your most learned
and respected authors, Joseph Kay, of Trinity College,
Cambridge, at the close of his great work on national
education, which is or ought to be familiar to you all—
that in England, where the aristocracy is richer and
more powerful than that of any other country in the
world, the poor are more oppressed, more pauperised,
more numerous in comparison to the other classes,
more irreligious, and very much worse educated than
the poor of any other European nation, solely ex-
cepting uncivilised Russia and Turkey, enslaved
Italy, misgoverned Portugal, and revolutionised
Spain.' The first and greatest of all popular
needs in every free Christian country is the need of in-
struction ; and yet your country has no system of public
education that is worthy of the name. The entire
amount of your annual Parliamentary appropriations for
the education of your people is less by thousands of
pounds than the annual public expenditures made for
this purpose by the city of New York alone. One
person out of every eight in your population is a pauper,
and the average poor-rates of England, for the last ten
years, have been 6,000,000/. ; and yet to provide public
education, and thus in a great measure remedy the very
neglect which has cursed you with this grievous and
yearly-increasing burden, your national Legislature has
expended in six years only 600,000/. One-third of the
population of the State of New York, according to our
census tables, just published, are regularly receiving
education in our public schools ; according to your
Parliamentary returns, only one-eleventh of your popu-
lation are enjoyinr, a similar advantage. Sisters, is that
a Christian state a society which, for some millions of
your people, renders the development and cultivation of
all those faculties which distinguish man from the brute
little better than a physical impossibility ?
"You, whom we are addressing, live in all parts of
England, but everywhere, in the metropolis, in the
manufacturing towns, and in the country, you see about
you the most pitiable destitution and degradation. In
London'there are, we understand, more than 1,000,000
of immortal beings who are never seen in the house of
God, and practically think the thoughts and live the
lives of absolute heathens. The condition of a large
portion of the labouring population of that vast city may
be judged from the fact that of its 20,000 journeyman
tailors, 14,000 can barely earn a miserable. subsistence
by working 14 hours a day, Sunday included ; and that
it contains 33,000 needlewomen, who earn on an aver-
age only 4d. a day, by working 14 hours. There are
50,000 people in London who obtain their living in the
streets, and Henry Mayhew, an authoritywhom you will
not venture to question, says of them, When the reli-
gious, moral, and intellectual degradation of the majo-
rity f these 50,000 people is impressed upon us, it be-
comes positively appalling to contemplate the vast
amount of vice, ignorance, and want existing in the very
heart of our land. There are 30,000 costermongers ; of
these he says only one-tenth-:--at the outside one-tenth
—of the couples living together, and carrying on their
costermongering trade, are married ; that not three
in a hundred of them had ever been in the interior of a
church or any place of worship, or know what was meant
by Christianity, and only one in ten of them is able to
read.' In your manufacturing towns the case is no bet-
ter. In Glasgow, there are 60; 000 women engaged in
factories or needle-work, whose average earnings do not
exceed 7s. or Bs. a week. Dr. Paterson, whom you know
and respect as one of the most eminent divines in that
city, stated, in a public speech not long since, that in
three wynds, constituting but a portion of his parish,
there were, in a population of 3,232, only 83 church
sittings, or little more than an average of two and a-half
to 100, and that in the whole locality there were only 117
Bibles. Certain it is,' he exclaims, 'that nothing short
of a levy en masse of whatever there is of living Chris-
tianity in the city, in all the branches of the Church of
Christ, will suffice to make head against the augmenting
ignorance, and ungodliness, and infidelity with which we
have to deal. If we do not destroy the evil, it will destroy
us.' Out of 10,461 burials in that city in 1850 no less
than 2,381, or nearly a fourth, were at the public ex-
pense. Glasgow, in these particulars, is but a speci-
men of your manufacturing towns generally. So, too,
of your country population. A very large number of
your agricultural population live in filthy and crowded
cottages, where the sexes are in close and perilous con-
tact night and day, where decency is difficult, and com-
fort impossible ; the effect of which is to break down the
barriers of morality, to obliterate all the sweet and say-
ing attractions of a home, to weaken and desecrate all
domestic ties, and to brutalise the manners, and debase
every natural feeling. The cottage accommodation of
your villages is little or no better ; and the low tone of
morality which this, in conjunction with other unfavour-
able influences, has caused, may be inferred from the
following sad statement, made last May in the North.
British Review :—" There are few things more remark-
able in the sight of observant residents in many
country villages than the small number of marriages
solemnised in the course of the year. Among these
few things we are afraid must be mentioned the num-
ber of illegitimate children that are born into the world.
In some villages, indeed, these events are of such
frequent occurrence as to excite neither surprise nor in-
dignation There is something in this kind
of insensibility which is very chilling and disheartening.
This obtuseness of the moral senses, this deadness to
shame, makes one almost despair over it. When the
standard of public opinion is so low, there is little hope
of practical improvement.

