The Sun.
London, England, 1825-07-15 00:00:00

FOR THE SUN.

Ma. EDITOR—IU a former letter to you, it
}vim assumed that the measures therein alluded to
alight justly be termed the wild excess of Reform,
+shere nothing that is old can be good but where
alteration is synonymous to improvement, and
where experiment and innovation, or any
other conceited novelty, means excellence.
Whatever effect the repeal of the Combination
Laws may have had, and will have, on commerce
and manufactures, the mischief is comparatively
as nothing when we consider the effect it must
produce on the seamen as constituting the de-
fensive arm of the country—the Economists have
formed a number of axioms and theorems sshich
have no foundation ; in fact, neither have they
any practical experience to recommend them ;
they are no other than the wild imaginary visions
of visionary brains, at all times railing against
practical experience. Among the many evils
they have engendered, perhaps none are of a
more dangerous and mischievous tendency than
the Royal Standard Union, which seems to have
originated on the rivers Tyne and Wear, com-
posed wholly of seamen, with which most of the
seamen of the other ports are united in principle,
and like them organized in bodies; they have, like
their brother operators, their Citizen Directors,
Committees, and Solicitors, corresponding and
itinerant delegates, whereby they rule and direct
their masses—they, too, dictate their own wages
and their own work ; they will not allow any but
united brothers to sail in any ship with them; even
all the Officers are to join (save the Master),
each man having a ticket and number, therefore,
whoever sail with them must join their Sovereign
Standard, and conform to their rules and laws ;
thus organized, they, with ease, dictate to those
who employ them, for where ships are under
contract they must proceed, or forfeit the penal-
ties. The Masters who should command the
Merchant ships are placed in a most critical situa-
tion ; sailing to all parts of the world they are cut
off from all authority that could in any way assist
them, their crews, officers and all, in a secret
union, to resist their orders whenever they think
proper so to do; thus are they situated ; all
around them may be disobedience, insubordina-
tion, and mutiny ; yet, under such circumstances,
does the union place them, that let whatever hap-
pen they can expect neither assistance on a pre-
sent emergency nor evidence in a future case, as
to any circumstance that may occur ; this is one
of the evils which is spreading and must spread
to the remotest regions, from the repeal of the
Restrictive Laws exposing the Ship-Owners and
these who command to every sort of conspiracy.
Lnstead of redressing any grievances and improv-
ing securities, all balances and counterpoises that
io any way served to give a steady direction to the
means our forefathers had provided to check those
violent spirits which otherwise are not to be cor-
rected, are totally destroyed ; insubordination
may now stalk abroad uncontrouled, and the op-
portunity has been eagerly seized on by the sea-
. Amen, and carried to the greatest extent. In
:many instances they have refused what was their
bounden duty to perform ; they have even re-
fused their assistance to rescue a vessel from a
aand-bank on which she had grounded on her
voyage; and the master, when questioned as
to the reason why he had not detained their
wages for such misconduct, answered, that if he
had done so none of the seamen would have sail-
ed in a ship with him, which would have lost him
the means of livelihood.
The sea apprentices have caught the con-
tagion ! they are encouraged to resist their corn-
molders, and to such a length has insubordina-
. tion been carried that there has been more ap-
plications to the Magistrates for commitments in
the maritime district for disobedience than per-
haps ever took place in the same time. Indeed,
the spirit of resistance to any thing like subor-
dination has got to such a height, and the dicta-
tion of having their own way is so general, that in
'mine of the sea-port towns they have displayed
flags as an emblem of triumph over those who
bs,e to employ them. These circumstances are
&mentioned to shew the spirit that prevails and
actuates the masses—to shew the effect that is
likely to be instilled into the minds of the pre-
aeut and rising generation, by relaxing the laws,
sod Thereby destroying subordination in society.
The ship-owners are driven to make the choice
nt two evils—that is, either to give the seamen
their own way and the nomination of their wages
and officers, or to let their ships lie in port, as
they cannot procure hands in many of the ports
bat such as are union men. But a still greater
sod a graver question arises from a relaxation of
the necessary discipline—that is, whenever the
seamen are wanted for the service of the State,
what are the consequences to be expected from
urea so trained, when forced into a service which
they generally wish to avoid ? On this great
uatioual. question, and surely none can be greater,
there are many gallant officers, members of the
Senate, and others their brother officers of long
experience in the service, perfectly qualified to
judge. It is one on which their experience
stionfd give them great weight, one on which their
minds were exercised day by day, month by month,
end year by year. To maintain that discipline
necessary to subordination, they are well ac-
quainted with the danger and difficulties of such
situations—they will remember the daring spirit
with which they had to deal that requires so
firm a check, and they must be fully sensible
of the. dangerous consequences of not keeping
such spirits subordinate—they will remember
the mutinies that spread through his Majesty's
Beets ; they sre well acquainted with the
heart-rending difficulties with which so many
gallant officers in those ships had to struggle,
—and they well remember the power assum-
ed, and the lone of language used by the
Citizen Admiral (Parker), and the Citizen De- ,
legates his colleagues. Lt must for ever be iude.
ably. stamped on their minds the situation that
, the Admirals, Captains, and Officers were placed
in--they have had a fine and a fair specimen of
what active citizens are, when acting under the
direction of citizen directors and citizen dele.

