The Sun.
London, England, 1831-11-02 00:00:00

3ebtow the best places in his gift, or attainable
through his influence, upon the unprovilled
members of the family, or its nearest rela-
tires. Thus were the late Archbishop of Canter-
bury, the Irish Lord Chancellor Manners, and
the present Speaker of the House of Commons
" provided for." Of any want of fitness in the
last-mentioned Right Hon. Gentleman for his
elevated and arduous office, we are unquestion-
ably not -unjust enough to Complain ; but of the
two former it may be truly said, that however
amiable they may have been in private life, their
professional qualifications were not such as could
alone have recommended them to the English
primacy, or to the Irish woolsack ; nor, indeed,
could the undisputed competency of Mr. Man-
ners Sutton have borne him through his first
contest for the chair, had he not fought under
the banners of Belvoir Castle. We might enu-
merate other members or connexions of the
house of Rutland, forced by its command of
votes in Parliament upon the Minister of the
day, but that our purpose is merely to illustrate
a system of government susceptible of grievous
injury to the nation, not by any means to wound
the feelings of individuals who are not already
and conspicuously before the public eye. The
practice resorted to for strengthening family in-
fluence, as we have just hinted at the uses to
hick it has been converted, is, to connect the
interest of clever men of business, qualified to fill
the part of political agents and effective partisans,
with those of the great head of the family himself.
Thus, to go no further, we have found the name
of Mortlock, a Cambridge factotum of the Duke
of Rutland, amongst the Commissioners of Ex-
- cise. But if the distribution of Ministerial favours
throughout the county for the last fifty years
were inquired into, and a list taken of the Ma-
gistrates, the various classes and kinds of revenue
officers, of law officers, and of clergy holding
Government benefices, with another catalogue
of their expectant successors in the several
branches were framed—a due estimate being
likewise made of the kindly influence derived
• from petty patronage in the hands of such mul-
tifarious functionaries, as well as of the more
stern though not less efficient ascendancy exer-
cised by them through the fear of their petty
persecutions—we may form some vague, but far
lion' adequate notion, of that established and
well-knit power with which the friends of Re-
form must unavoidably struggle, in the county
where patronage, that is to say, the unmeasured
and irresponsible controul over the public money,
has been for a period almost beyond the memory
of living man, radiating upon every point of its
circumference, from one great centre, and that
centre, the chief of the Manners family, who
summons the entire host of place-bound vassals
• to a last fight in defence of their common pro-
perty, the plunder of the people of England. Yet
such a battle has been fought, and a mighty tri-
umph achieved, over the joint influence of Rut-
land and Yorke, the superlative and comparative
of malignant planets in the Tory system. We
aver that this has been a magnificent triumph.
It was not, as in Dorsetshire, where the mater
rials of resistance to prescriptive servitude ail
• feeble ;—it was not, we say, all but a drawn fight;
like that between Lord Ashley and his liberal
though unsuccessful adversary ;—it was, in thci
face of the old Pitt-ocracy, and of the church~
militant under all its forms of Episcopal and
College stubbornness, a victory carried with aj
high hand, and by a majority of much mor
than one-third of the whole number polled by
the anti-national interest. Wliv, then. was this ?
Because Cambridgeshire boasts of an indepen-
dent body of farming freeholders,—men above
want, men with opportunities of acquiring in-
formation upon the state and politics of the
country, by intercourse beyond the precincts of
their immediate neighbourhood. These en-
lightened, uncorrupted, and incorruptible electors,
resolved that they would no longer be Rutland-
ridden. They were not deceived by the dis-
honest prating of the Tories about the hostile
• tendency of the late Bill towards the landed in-
terests. They were sensible that a state of the
law which gives the nation generally a power of
managing its own concerns, must be better for
the great portion of the people, than one which
gives to one order of men, exclusively, a right
of robbing all the rest. Therefore it was that
Captain Yorke's rhetoric failed, and that Mr.
Townley, without any art of rhetoric, defeated
him. It is indeed a noble victory, and England
may well be proud of the Cambridgeshire electors.
—Times.

Tranquillity has at length been restored in
Bristol, but at an expence at which humanity
shudders. From 400 to 500 of the misguided
rioters were sabred or cut down. The loss of
life was, however, we understand, mainly caused
by drunkenness. Many perished in the flames.
The destruction of property has been very great.
The riot was quelled on Monday, by two
charges of dragoons, the same—part of the 3d
and the 14th—who are alluded to in our ac-
counts of yesterday. from the afternoon of
Monday, to eight o'clock yesterday morning
—the latest hour at which the coaches
left Bristol—all has been quiet. The Magis-
trates were, it seems, weal: and inefficient, and
to their want of judgment and firmness must li
be attributed the dreadful loss of life and de-
struction of property which have taken place.
As soon as they could be induced to act with
courage and common sense, the same soldiers—
namely, part of the 3d and 14th dragoons--put
down, at an enormous expellee of human life, a
riot which they could have easily checked in the
commencement, had they been allowed to act
with effect. In fact it would almost seem as if
the authorities in Bristol had wished to take for'
a precedent the conduct of the Magistrates of
London in the Lord George Gordon riots of
1780. Too much care cannot be taken to
avoid extreme measures, so long as the ebul-
litions of the people are not of an outra-
,,eoos character ; but the moment they
begin to wage war against persons and
property, hesitation in men, entrusted with
authority, w restore order with the utmost
promptitude, by the employment of all the force
at their disposal, is a gross failure in their duty
to the community. We were thunderstruck
when we saw in the accounts received on Mon-
day that the soldiers had withdrawn, leaving
-Bristol in the power of a ferocious mob ; but we
avoided ail remark on so strange a proceeding,
from an unwillingness to deal out censure which
might have been misapplied. We now find that!
the blame rests entirely with the Bristol Ma.
gistracy. The. accounts which we have col-
lected front various sources, represent the con-
duct of the populace of Bristol in the most un-
favourable light. " The people are guilty (says
a
the Bath Jorernao of every excess of debauchery
and licentiousness that can disgrace human
nature. Female chastity has no protection, the
violation of every law characterises the insur-
gents. Three of them, in a state of drunken-
Hess, were burnt in one of the
douses they fired,