" But, sisters, we have said enough ; and we now ap-
ncagtion and influence ?
peal to you very seriously to reflect, and to ask counsel
ecso—rdaynce
r
of God how.far such a state of thing
youri is
in
du
with His Holy Word, the inalienable rights of immortal
souls, and the pure and merciful spirit of the Christian
oand told d you, to distressed
u
of all rankats accordance
duties—your
preeleiguiloianr.
duties
—aasre
women
ednisocf d
discharging
A individuals As on e of yourof own w
every description
compassion and charitable aid ; While' you owe
to your
lower orders, as such, you owe, not charity, but justice
writers has
t —not so much the openpurse as the equal measure; ad-
vice, as far as they will receive . : guidance, as far as
they will submit to it ; education of the best quality and
to the utmost extent that your unhappy sectarian jea-
lousies will permit you to bestow. You owe them fair
play in everything ; justice of the most even-handed
sort—full, unquestiqned, and overflowing ; the removal
of every external impediment which prevents them from
doing and being whatever other classes can do and be.
You owe it to them to employ your superior capacities,
your richer opportunities, your maturer wisdom, in
cheering their toil, smoothing. their difficulties, directing
their often misguided and suicidal energies. You owe
to them every facility with which you can surround
their conflict amidst the obstacles of life 'facility to
obtain land, to obtain employment, or obtain coloni-
sation—facility to acquire temperate habits, to accumu-
late savings, to employ them wisely, to invest them
well—facility, above all, to acquire that which is at
once the key and crown of all, solid and comprehen-
sive instruction in all the things which belong both
to their earthly welfare and their future peace. How
you have performed these duties may be learned
from the following short paragraph in a work pub-
blished last year, by 'William
i Johnston, barrister-at-
law, entitled, England as t Is., i'The separation
between rich and poor—the dis-sympathy and isolation
of classes—is the great social
'evil of the time. In-
stitutions for scientific and literary teaching by lecturers,
at the cheapest possible rates, are established ; parks,
for the recreation of the lower orders, are established ;
even clubs, upon something like the aristocratic model,
where conveniences and luxuries are supplied at lower
prices ; but all this seems unsuccessful. What one
wants to see--a mutual and hearty recognition of the
difference of civilisation, a kind and cordial combination
on the one hand, and an equally cordial, but still re-
spectful, devotedness on the other—appears to make no
progress.' This is the common complaint among all
your philanthropists.. Now, sisters, we do not shut our
eyes to the difficulties that might beset the sudden eleva-
tion of your degraded population to the rights and the
dignity of manhood. But, nevertheless, we cannot be

isilent on those symptoms of your society which, in
direct contravention of God's own law, deny in effect to
the poor labourer the sancity of marriage, with all its
joys, rights, and obligations ; nor can we be silent on
that awful policy which, either by laW, or by the absence
of law, precludes any race of men, or any portion of tho
human family, from that education which alone can' en-
able them to understand the truths of the Gospel and
the ordinances of Christianity. We appeal to you as
sisters, as wives, and as mothers, to raise your voices to
your fellow-citizens, and your prayers to God, for the
removal of England's shame from the Chri ,tian world."

