The Sun.
London, England, 1822-01-24 00:00:00

AGRICULTURE.

A Meeting of Landowners and Agriculturists
of the County of Huntingdon was held on 'rues-
day last in the borough of Huntingdon, for the
purpose of considering the distressed condition of
the Agricultural Interest.—The following is a
copy of the Petition which was adopted. by the
Meeting :

" To the-Honourable the Commons of the United Kingdom
of Great Britain and Ireland, in Parliament assembled.
" The Petition of the Land Owners, Farmers, and
Traders, whose names are undersigned, residing. in
the vicinity of Huntingdon and parts adjacent:
" Most humbly sheweth,
" That the affairs of yoar Petitioners are in a state of em-
barrassment, and themselves and families in a state of distress
and alarm of which they are wholly unable to lay. an ade-
quate description before your Honourable House—taat it is
their sincere conviction, that unless an efficient remedy bu
speedily applied, a convulsion of 'the most alarming nature
must be the final consequence ; for they see the hour approach-
ing when reats must go unpaid, taxes and tithes uncollected,
relief to the poor undistributed, and when the labouring
classes, raging with hunger, will be induced to satisfy that
hunger by acts of violence.
" The cause of this state of suffering and danger cannot,
your Petitioners humbly presume, be other than manifest to
your Honourable House; but your humble Petitioners beg
leave to express their decided opinion that the immediate
cause is thlr Act of, your Honourable House, which has, in
fact, tripled the value of money compared with the price of pro-
duce, and which, leaving the taxes unreduced and contracts un-
modified, has, in fact, tripled those taxes, and disturbed and
violated all existing contracts.
" Your Petitioners, therefore, humbly pray that your
Honourable House will be pleased to adopt measures to rc,llly
all contracts according to the alteration in the value of money
—that yen will be pleased to abolish all sinecures and grants,
all pensions not fully merited by real public services--to d;s-
charge the standing Army, to curtail the Civil List and reduce
the interest of the Public Debt, so that the burthen of taxation
may be greatly alleviated ; these measures being, in the fried
opinion of your humble Petitioners, absolutely necessary
to put an end to the present distress and misery, and to
turn aside the dangers which now menace every species of
property, as well commercial as agricultural, and which, in
the conviction of your Petitioners, threaten to produce scenes of
disorder, confusion, and violence, which duty to their families,
their country, and their King, compels them to anticipate with
a degree of sorrow and alarm not in their power to describe.
" Your Petitioners are not insensible to the defective state
of the Representation in the Hoene of Parliament, as at pre-
sent constituted, and cannot, therefore, help expressing their
decidettltpinion, that the manifold evils that at present afflict
this unhappy country are increased, if not 'occasioned, by
this unfortunate circumstance. We, therefore, earnestly hope
your Ilonourable gote will lose no time in instituting an in-
quiry into the prettlfestate of such Representation, in order
that your Petitioners and the People at large may receive that
which they feel is their birth-right—a hill, lair, and free Repre-
sentation."

DEVON COUNTY MEETING.-The High Sheriff
of Devon, in pursualite of a requisition nume-
rously and respectably signed, to call a Meeting
of the County to take into consideration the pro-
priety of petitioning Parliament on the present
alarming state of Agriculture, has appointed a
County Meeting, to be held on Friday the lst of
February next, at twelve o'clock at noon, at the
Castle of Exeter.

LONDON JOURNALS.

DAILY EXTRAVIS -FROM Tut: 1%1 0 lIN I S PAPERS,
Jan luny.: 2-1, IS'22.

