The Sun.
London, England, 1838-08-09 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

The Times of yesterday has an article on what it terms
" the astounding exposures of our foreign policy" which
appeared in its columns some morning last month. Our
Contemporary, we presume, refers to " The Confederation
of Gaul ;" nor, indeed, are h;s commentaries unworthy of
the author of that " astounding" revelation. " The pro-
duction by the Foreign-office of a ir.css of State papers,
revealing the hostility of Russia towards this country,-
proves"—what ? " Lord Palmerston's connivance with the
Russian Cabinet," s lys the Times. And can anything be
clearer ? What stronger proof can be found of his Lord-
ship's collusion with the Cabinet of St. Petersburg than his
publication of a mass of State papers " revealing the hos-
tility of Russia towards this country ?" Indeed, the
reason is so temptingly conclusive that its utter false-
hood is no tbstacle to its being adopted by the

Times. Our Contemporary, however, is too scrupu-
lous to condemn even a political opponent upon the
evidence of a single fact, however conclusive in
itself, and other testimony, is accordingly add Need
of collusion between the Foreign Secretary and the Cabi-
net of St. Petersburgh. It is an " astounding" fact that
in 1836, at Lord Palmerston's suggestion, " the British
wavy was increased." To a common observer this might
seem a prudent precaution on the part of our Government,
bat the clear-sighted people of Printing-House-square are
not to be so deceived. To them it is evident enough that
the increase of our navy was but a cunning device to fur-
nish Russia with a plausible pretext for following our ex-
ample. Except that it might interfere with " the conca-
tenation of his reasoning," which we have really no dispo-
sition to disturb, we would remind our Contemporary that
the increase of the Russian navy preceded the increase of
ours. And by the way, this fact will support the argu-
ment just as well as the other. Cannot our Con-
temporary assert, in his own dashing style, that by
adopting the example of Russia, Lord Palmerston
clearly approved it, and ought to be impeached,
and God knows what besides, for this profligate
connivance with the deadly enemy of England ? In addi-
tion to suggesting an increase in the navy, Lord Palmerston
adopted "a new commercial treaty with Turkey ;" he es-
tablished, so we are told, " commercial and official rela-
tions with the independent municipalities of Circassia," a
country at war with Russia, and appointed Mr. Urquhart,
a most valiant anti-Russian penman, secretary of legation
at Constantinople. And yet, with these facts staring them
in the type of the Times, men can be found to doubt that
the Foreign Secretary is in collusion with the Cabinet of
St. Petersburg. Having, by this overwhelming mass of
evidence, established his "astounding exposures," our Con-
temporary proceeds to take a bird's-eye view of " the
events of Europe" for the last ten or twelve years. The
precise object of the five or six and twenty lines devoted to
this subject it is not easy to divine, nor, considering
the very novel information set before us, would it be
grateful to inquire. We are told, for instance, that
" by his personal acts at Constantinople Lord Durham re-
cognised the treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, excluding British
pennants from the Black Sea." In the first place, at the
period Lord Durham was at Constantinople he could," by
his personal acts," neither recognise nor repudiate the
treaty of Unkiar Skelessi. The casus firderis had not
arisen, and Russia had not asked and could not have asked
for the fulfilment of the treaty. In the second place,
Lord Durham entered the Dardanelles in an armed frigate,
which lay above Constantinople. In the third place, Lord
Durham left the Dardanelles, and entered the Black Sea in
a steamer, armed just as when she left England, in precisely
the same condition as when she conveyed Sir H. Ellis on his
special mission to Persia, and, above all, as this is the point
insisted on, with her British pennant flying. Nor was
she the only British ship from which the same pennant was
displayed at the same time on these forbidden waters of the
Black Sea, as a frigate happened just then to be making a
circuit of the coast. Though sorely disappointed at the fate
of " The Confederation of Gaul," our Contemporary it,
however, nothing daunted. He has set his heart upon a
confederation of some kind, and a contsderation it is evi-
dent he will have. With the following undigested sketch
we are favoured in yesterday's Number :—" In our for-
mer elucidation of Lord Palmerston's conduct in the
affairs of Frankfort, the German Customs, Circassia,
Greece, Cracow, Algeria, the treaty of Unkiar
Skelessi, Java, and the North American boundary,
we proved his concurrence in the violation by
Russia, Prussia, Austria, France, Holland, and the
United States of every international obligation by which
these powers were respectively bound to England. Such
a system must necessarily entail en its author the impossi-
bility of resisting any further encroachment of any of those
Powers, and unite them in a dtfensive and offensive league
against England !" We now know what we have to tx-
peet, and in a few days more Europe of course, "ring"
with the articles of the league. Should " the Powers'
determine on a partition of Great Britain, we on'y bore
they will make some attempt to establish the independence
of Puidledock. as hinted at by a W eekly Contemporary.--
_ Morning chronicle.
