The Sun.
London, England, 1836-11-08 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS

The authorized organ of the Tories in Ireland, the
Dublin Evening Mail, assures its readers that Mr.
O'Loghlen was most reluctant to accept a seat on the
judicial bench, and would gladly have remained in his
office of Attorney-General ; which statement, by the
way, is in direct contradiction to a previous assertion
by the same journal, that his acceptance of promotion
manifested a want of confidence in the stability of the
Government. The fact, we believe, is true, that Mr.
O'Loghlen would have preferred to retain the situation
which he filled, had he consulted his own convenience
or advantage only. But we are sure there is no foun-
dation for the reason assigned by the Evening Mail
for the Government pressing him to take the seat on
the bench—namely, that if Mr. Richards should
be advanced to it, there would be an insuperable
obstacle thrown in the way of subsequent ar-
rangements ; inasmuch as Mr. Woulfe, the new
Solicitor-General, and Mr. O'Loghlen, being both
Catholics, it would be impossible to commit
the two highest law offices under the Crown to
them. Why should it be so ?or how could such
a notion cross the mind of any Member of the present
Government ? The law and the Constitution recog-
nise no distinction between Protestant and Catholic in
civil life ; nor was any jealousy felt or expressed dur-
ing the years which elapsed since the passing of the
Emancipation Act, in which the principal law officers
of the Crown were Protestants, and all the promotions
to the judicial bench were conferred upon lawyers of
that persuasion exclusively. A Government has no
no right to look to any thing but personal and profes-
sional capability in the disposal of such offices. The
mere accident of creed should not influence it one way
or the other ; and we are confident that it is a gross
libel upon Lord Mulgrave to insinuate that he would
feel in the slightest degree embarrassed or impeded in
the arrangements which appeared to him calculated to
serve the country, by any narrow prejudices of
the kind alluded to. Indeed we are quite con-
vinced of it. His whole conduct, from the day that
he set foot in Ireland, purposing to administer the
affairs of that country without partiality or distinction,
manifests the determination of his mind to know nei-
ther Protestant, Catholic, nor Dissenter in the ap-
pointments he should make, but to place his confidence
in, and bestow his favours upon, the best Irishmen,
without any other consideration. Of Lord Melbourne
and his colleagues in the Government the same thing
may be affirmed. Not an individual amongst them
would listen to the silly objection, which the Tories
themselves would in their private hours laugh at as a
plausible nothing, against the danger arising to the
State from a Catholic Solicitor-General being ap-
pointed to act under a Catholic Attorney-General. In
a country where seven-eighths of the people are Ca-
tholics, those who are employed to administer the laws
may belong to the Church of the majority, we pre-
sume, without detriment. No Government, professing
the enlightened and liberal principles which constitute
the strength of the present Administration, could per-
mit such a shadowy and offensive scruple to obstruct
their fair intentions for a inoment.—Morning Chron.
We have yet another example to add to those over
which the country has already rejoiced, of Conservative
Associations springing up where they had hitherto
been unheard of. In truth, they burst out from the
pressure of a new emergency, which will have its way,
and carries everything before it. At Devonport, on
Friday last, there was a Conservative meeting and
dinner. The Revolutionists, if they please, may laugh
at dinners, but that cause must be at a loss for merri-
ment which tries to extract it from such a source.
Dinners in this country constitute facilities of re..
union, and furnish opportunities for the expression of
sentiment, as well as for the reciprocation of political
pledges, among those who feel a sympathetic interest
in the course or tendency of our national affairs,
which custom has firmly established, which ages in-
deed may be said to have consecrated, and to have
so embodied with both the public and individual
character of Englishmen, that it is not the feigned and
lugubrious levity of a set of mortified grumblers now
to eradicate the taste for such meetings, or to impair
their usefulness where great and substantial ends ars.
promoted, by making the spirit of conviviality instru-
mental to harmony, energy, and manliness of action.
The Devonport meeting was one of these. It was
an inaugurative meeting—not commemorative—like
that at Liverpool. It was the birth of the Devon-
port Conservative Association—net, as elsewhere, the
anniversary of such an institution. The respectable
and able Chairman of the Liverpool meeting announced
to the company of 1,100 Conservatives who sat around
him, that at its origin, only one twelvemonth before, the
Liverpool Association had consisted of no more than
70 persons. What, then, is the case at Devonport ?
There is, indeed, no twelvemonths' growth, but the
'babe comes into life a giant—with more arms than
Briarens--with more heads than the hydra—stron:,
enough, we dire say, before it has, been cradled a week,to choke a whole legion of the hissing serpents of
democracy. Four hundreri, and seventy gentlemen sat
down to this first constitutional banquet of the Devon-
port Association. How many may we not reckon on
for the return of that day ? which was itself the anni-
versary ofK.,rig William's landing—the father of those
civil seem Ales and of those religious liberties which
it is the grand object of a different set of beings
fmm our great deliverer and his illustrious Whig aCI-
- of that period to sweep away for ever. The
Devonport meeting was characterized by a display
of spirit and talent not inferior to those of the
Conservative meetings which have gone before, and
doubtless assisted in producing it. The noblemen
who attended; Lords Eliot and Valletort, true to their
station, their principles, and their duty, stood forward,
like waters of their own high rank, and showed that
the British nobility of these times are no sleepers at
their post, nor members of a sinecure Aristocracy.
Their language and sentiments were such as befit all
Englishmen, alive at once to their birthright, and to
the obligations it imposes : they defended the national
Church as the inheritance of rich and poor, but em-
phatically as that Church which alone does not debar
the destitute from the consolations and blessings of re-
ligion. They vindicated the civil institutions of the
realm as the most efficient protectors of those portions
of the people of England who otherwise would have
been helpless, against the despotism of democratic
tyrants. Lord Valletort made a pertinent allusion to
the monstrous ingratitude, and worse than barbarous
brutality, of the rabble, in their treatment a few years
ago of the greatest man this empire has produced for a
century, when they attacked with ruffian fierceness the
house of the Duke of Wellington—of him who had
warded off from the home and fireside of every man in
England that destruction before which the rest of the
inhabited world stood appalled—and an edifying
specimen indeed it was, of the wise and virtuous con-
sistency of that populace which is held up by modern
Whig Ministers as a fit repository of privilege and
power, when Lord Valletort described it as only three
years ago forcing the saviour of the country to barri-
cade his door, and within these few months, in hap-
pier, though possibly not more stable, mood, cheering
and extolling him as their idol. That order of the
community which in Holland, seized with diabolical
fury, massacred De Witt, than whom a more illus-
trious statesman or patriot has seldom, if ever, existed,
are worthy candidates, it must be confessed, for su
preme power over the educated and affluent classes
anywhere ! Eminent judges of the qualifications of
public men ! Wise and upright in the discharge of
important trusts, and temperate in the exercise of con-
stitutional functions I We are happy to see 'Mr. Daw-
son once more in the field, and in a disposition to speak
ont his whole mind on the trying questions by which
England is now agitated, but on which it gratifies all
honest men to know that she is no longer, if ever she
was, anything like equally divided. The constituency
of Devonport, we are sure, cannot have a representa-
tive at such a crisis more strenuous or efficient for the
crushing of revolutionary madness than Mr. George
Dawson. It cannot be repeated too earnestly, or
too importunately impressed upon the people of Eng-
land, that the question at issue is constitutional
freedom, or a species and degree of tyranny which
the Constitution of England has never known. A
faction raised by the caprice of fortune to a transient
and giddy power, assumes the style, title, and dignity
of the " people. To indulge its own rapacious and
deadly passions it seeks to destroy the Church ; and ,