The Sun.
London, England, 1838-10-05 00:00:00

i);' '~;

WITH WHICH
THE " TRUE SUN " IS NOW
INCORPORATED.

LONDON :
FRIDAY EVENING. OCTOBER 5, 1838.

The Times of this morning in cursorily alluding to ,
Lord BROUGHAM'S sketches of public characters,—
which appear in the last number of the Edinburgh
Review, takes occasion to sneer at his scholarship, in
such terms as "we have to regret that Lord
BROUGHAM will prate so positively about the merits
of classic, especially Greek, authors, when it is noto-
rious that he can have become acquainted with them
only by means of translation." This is a little
bit of swagger, which, contemptible as it is,
should not be suffered to pass without notice.
What right has the Times to sit in judg-
ment on his Lordship's classical acquirements?
Has our Contemporary vet sounded the depths of
his Lordship's mind ; has he perused and discovered
the shallowness of his strictures on the Greek orators
in the Edinburgh Review ; or ascertained, by his
own critical perusal of the original, that his remarks on
DEMOSTHENEs, in the Noble Lord's sketch of Fox,
are ill-founded ? Not a bit of it. But the Times
must swagger ; it is the necessity of its nature to
swagger ; it is nothing if not a swaggerer ; hence the
desperately brazen assertion that Lord B ROUG }I A El,
on our Contemporary's own well grounded conviction,
is no scholar ! Now, it so happens that his Lord-
ship is one of the first Greek scholars of his age ; and
if there be one Greek writer whom he " has studied
with more attention than another, that one is DEMOS-
THENES. Perhaps, as our Contemporary is so eager
to assert his Lordship's ignorance of the classics, he
will be considerate enough to adduce the proofs ;
which we have no doubt he will do, when challenged
to it, as it will give him an excellent opportunity of
showing off his own superior classical attainments.

The conclusion of Mr. O'CoNNELL's Letter to his
Constituents—which may not inaptly be said to in-
clude a large section of the Irish nation—will be found
in our columns of this day. Though professing, to he
no more than a plain statement of facts, it is obviousl
intended as an answer to the strong objections which
have been made in England, Scotland, and Ireland to
Mr. O'CONNELL'S support of the Government in
passing the late Irish Tithe Bill. It will be lemem-
bered that Mr. WA RD attributed the r.•jection of the
appropriation clause to the O'CoNN ELI. party, and not
to the Ministers, who were pleOge.:l, in turning out the
PEEL Cabinet, to support the principle involved in

the celebrated forty-seventh clause of the STANLEY
Tithe Bill. Mr. O'CONNELL does not once allude to
the speech of Mr. WARD to his constituents, although
in substance he meets the statement which it contained
relative to the Tithe Bill, by a direct negative. " I
had an intimation" he asserts, " from a very influ9ntial
member of the Government, that the Ministerial Tithe
Bill of last Session would adopt, to a considerable
extent, my plan of Tithe Extinction. This was the
only intimation I received upon the subject." We
wonder who it was that gave Mr. O'CONNELL
such an intimation. It is well known that Mr.
O'CONNELL'S plan was to extinguish tithes al-
together, and to leave the Clergy to be paid en-
tirely out of the Treasury ; so that it appears
such a plan was artualiy deliberated upon by the
Ministry. With respect to the Members in the
habit of voting with him, Mr. O'CONNELL says in
continuation—" I cannot say whether any other Irish
Member knew of the Tithe Bill intended to be pro-
posed ; I don't believe there did. But for myself, I
say distinctly that I knew nothing of the Bill, as it
really existed, until it was placed on the table of the
House. On the contrary, I had announced in the
public Newspapers that my plan of tithe extinction would
be, to a considerable extent, adopted, justified as I was
by the announcement made to me by a Cabinet Minister."
With respect to the finality of the Tithe Bill of last
Session Mr. O'CONNELL is, if possible, still more
explicit. "No Irish MeMber," he asserts, " ac-
cepted the Tithe Act of this Session as a final mea-
sure, or as a satisfactory measure. For my own part,
I distinctly stated that I did not accept it as an in-
stalment, or as a measure likely to be satisfactory, far
less final. On the contrary, I distinctly stated that
the people of Ireland would not, aid, in my decided
opinion, ought not, to be satisfied with it, or to relax
their efforts to get rid
of all compulsory payments to a
Church to which they did not belong. It will be
naturally asked why did Mr. O'CONNELL and his
Hibernian phalanx support the Bill, knowing that he
could not in his conscience approve of it. We will give
his answer in his own words. He had, it appears, three
distinct reasons for supporting the Bill. The first was
on what he calls principle ; the second on public
grounds ; the third was personal to himself. His
reason on principle is as follows :
I did state, and I repeat my conviction, that the Bill of
last Session instead of being an additional security to the
Parsons, would increase the resistance to the payment of
the tithes in the shape of rent-charge ; that it would bring
into the field a new class of Whitehovs—that is, of tithe
resisters ; men in broad cloth and boots, instead of the
small farmers in frieze ; men who would dislike exceedingly
the payment of the rent-charge, and would not relish the
mixing up of their rents with the blood-stained tithe im-