(Front the Morning Advertiser.)

The " Women of the United'States of America"
have replied to the anti-slavery address from the
women of this country, in an " Affectionate and
Christian Address to their Sisters in England."
We give this reply in another column. We hail
its appearance. Though intended as a retort, and
written in a spirit of censoriousness under the cloak
of great " sisterly" affection, it is a document from
which we anticipate incalculable good.
The women of the United States, it will be ob-
served, studiously avoid all allusion to the question
of American slavery. They do not even make any
direct reference to the Staffordshire-house address,
though that document has called forth their appeal
to the women of England. This shows, in a
manner not to be mistaken, how sorely they
smart under the severe reproaches, though
couched in courteous phraseology, which the
address; from the women of England contained.
They know that they cannot defend the conduct of
their country in.reference to, slavery„and therefore
abstain from any direct attempt to justify the
"peculiar institution." Their address proceeds on
the assumption that two blacks make a white.
They seem to extenuate, if not justify, their own
conduct with regard to slavery, by throwing in the
teeth of their " sisters in England," the ignorance
which prevails among us—the destitution and
misery which are so rife in our populous towns-
and the fearful amount of wretchedness of which
misgovernment has been productive in Ireland.
We admit, to a certain extent, the justice of the

reproaches which the Transatlantic ladies bring
against England. We cannot deny, nor have we
any wish to deny, that we have not done all that
it was our duty to do, with a view to the ameliora-
tion of the condition of the poorer classes in this
country. But, we beg to remind the fair sex of the
United States, that they do a grievous injustice to
their " sisters of England," and to their " brothers"
also, when they hold them responsible for all the
want and wretchedness which prevail in the
United Kingdom. So far as the misgovernment
of Ireland has been productive of degradation and
misery, the people of these realms are not to blame.
They have never ceased to remonstrate with those
in authority against the course of procedure which
every successive Administration has pursued to-
wards Ireland. The blame for the deplorable state
of things which has prevailed from time immemorial
in that country lies at the door of the Government
alone. The " sisters of England" are as guiltless
in this matter as are their sisterly censors on the
other side of the Atlantic.

And so it is, in a greater or less measure, with
regard to those other evils which the ladies of
America point out, and reproach their English
" sisters" for, in Great Britain. Tho people of this
country, including the female portion of the popu-
lation, have never ceased to deplore the extent to
which ignorance prevails among the poorer classes.
And they have not failed to furnish a practical
proof of this, by the enormous sums which are an-
nually raised by voluntary effort to impart the
blessings of education. What has been done in
this way must appear astonishing to all who reflect
on the subject, and ought to have elicited the com-
mendation, instead of calling forth the reproaches,
of the ladies of America.