• . [TII E TIMES.]
The proceedings of the Victualling.Boardare
veiled :in obsCurity, and.the supposed magnitude
of the abuses is only thereby increased in the ge-
neral suspicion. It is certain that the-officers to
whom we before alluded have been subjected to,
the severaUPenalties .of . which we spoke. But
fintlalSo, that a Commßsion has been sitting,
composed of two Lords of the Adinitalty, assist-
ed by the Secretary and Solicitor, for the inves-
tigation of the abnses. Now,- without speaking
a word more respectinif the misconduct of inferior
officers, we say that ta' necessity of forming such
a ‘einmissiOri, at once prOves the inadequacy of
the Board. Does not a commission, consisting
of strangers, appointed to examine the concerns
'of a mercantile house, evince the unfitness of the
partners to conduct their own affairs ? In the
same manner, if• the Victualling, or any other
13aLCrd'whatever, is incapable of detecting and re-
pressing the -abuses of its 'own servants, till
haie attained 'such a magnitude
as to attract the general attention of Govern-
ment, we say at once that such a- Board ought
not to exist : it ought to be dissolved,_and recast.
Incited, we recollect, when the relative of a cer-
'lain Lord of the Admiralty was made one of the
CommisSiboers. of. the Victualling Board, we then
stated. that-the new Commissioner,
.most prepos-
terously taken from the army was nOt a man of
habits suited to his new employment ; and that
the appointment was made merely to give
him a pension out of the public Money. We fear
the same thing may be said of others in this
Beard,' On the detection of every single abuse
b) the CortrirniSS'.on now sitting, an inquiry, tulles
:qtroties, will necessarily spring up and suggest it-
self --to every one's mind—how came the Board
to overlook this act of misconduct ? of what use
wa?. a body under which, that abuse has been so
long 'practised without observation ?—When
-we use; as we have done, the word " abuse"
in the preceding remarks, we must be under-
stood as merely employing that term upon the
strength of the dismissals of which we spoke
; •
yekterday : of the deeds really done, we know
very little; we cannot learn that they are of a
very reprehensible nature. Among the dismissed
is said to be one—even a Commissioner—who
violated the order which himself had written :
his case is Of course the worst. The act of tak-
ing up Victualling Bills, purchasable like all
Other Government paper, is said to have been
prohibited to the people in the office, only be-
cause it was thought to interfere with their em-
-ployment, or might too much engage their atten-
tion ; not that it was conceived to be, or could
be, illegal or dishonourable : and among the most
trivial violations of the rule is said to be that by
..one who had only taken up a bill or two for a
The last but most remarkable oc.
currence is the,:triode of correction adopted by
the Commission itself ; for we find that the sub-
stitute for. the dismissed Commissioner, whose
:alary should have been saved. to the country, is
stnother army gentleman considerably advanced
years, 'who has` been brought away from the.
7N.avy Board.—We may add, that in pursuance
Of their determination to search into and detect
'abuse wherever it is. likely to exist, the Com-
tnittee of Inquiry mean to investigate the expert...
ditnie of that branch of the Victualling Office
which is at Deptford.

• [NEW TIMES..
The money market was. dull throughout the
whole of yesterday, notwithstanding the revival
of the report mentioned in our last, that peace
had actually been concluded bet Ween Turkey.
acd Russia. This statement was circulated with
increased confidence by persons generally well
inforined. They went so far as to fix the day
when this happy event-took place, viz. the 18th
ultimo ; and it was said that corroborative ac-
counts were received from Constantinople to that
date, and from Odessa to the 28th. The
,ptiblication of similar statements in an . EVen-
ing Paper of the first respectability might
hive been expected to have given a new
Stimulus to speculation ; Jut in fact it had
z,o such effect : on the contrary, Consols,
which had opened at 764, fallen to a, and
recovered their first elevation, dropt again to
f, and finally closed at the other hand
there were vague reports of an impressment on
the river, which of course implied the apprehen-
sion of immediate hostilities-; but neither the
pacific nor the warlike reports seemed at all to
disturb the serenity of the monied interest. In
fact, the funds at the present moment are much
.mere affected by domestic than by foreign .poli-

tics. The uncertain apprehension of financial
measures, unfavourable to the funds, produces a
general unwillingness to speculate in stock, and
thus the prices imperceptibly decline, it may
almost be said, without any obvious cause.

[MORNING POST.]
The report of the Russian Ultimatum having
been accepted by the Porte, rather gained ground
yesterday. It was stated that letters had been
received by an eminent Greek Merchant from
Constantinople, dated the 18th of December,
and from Odessa the 26th, announcing that event
to have taken place on the 18th. It was also
added, that the Gentleman in question had given
a convincing proof of his implicit confidence in
the truth of the information by immediately
quittibg London for Odessa, to enter into exten-
sive mercantile arrangements:" These, however,
are at best but individual acts, which establish
nothing except the particularconviction by which
their _author .was influenced. A. few days, if
the intelligence be. correct, most at last dispel
all doubt on the subject. If Turkey has ac-
cepted the Russian Ultimatum, such as it was
en i-officially published in the Austrian, and
copied in all our. Papers two months since, she
has laid herself as completely at the feet of her
gigantic neighbour, as if her strength had been
broken in the field, and the victor had dictated
terms to her captive. Monarch, within the walls of
his Seraglio. Letters of the 1%11 inst. were yes-

terday received from Genoa, which state, that a
vessel had arrived at that port from Constantino-
ple in 15 days ;':.4.nd the intellicrsence brought. by
this conveynnee :mentions that every thing is
settled, and Constantinople,.up to the date of the
?.Sth of December, . wa.s .perfectly tranquil:—
W.hether this ref erretta:the final adjustment of
the 'differences with Russia, ot.only to the state
of Constantinople, we. are at -a loss tO conjec-
ture ; at any rate, however, it is important as to
the state of the capital."