The Sun.
London, England, 1853-05-06 00:00:00

mind Mr. LAWLESS that the charge is not to be
levied on the property, but on the property and
income of Ireland. We have never heard it as-
serted that 1001. per annum would not go as far
in that country as in England. Indeed, we be-
lieve it is universally admitted that a person with
such an income in the Sister Kingdom can com-
mand a much larger amount of the comforts and
minor luxuries of life than one of similar income
in this country, The Irish Members, very justly
and very pertinaciously, insist upon equal rights
and privileges for their compatriots. They are
fully entitled thereto, and it would be
a gross dereliction of duty, an unpardon-
able violation of the important trust con-
fided to their hands, if they neglected
to insist thereon, vigorously and energetically,
at all times and seasons. But they must recollect
that the possession of equal rights implies the
submission to equal burdens ; and that if they
refuse to bear their fair proportion of the one,
they cannot hope to participate on terms of
equality in the other. We trust that these will
be taken into consideration when the House is
this evening called on to give its decision on the
proposition of the Honourable Gentleman the
member for Clonmel.

Personalities appear just now to be so much
"the order of the day," that for a little while at
least we almost despair of anything like sedate
deliberation. An interval must be allowed for
the effervescence. Both within and without
the walls of Imperial Parliament there are con-
tinually manifest nowadays these deplorable evi-
dences of excitement.
Commons and Lords are alike affected by the
prevailing epidemic—a spleen finding vent in the
language of atrabilious indignation. It cannot
yet be forgotten how intemperately the Earl of
CLARENDON objected the other evening to a quo-
tation from OTHELLO—failing to remember, of
course, that the quotation was not applied to him-
self, and indifferent it would seem to the decorum
which might reasonably have been expected in
debate from one of the Ministerial advisers of the SO-
VEREIGN. Frequently as the Earl of DEnmchas com-
manded the admiration of the Legislature by his re-
markable powers as a rhetorician, he has seldom
won more cordial approval even from among the
crowd of his political antagonists than by those
brief but withering words of rebuke addressed to
the Foreign Secretary, with a dignity eminently
well befitting one who had, for however short a
period, guided the reins of her MAJESTY'S Go-
vernment. Scarcely has this incident passed over
when there becomes audible, under the same roof,
the noise of that Irish "skrimmage" which yester-
day agitated so profoundly the assembly of our
popular Representatives. Nevertheless, while it
may be surprising that such unseemly wrath
should have been excited by those whispered
words of SHAKSPERD--" A man may smile,
and smile, and be a villain" —it can
scarcely be much cause for amazement that
such extraordinary tumult should have been pro-
voked by that declaration made last night in the
House of Commons by the Hon. Gentleman the
Member for New Ross—" I say, short as my ex-
perience in Parliament has been, that, in the worst
days of the Walpoles and Pelhams, no more scan-
dalous corruption. existed than I have seen prac-
tised under my own eyes in. the corruption of Irish
Members "—expressions quite sufficient, by the
way, to infuriate many of those who were listen-
ing to Mr. C. G. DUFFY, because the words im-
plied at once a charge of " truckling" against his
" compatriots," and an accusation of the most
gross and wholesale bribery against the Coalition
Government. No wonder, therefore, that the remark
made yesterday by the Member for New Ross should
have produced immediately that lamentable scene
of uproar, rage, and " confusion worse con-
founded ! " It was like exploding a bombshell
in the midst of a powder manufactory. Hence-
forth, indeed, Mr. GAVIN DUFFY may be said to
have exceeded in his rashness even the extra-
vagant and self-sacrificing temerity of GUY
FAwKEs--resolved apparently at all hazard to
have blown up the Ministry as well as the Par-
liament. Unluckily for himself he does not ap-
pear to be skilled in the use of projectiles. To-day's
sitting will decide whether his charge will tell
upon those adversaries against whom they were
directed, or whether that eccentric speech of last
evening will recoil upon himself like a boomerang !
Personalities such as these, however, are by no
means confined within the walls of Parliament.
Outside those stormy halls of discussion, people
seem to be going " mad for the sight of their
eyes that they do see !" Several of them have
latterly foamed through two or three hundred
mortal pages (certainly not immortal pages) octavo
—at one moment against an English gentleman,
at another against a foreign potentate. There
was M. HUGO, for example, gnashing his teeth
through we don't exactly remember how many
chapters against his Imperial Majesty the Third
NAPOLEON. Then again there was Mr. RICHARDS
talking " a small armoury of daggers" against the
Hon. Member for the West Riding of Yorkshire.
Our ears have for some time past been ringing with
the yells first of one and then of another of these
discordant and infuriated pamphleteers. The
dogs of war, or at any rate the whelps of slan-
der and scurrility, appear to have been bitten
with a rabid cacoethes scribendi, and to have
gone off into a sort of political hydrophobia.
Since which time every one of them, lur-
cher, bobtail, and all, have been snarling and
biting to the right and to the loft with a mar-
vellous display at once of industry and imparti-
ality. Whoever happened to be conspicuously
before the public was at once assailed with a fero-
city, a rancour, and a resolution that would have
been absolutely appalling, but that it has proved
in every instance only a despicable show of
a most fierce but an utterly impotent malevo-
lence. HUGO has lightened on the horizon
of France, but we believe the Emperor NAPOLEON
still resides with great pomp in the Palace of the
Tuileries, and still reigns over 40,000,000
of one of the most civilised races on the face of
the globe in uninterrupted tranquillity. RICHARDS
has thundered from the solitudes of the Temple,
but only, we fear, with a brutum fulmen, for, un-
less we are considerably mistaken, Mr. COBDEN
still addresses the House of Commons, whenever he
likes "as an authority," and till retains the
leadership of the clever and rather influential
school associated by name with the city of Man-
chester. It is the old story of the will proving
rather larger than the deed. As " some one,
some time, somewhere, said," when speaking of a
similar class of calumnious assailants—they have
all the venom of the asp, but they lack the
perforated tooth through which it has to be
squirted ! At the best, moreover, they were
only shallow .iniitators. Mr. RICHARDS ought
to have remembered that he was coming a
long way after the redoubtable BUSFIELD FERRAND.
M. lirroo ought not to have forgotten that he. was
merely saying ditto to that Brummagen BURKE,
"An Englishman." So that these "latter day" sin-
ners, in the way of slander, had not even the merit
of originality. However this might be, the PROME-
THEUS of Pump-court strove assiduously to set the
Thames on fire with a spark, stolen anywhere but
from heaven—while the new SALMONIUS recently
imported from Paris was stunning the ears of the
public with the car of his wrath, a vehicle, accord-
ing to the old mythologists, drawn over a brazen
bridge—all the brass of which in this instance

was certainly supplied by our mimic JOVE'S own

temperament.

Assuredly, if Messrs. HUGO and

RICHARDS could, by any possibility, by some de-
lightful freak of fortune, by hook or by crook, be
pitted against each other—the one backed say by
BUSFIELD FERRA.ND, and the other by "An Eng-
lishman"—their contention would inevitably end
like the quarrel between the famous cats of
Kilkenny.

Elsewhere we may look around for consolation in
the hope of detecting some of the " milk of human
kindness" under all the poison of these odious and ac-
cursed scurrilities. In vain. Elsewhere, too, we
seem to hear nothing but personality—personality
—personality. The phobia already alluded to is not
restricted to a cluster of miserable pamphleteers.
It has infected even, we lament to think, some of
the most eminent of our daily and quarterly pub-
lication:s.. Scarcely three coneecutiye mats= of