post, and who would rue the day that they acquiesced, if
they should acquiesce, in any such admixture. I have
reason to believe, as I sincerely hope, that the resistance to
the payment of a sinecure Church will be augmented, and
not diminished, by the late Act of Parliament.
The Penal Tithe-laws, and not Mr. O'CoNNELL,
are to be blamed for conipelling the representatives of the
Irish nation to have recourse to such sophistry as this,
under the specious name of pattiotic principle. Here
the shifting of the burden of an unjust impost from
the shoulders of the enduring to the backs of the more
restive, without any regard to the abstract justice of
the question, is assumed as a masterly stroke of com-
bined patriotism and political sagacity. Such, in the
best soils, are the fruits produced by a system of
civil and religious despotism. The second reason cited
by Mr. O'CONNELL. for his support of the Bill is
less objectionable :
The second was my apprehension that as the Govern-
ment had been compelled by the House of Lord; to give
horse, foot, and police to aid the rebellion ruffians, the
people might be driven to open resistance, and to one of
those drift le:a rebellions which bring destruction upon the
population, and strengthen the hands of every crawling crea-
ture connected with power or government. The recent pro-
ceedings in several of the midland and southern counties
amply justified my apprehension.

This reason is more intelligible, and addresses itself
more cogently to the common sense of Englishmen.
We are persuaded that there is much truth in it ; but
unfortunately, as regards tke Hon. and Learned Mem-
ber for Dublin, the degree of truth there is in it only
shows that the people of Ireland had begun to distrust
the final efficacy of the passive resistance schemes, so
terrible to PEEL and the English Tories. We now
come to the third reason :
The third reason is of a more personal nature. Multitudes
of per=ons who were sued for tithes, or whoso property
was seized upon, or whose per:ons were incarcerated, wrote
me the most moving and heart-rending letters—heart-
reading, because I could not give them any relief, or advise
any course that could extricate them from their difficulties.
I was the powerless butt of thousands upon thousands of

afflicted complainants. Every now and then a victim
perished in gaol—a tithe martyr. It was a strife that made
my heart bleed ; and I was not sorry to see the tithe war
shift its quarters from the poor and the lowly to those who
can better bear the brunt of the battle ; whilst the spirit
of the ever-faithful people will support and back their
wealthier co-operators in order to put an end to the tithe
system for ever.

We admit that to any man of strong feeling, Mr.
O'CONNELL'S position with respect to the tithe-
martyrs was one of the most painful that can well he
imagined. The conviction of dying for a principle,
however just and patriotic, is a small support to tender
to the widow and the orphan in the hour of their
desolate bereavement. But what does this all amount
to ? Why, simply, that, as we stated an hundred
times over, there can be no tithe compromise as re-
gards Ireland. No system short of the voluntary one
will ever give peace to that country.

A dinner was given to the Earl of CARDIGAN 011
'Wednesday last by the Conservatives of the Northern
Division of Northamptonshire, which is no otherwise
remarkable than as being the first public ovation which
the Conservatives have had the heart to give since the
recess. Generally at this period of the year they have
specially distinguished themselves by the frequency of
their dinners ; but this autumn they seem to have dis-
pensed with them altogether, just as if their present af-
flicting position was such as to call for a fast rather than
a feast. It is therefore solely in consequence of the
novelty of the thing, that we arc induced to
take the slightest notice of the Conservative
dinner to Lord CARDIGAN ; for a more dull,
hopeless affair, can scarcely he imagined. It was