gates (on board the fording Republic of that day) ;
CllO7. will reenenibek,theAdaairals Coipois, Gard-
,

.... ~ ~

ner, and other Officers' narrow escape from their
mutinous crews—having many of them witnessed
such scenes, they are fully competent to judge
whether seamen, organised under the directions
of citizen delegates, training en masse to rules
and regulations to give such masses a power to
controul, and who are actually controuling all
the officers in the merchant shipping, are likely
to become very subordinate, when they are called
on for the service of the country to act their part
on the vasty deep—the question is, " will they
come when they are called 2" This, of all others,
is the most vital question, and requires the most
serious consideration of practical Statesmen, of
experienced Officers, and of all those who are
not smitten with the enlightened philosophical,
economical, or radical mania ; those who have
not the vanity to proclaim that they were the
first to discover and to act on sound principles.
There are those who declare to the masses that
they are the only legitimate source of power ;
there are those who have been active citizens in
destroying the laws and discipline, which have
hitherto preserved all orders—when the masses
are thus instructed, will any one, not a sentimen-
tal philosopher, an economist, or a reformer, have
the hardihood to say, that in such a state of
things there is not most imminent danger ; be as-
sured that the masses so trained will care no
more for the Captainof a man of war than they
now care for the master of a merchant ship ; it
may be urged, that in the one situation they are
under superior officers, and subjected to martial
law, and in the other that they are under little or
no restraint (this is certainly true less than in any
other maritime State), and from that cause the
British merchant service has always been in a
state of laxity for want of some law to restrain
the licentiousness of their crews, and from that
cause, more than any other, the mutinies in the
Fleets originated, and became so formidable as
to set both officers and martial law completely
at defiance to supersede them, and threaten to
put in execution the seamens' will as law. This
is no exaggerated picture, but the plain facts that
many of the officers experienced in that severe day
of trial, which, of all others, must have been the
most distressing to their minds, when they found
themselves no longer able to command that navy,
which, when subordinate, was the pride and
glory of the country, become in an evil hour, in-
subordinate and mutinous, threatentng ruin and
desolation to the kingdom which gave them
birth, and of which they were the natu-
ral defenders. Of what avail will be the
boasted wooden walls, or the nautical skill
and gallantry of the officers, if the moral of
those who compose the crews are inflamed and
corrupted ; the collecting such masses together
would only be collecting insubordination and
mutiny, if they are to be numbered, and ticketed,
and trained to support a Royal Standard Union
of the People, raised by a few desiAning men,
to mislead the seamen from their duty, which, if
suffered to proceed in its portentous course, may
be the means of leading them from their alle-
giance. When such theories are forced into
practice, they are vauntingly proclaimed by
Whigs and Tories as the sound principles of free
trade, rights, and equalities, and reciprocity, on
which we are in future to be guided in all es.
sential measures of Government. When this
doctrine is promulgated and sounded in our ears
by a daily repetition from demagogues, puritans,
and levellers—when the laws enacted by our an-
cestors, that has raised this kingdom to such
power (and perhaps too much wealth) are re-
commended to be radically swept away, and their
spirit lost—when they are moreover denounced
as the rules of barbarism—when measures are
progressively carried in direct opposition to those
which were once advocated—then well may they
be termed theories of reform ; they are the
theories of a new school ; the Philosophers
are, by sophistries, filching a credit for them-
selves for what the old laws have effected !
The whole of what they have done has
failed ; they cannot conceal that they are
completely baffled in their experiments ; they
cannot conceal that their experimental job work
(for it deserves no better name) is ricketty and
short-lived, that their measures are cont.• ually
returned on their hands as incomplete, anti must
be new vamped. They have not the candour to
allow that their boasted sound principles are
found unsound in practice ; they are unwilling to
return to the principles of our ancestors, and to
take them as their guide; no, they have renounc-
ed them as barbarous relics ; rather than confess
themselves at fault, they would destroy the whole
fabric ; they therefore proceed like travelling
tinkers, in mending one hole they make two. In
the instance of the repeal of the Combination
Laws, the operators (the new term) were and
are allowed to combine, for the purpose of fixing
their wages and hours for operation ; they have
literally combined according to the act they fix
their wages, and operate or not as they please ;
when this is done, many of the economists seem
a little astonished even at the fruit of their own
rearing—many of those who hailed the notice for,
and assisted in, the repeal, turn round and
threaten the operators with the vengeance of
another sort of thunder, provided they do not
abide more strictly to their wise monitions, that
if they continue obstinately to act as the law,
or as the operators conceive the law allows
them—that their Monitors will shortly apply
another new experiment on the sound prin-
ciple of cosmopolitism—by admitting foreign
shins, foreign seamen, and all sorts of foreign
goods and manufactures. Then our ships
may rot in port, and our manufactories stand
still ; this is a wonderfully clever notable dis-
covery ; what a pity that English artizans and
operatives, and their necessary train of machinery,
had not been allowed for exportation, and put
into that sort of training for a separation (as we
are informed the Colonies are now in) which
would materially ease the shock whenever it
comes; by this means, as we shall be supplied
much cheaper as long as We have money to pay,
there is no need of any alarm on the score of de-
fence, which a little alarmed Adam Smith, as the
modern philosophers have likewise discovered
that wars are the old relics of barbarism and

must be exploded ; therefore seamen will be no
longer necessary, There is another very notable