It is the same with regard to the various other
social and moral evils which exist among us. We
have done, are doing, much, and will, we trust, ere
long, do a great dear more, to grapple with, and
master the monster evils with which we are every-
where surrounded. And, in order that we may
apply ourselves with greater resolution and in-
creased energy to the task, we are heartily glad
that such a stimulus as that which the address of
the American ladies supplies, has reached us from
the opposite shores of the Atlantic.
But we say again, that for the more collossal
evils which we have to deplore as existing among
us, the people of this country are much less to
blame than the Government. It is the duty of
Government to apply remedies for the evils of Ire-
land, and to provide a sound and salutary educa-
tion for the children of those who are unable to
procure instruction for themselves. It is unjust
and ungenerous, also, to hold the nation respon-
sible for the sins of the Government. The women
of America might, with just as much justice, re-
proach the nation for those other short-comings in
the Government, such as the non-introduction of
necessary reforms, which the people deeply and con-
tinually deplore.
But it is otherwise with American slavery. That
is spoken of and cherished as a " peculiar institu-
tion," and as one which may be defended on vari-
ous conclusive grounds. The American people not
only do nothing to abolish slavery, but they do not
recognise it as their duty to do anything. On the
contrary, they seek to maintain it. They not only
justify it, but regard it as one of the institutions of
their country of which they ought to be proud. It
is because the women of England entertain an op-
posite view, and have addressed a friendly remon-
strance to them, that the American ladies have
written in a spirit of recrimination, and with great
bitternesi of spirit, but ill concealed under an at-
tempt at the use of a polite phraseology. There is
thus a great distinction in the degrees of culpability
between the Americans and the people of England.
Slavery is the adopted and proudly-caressed child
of the nation ; the moral and social evils which
prevail in this country are not only condemned by
the nation, but all that voluntary effort could do
has been done to put an end to them.
We have said, that in the " Affectionate and
Christian Address of many thousands of the United
States of America to their Sisters, the Women of
England," there is a studied absence of any allusion
to the enormities of Transatlantic slavery. But,
notwithstanding that fact, no one can fail to
perceive how. sore the Americans feel whenever
that subject is spoken of. In the opening part
of the address to the " sisters of England," there
is a sneer at " Uncle Tom's Cabin," which tells, in
terms which cannot be misunderstood, how deeply
the exposures in that wonderful work have cut
the American body to the quick. "We ap-
proach you to-day," say the sisters of the
United States, " not with fiction, but with fact—
not fact as exaggerated, perverted, and discoloured
by the novelist's imagination, but fact as presented. in , its naked simplicity, by Parliamentary docu-
ments, or other statistical writings, which are
regarded in your land as of standard authority."
No one can mistake the allusion here. We will not
pause to defend Mrs. Stowe's work from the attack
thus made, by implication, upon it. It is because
of the stern, stubborn facts with which that book
abounds, that it has produced so great an impres-
sion in both hemispheres, and has made the slave-
power groan and quail under its terrible exposures.
Though the American women betray so much
soreness at the faithful remonstrance which their
sisters in England have addressed to them, we anti-
cipate immediate results from it of the most bene-
ficial kind. It will have the effect of making the
people of America reflect more on the subject of
slavery than they have ever before done ; and be-
cause we have an unbounded faith in the ultimate
triumphs of truth, justice, and humanity, we cannot
doubt that the result of that additional reflection
will be the destruction of the " domestic institu-
tion."

CLUTTON ABDUCTION CASE.—We have heard from
good authority that this case, which made so much noise
in the neighbourhood some months back, came on on
Wednesday, the 22d ult., before Mr. Justice Erie, his
lordship having to try the contempt of court committed
by Mr. Money in taking away his wife, while she was
under a writ of habeas corpus procured from himself.
The investigation lasted three hours, and the judge at
the conclusion dismissed Mr. Money, not only without
punishment or reproof, but with every expression of
sympathy and condolence. He said that his judgment
proceeded from the evidence as then brought before him,
and he stated that Mr. Money, without any fault of his
own, had been subjected to the greatest calamity that
could befal a man ; and that, under the most trying and
painful circumstances, he had behaved in a kind and
honourable manner.—Bristol Mercury.
THE INConPoRATED NATIONAL SOCIETIES SCHOOLS.
—That the number of children attending schools, in
immediate connection and correspondence with the
society, amounted in the year 1813 to 40,484; in the
year 1833 to 400,830 ; in the year 1837 to 597,811 ' • in
the year 1847 to 816,874 ; and at Christmas, 1851 to
the increased number of 886,430 ; while the total n'um-
ber of Church Schools known to exist up to Christmas
1851 is 23,457, with 1,564,401 scholars.
TRAINING CRANGES.—it is reported upon trustworthy
authority, that J. B. Day, the well-know ccwor
uolvaatrhde,
n Honest
John," is about to remove to Mitchel Grove and that will officiate as trainer for Messrs. Gratwic'ke,
and Magenis.