The Whigs, who stormed their way to office, by agi-
tating that particular variety of pillage known of late by
the c •nt term of appropriation (for the slams nomenclature
finds :ow familiar household word to designate every
branch of the furtive science), the Whigs, who took their
stand upon that principle as the sine qua non of all Tithe
adjustment, as the great substratum of justice, without the
accomplishment whereef no Government could be suffered
to exist, nay, to which not Government alone, but law, and
coestitution, end religion itself must yield—the Whigs,
who pealed i' into the public ear as the first, the m st in-
disputable, tlse most indispensable. the most iminntehle, of
cernal but who now, after having totally erased
from their own Tithe measure every token and vestige of
this their once favourite doctrine, continue their gripe upon
the Government of these kingdoms as if they had fulfilled
their protestations arid redeemed their pledges—these
Statesmen are just now practising in Parliament and
elsewhere, a feint for their defence, which they may be
quite assured will not succeed in deceiving. the country.
They affect to believe that the crime imputed to them
is
the simple om'ssion of the approeriation clauses from their
Bill, and thus plead the impossibility of enforcing those
clauses in the present state of public opinion. Now, they
know perfectly well that this is not the point of the charge
against them. The ground of the public reprobation is,
not that they have dropped the appropriation principle out
of this year's Rill (for on that heal it must be admitted
that the general indign ttion of the just and religious people
of Great Brita;tl left them absolutely no alternative), but
that, finding themselves defeated upon this vital mutter,
this one thing essential and paramount, without which
Ireland could not prosper, and a Ministry ought not to
stand, they yet retain their own unseemly hold of
office ; in a word, that instead of abandoning their
places and abiding by their principle, they have aban-
doned their principle and abided by their places. This is
the real charge,-and to this it is no answer for Lord Mel-
bourne to say, in his own pleasant porn curante roanees,
that " lie does not mean to deny the influence of present
circumstances, end thinks be may fairly give way to that
influence without any dereliction of opinion 1" Now, we
have already admitted that " the influence of present cir-
cumstances," that is, the impossibility of obtaining the con-
currence of the Legislature, or even of the House of Corn-
mens, to an appropriation of Protestant Church property
for Roman Catholie uses, is a very good argument for de-
sisting from the attempt to enact such a clause ; but does this
repugnancy of Parliament render an adjustment, excluding
appropriation, more likely to be efficacious in 1838 than
it .wou!d have been in 1835, when the Whigs re-
solved that no tithe adjustment could be satisfac-
tory whereof this appropriation should not form e
part ? On the ccntrary, the O'Connell party, the au-
thorities whom the present Ministers have relied on
throughout their Irish policy, hesitate not to proclaim that
the prospects of pacification are very much remoter and
darker than ever. Any chance, therefore, which a Tithe
Conversion Bill might have had for tranquillizing Ireland
in 1835 is, on the admission of their own partisans and
counsellors, diminished in 1838 ; and yet in 1838, under
a Tithe Conversion Bill unaccompanied by appropriation,
they assume time responsibility, long since declared by them-
selves to be in such circumstances a desperate one, of keep-
ing the peace in Ireland. No doubt you cannot carry the
appropriation ; but, having for these three years persisted,
in order to turn and keep out of office its opponents and
your own, that unless it be carried, Ireland cannot be go-
vet n wuat honesty do you now undertake to go-
vern Ireland without it? In other circumstances than yours,
it might have been allowable to you say—True,
we thought it necessary, and we think it necessary
still, to the working of a Tithe Bill that it should
contain appropriation clauses ; but we think a Tithe
Bill without those clauses better fitted for the tranquiliza-
tion of Ireland than no Tithe Bill at an. Rut fromsaying.
this you have by your own acts estopped yourselves be-
cause for three years you have resolutely held out that it
was better for Ireland to have no Tithe Bill at all, than a
Tithe Bill without those clauses; and you have kept her
without a Tithe Bill accordingly. Not only have you till
now refused to drop the consideration of the obnoxious
clauses, but you have even refused to allow that they should
b eonsiderert in a separate Bill ; so indivisible have you
always asserted the two subjects to be. That was what
you said to keep
out the Conservatives, who wished these
subjects divided
; but now that they have the country with
them, and you can foil them no longer by insisting upon
the indivisibility of the two matters, you unworthily under-
take the Government on that very principle of separation
between
appropriation and tithe adjustment, on
which you voted it intolerable that your rivals
should attempt to govern. This it is which has
filled up the measure of the nation's disgust against
you. This it is which has satisfied the people that

your ends are as low as your means are reckless—that int
the honest zeal of a misguided liberality has hurried you
into measures of danger to the Constitution and religion of
the land, but that your own ignoble interests run steady
and dark at the bottom of all these public hazards ; so that
what seemed the effarvescences of your temerity are, in
truth, but the contrivances of your selfishness. It was pos-
sible, to be sure, that you might have arrived at conviction
of your original error, and learned from experience and re-
tlection, that the policy which your opponents recommended
was really the right one. If so, to them, and not to
you, belonged the honour of administering this policy ;
for as ou superseded them on the pretext that they
were wrong, you were bound to restore them on the
proof that they were rigbt. But you possess not even
the excuse, always a sorry and suspicious one when
assigned as a reason for retentien of place, that you
have bona fide come over from your own opinions to those
of your opponents ; for your leaders in both Houses of Par-
liament have male especial protestation, that though they
wave appropriation in the present enactment, they still
adhere to their sentiments in its favour ! The principle—
if that name can be given to a doctrine so wholly unprinci-
pled—is defunct. The Ministry engendered by it may
howl at its wake, and cling affectionately to the places which
it procured for them ; but it is in vain that they proclaim
their continued allegiance to its memory ; it is in vain that
they promise themselves a profitable resuscitation of it.
It is gone, and for ever, and not a muscle of it can
they galvanise into motion again. Its odour is evil
in the nostrils of the people, and priests can no longer make
their market of its relics. To be sure, the Ministers have the
resource discreetly indicated to them by their Secretary at
War. They can join in the promised agitation for the total ex-
tinction of the Protestant Church in Ireland. They can
say, that appropriation, after all, was but a partial remedy;
that Catholic Ireland, entitled to the whole of the Pro-
testant revs nue, would not and ought not to have contented
herself with a mere participation of it ; that half measures
are futile, and that the Catholic Relief Bill must be car-
ried out. All this they may say, and all this they would
be saying now if appropriation had been already conceded ;
for, indeed, the one enormity is but the natural conse-
quence of the other. But of the two moles of hostility
to the Protestant Church, we shall prefer the undisguised
and unmeasured one : it will rally more and firmer de-
fenders, and it will speed the riddance of the assailants.—
Tiweas.
We heartily congratulate our readers on the fact of the
" Juvenile Offenders Bill" having last night passed the
House of Lords. The Marquis of Lansdowne, on Mon-
day, in reply to some captious objections of Lord Lynd-
hurst, made the following gratifying remark respecting
the organization of the new prisons to be devoted to
the purpose of repressing the lamentable increase of juve-
nile delinquency :
" The children were to be furnished with every means of
acquiring a knowledge of a trade, so as to be enabled to earn
an honest subsistence when they were discharged. Every
means also were to be taken to enable such children as
wanted to emigrate to become useful emigrants. Such was
the course adopted by the Society of the Friends of Children.
Such was the principle upon which the Refuge for the
Destitute was constructed at present, arid he could tell their
Lordships that there was at this moment residing in a pro-
vincial town a considerable tradesman who was an arrant thief
at the age of ten, and who had learned the trade he now
carried on when he was confined in the Refuge for the Des-
titute. He trusted the institutions established by this Bill
would work equally well."
We have before stated to our readers that it is proposed
to effect the great desideratum expressed by the title of
the Bill, viz., the suppression of juvenile delinquency,
by the erection and establishment of an experimental
Penitentiary for juvenile offenders, at Parkhurst, in the
Isle of Wight. The objection of Lord Lyndhurst took
for granted that the system to be adopted at this site was
permanently and unchangeably organized ; and farther that
it would bear a resemblance to the system already adopted
at the Penitentiary of Milbank and other places. This is
not the case. The institution will be, in the first instance,
experimental ; and will therefore admit of such continued
suggestions and improvements as may contribute to the sa-
lutary object in view. The best plans hitherto recommen-
ded for reforming the numerous class of juvenile delinquents
(whose vices and crimes have rendered their incarcera-
tion necessary for the safety and well-being of society)
are to be tried on a broad scale and in a liberal and en-
lightened spirit. The separate system of seclusion which
Lord Lyndhurst deprecates is not to be tried with regard
to prisoners of tender or immature years. Although with
regard to adults we consider it to be the best penal succe-
daneum for the abortively severe punishments of the erimi-
nal code, we, too, should deprecate this penalty as cruel and
detrimental when applied to youthful novices in crime ; and
calculated to prevent their reformation altogether, by har-
dening their hearts and closing the avenues of their minds
to the purifying influences of the education we recommend.
The renunciation of this penalty is, therefore, one good
feature of the Bill. There are other good features in its
frame-work—such as the opportunities for educational
training of a moral and religious description, and for salu-
brious exercise, which the institution at Parkhurst is
intended to afford. By one of the provisions of etc
Bill we find that a large space of ground (about eighty
acres) is to be appropriated to the youthful prisoners,
in order to enable them to take such healthy exercise as
will tend to impart a healthy tone both to their minds and
bodies. There is one objectionable feature of the Bill
which escaped Lord Lyndhurst's vigilant eye, and which
we hope to see removed before its provisions are brought
into practical operation. We refer to the clause %%Lich em-
powers the Governor to inflict corporal punishment at his
disi-Trfion. We (I...u'J!, :n the first place, the beadt of the
application of corporal punishment under any circum-
stances, and the sooner it is got rid of—both in the civil
penal code and in the penal codes of the army and navy—
the better. Temporary confinement, accompanied with
adequate restrictions or even discomforts, might in all cases
be safely substituted for it. We protest, moreover, against
a discretionary power of inflicting a punishment, against
which the spirit of the age revolts, being invested in the
hands of any functionary, who may or may not be a tyrant,
and whose segregrated and irresponsible position may
prompt him to ::buse it. We trust to see this objectionable
feature of the Bill removed.—Morning Advertiser.
At the Birmingham meeting on Monday, a repeal of the
Corn Laws was stated to be one of the great objects, to
the attainment of which Mr. Attwood and his friends pro-
pose to devote themselves ! A repeal of the Corn Laws
would confiscate four-fifths of the agricultural capital of
England—would destroy our home market—increase the
wretchedness of the labouring poor to an extent absolutely
intolerable—render the discharge of public and of private
obligations impossible—anal precipitate the country into a
revolution of bleed. Knowing how inevitable such results
are, if the Corn Laws be repealed, the farmers of Eno-land
are apt to believe the repeal of these laws to be scarcely in
the list of possibilities. It may be well for them to dis-
trust their fixed conclusions on this subject. Changes quite
as fatal in their tentic my—although not so comprehensive
in their range of mischief—have been in regular progression
during the last 20 years ; and each of those changes, be-
fore it took place, appeared as little likely to occur, as a re-
peal of the Corn Laws may appear probable, at the present
moment. The crusade against native industry which
Whig " philosophers" projected, and which Whig Sta'es-
men and their pupils have led, has been in regular progress
for twenty years past. Our labouring poor are doomed,
day by day, to severe competition with machinery, and with
foreign producers. Our system of cottage manufactures—
that system which provided profitable employment for the
young, without robbing them of health and innocence—has
long since given way to our factors, system, with all its un-
utterable catalogue of physical and moral horrors ! Nearly
a million of ingenious, intelligent, and most paticnt ope-
ratives—the hand-loom weavers—have been robbed by the
Legislature, of a market for their labour, and calmly handed
over to a struggle with starvation—a struggle that must
terminate in the violent extinction of the class! The
market-gardeners of Kent, and of the other fruit-growing
counties are now about to be sacrificed—and the
farmers of England will,
in du: time, be aided to
the list of victims to the principles of " philoso-
phical" legislation. Why should the farmers hope
to escape? Will they appeal to the fact, that their land-
lords are concerned in the framing of the laws, and there-
fore, never will consent to sacrifice the cultivators of the
soil? Let not farmers deceive themselves! The land-
lords of England—if they had understood, in the faintest
degree, even their ots n permanent personal interests (to
say nothing of the great interests of the nation, and of
humanity) never would have consented to sacrifice the
hand-loom weavers, nor would they endure, for an hour,
the system which dooms tens of thousands of helpless
children to slavery in cotton factories. The landlords of
England, be it recollected, moreover, are sinking, more
and more, every year under the dominion of the " philo-
sePhers" and the schemers ;—and many of them begin,
actually, tia bellow, that a repeal of the Corn-laws—
although it might ruin the present race. of farmers—would
not injure, permanently, the market value of land. Lord
r
william openly avows this opinion—and his Lordship
is not without many silent followers amongst the landlords
who take part in the business of legislation—and who
ci
would not be unwilling, by sacrificing the farmers, to gain a
respite from unpopularity T It is true,
o standby
t sundoubtedly,trndhbays thee
rt
(at r as s
yet the Parliamentary landlords seem ;
aunndwiiitiiitsignnoelses to meddlesstrue,thatwLitohrdth Melbourne
CornelbouLaews. declared
landed
lded
his
aristocracy, however, has shown itself, of late years, wil-
ling to oppose but feeble resistance to the march of hurly-
burly innovation on the rights of the producing classes—
and as for Lord Melbourne, he is but the creature of " the
pressure from without." Let but an extensive system of
agitation be organised—let but akw large meetings, like
that of Birmingham, send forth their voices--and the far.