The Sun.
London, England, 1838-03-07 00:00:00

that the Noble Lord acted spiritedly, and cheered him
when he announced the determin ktion of the Govern-
ment. Mr. HALL made a short and able speech.
Lord SANDON, after a rambling speech, moved an amend-
ment, which occupies half a page of the Votes, and is care-
fully drawn up. There was no hesitation in producing it :
he did not go to the table to write it ; he went down to
the House with it in his pocket, us it had been agreed to by
the Conservative leaders. The whole party, then, had
coolly and deliberately adopted the plan, before the debate
commenced, of attacking the Ministers, in the manner fol-
lowed out by the Noble Lord. Mr. LABOUCHERE replied
to Lord SANDON in an effective speech, in which he suc-
ceeded in showing that the evils under which Canada
laboured had been caused by the Tories, and that Lord
GLENELG had very successfully averted far worse mischief
than had actually ensued. His speech was felt to be
so powerful, that the great Lord STANLEY took it on
himself to reply to it, and made a regular slap-dash
oration, which the Tory Journals speak of as a model
of perfect eloquence. In our judgment, it wants, like
most of the Noble Lord's speeches, one valuable qua-
lity—truth. Lord STANLEY is a pious Lord, and a prodi-
gious hater of all kinds of evasion, and gave the House to
understand that the course adopted by the Tories, though
Lord SANDON produced his amendment ready cut and
dried, had been adopted consequent on Lord PALMERSTON'S
speech. Noble Lords are just now very sensitive, and the
privileges of the House are very great ; so we must leave the
public accurately to characterise Lord STANLEY'S peculiar
and perfect eloqu lice. Sir CHARLES GREY followed
Lord STANLEY, and spoke in favour of the Ministers.
lie is supposed to belong to the Tory party, but
he was one of the Commissioners sent to Canada ; and we
regard his testimony in favour of the Ministers as of far
more weight than all the vituperation of political opponents,
eager to supersede them in office at any expense of public
welfare. Unfortunately. Sir CHARLES GREY'S speech, which
is said to have been an effective one, was not heard in every
part of the House, and the Ministers lost the benefit of
his defence, while the better lungs of Lord STANLEY al-
lowed no part of his attack to be lost. On Sir CHARLES
GREY sitting down, the debate was adjourned.
There are only two points to which we shall now call
public attention. The first is the conduct of the Tories.
Why, we ask, did they, in the month of January, scarcely
six weeks ago, when they had before them all the evidence
which they now possess of the weakness of the Colonial Go-
vernment, for since that period its conduct has been eminently
successful, and the rebellion in Canada which was then
raging has been completely suppressed—why, we ask,
did they at the latter end of January unanimously agree
to place in the hands of the Ministers a dictatorial power
as to Canada, and on the 6th of March move a resolution
that " the necessity of suppressing rebellion by force of
arms and of suspending the Constitutional Government of
Lower Canada, are in a great degree attributable to the
want of foresight and energy on the part of her Majesty's
confidential servants, and to the ambiguous, dilatory, and
irresolute course which they have pursued in respect to the
affairs of Canada since their appointment to office ?"
The Tories knew all this in January as well as
in March, and yet they then consented to place most
extraordinary power in the hands of Ministers, whom
they now ask the House of Commons to brand as
incapable ; Why are the Tories guilty of this factious in-
consistency ? The answer is plain. Their head is now
moved by the tail. Their ♦ictory over Mr. O'CoNxxee
has inspired them with the most greedy hopes, and they
refuse any longer to obey their chief, unless he can glut
them with the
,spoils of office. So factious are they be-
come, that they will rather condemn in March their own
proceedings in January, than wait one moment longer
to gratify their hunger for office. The public will
know what opinion to form of those who would risk
the public welfare for such an object. The only
good we can possibly anticipate from Sir W. MOLES-
WORTH'S motion, is the thus unmasking the Tories, who,
as Mr. HALL last night justly observed in his useful speech,
were ten times more to be condemned than the Ministers.

The great vices of which the Ministers were accused, is
vacillation, irresolution and doing nothing. The House of
Commons has over them a great advantage. It judges
after the event, while they had to act while it was in
progress. Now, with all deference to Lord STAN-
LEY and Sir ROBERT PEEL, and the rest of the Tories,
who hare lived only to witness year after year, and
day after day, the defeat of their best-laid schemes of
policy, we must observe that they of all men should
not be too positive and too overweeningly presuming.
The political world partakes at present of the quali-
ties of the physical world, and is moving on with rail-
road speed. We have lived through ages of political expe-
rience since the peace, and particularly since 1830. But
when statesmen have seen their wisest plans set at nought,
are they never to learn, and to be as ignorantly presumptu-
ous at the end of time as at its commencement? Let us
take as an illustration of their failure, the Catholic Eman-
cipation Act. 'We are ready to prove, that unless it had
been passed, the country would have been the prey of a
bloody revolution. But has it answered the expectations of
its authors ? Have the iron-handed Duke of WELLINGTON
mowing down all men to one flat uniformity, orthe supple Baro-
net whom he made his instrument,been more successful as po-
liticians than Lord GLENELG? They have not, and Lord
STANLEY knows, whatever might have been their intention,
that the indispensable concessions to Ireland of 1829, only
made more concessions necessary in 1832. Now with these
facts staring the Tories in the face, it is something like the
uttermost folly in them to accuse other Statesmen of vacil-
lation who have not their blind presumption, But Lord
GLENELG, in fact, has been eminently successful. In 1833
and 1834, when Lord STANLEY was in office, the bulk of
the population, both in Upper and Lower Canada, was in a
state of discontent and threatened insurrection. By Lord
GLENELG'S conduct the great bulk was reconciled to the
Government—almost all the influential men sided with it,
and left the few desperate wretches who could not be con-
verted by his mildness and forbearance, to strand themselves
by their own rash rebellion. If any body should be
accused it is Lord STANLEY, who, by his vigour was,
in fact, the real author of that general discontent which
Lord GLENELG was fortunately able to lessen, and limit
entirely to a few unsuccessful demagogues.

The Christian world is deeply indebted to Lord
BaouctrAm for his untiring zeal in the sacred cause of
Negro Emancipation ; and among his Lordship's most suc-
cessful efforts to effect so humane an object, we class his
motion in the House of Lords last night, condemnatory of
the Order in Council which legalizes the importation of
apprenticed labourers from India to Guiana. Nothwith-
standing the nominal rejection of the Noble Lord's amend-
ment by a majority of their Lordships, it is manifest from
the tenor of the debate—from the humiliating concessions
made by the Government—from the substance of the
compact into which its Chief entered with the Duke
of WELLINGTON, before that majority could be organ-
ized—that the Noble and Learned Lord virtually
obtained a complete triumph. His Lordship's motion,
though nominally rejected, was, in fact, adopted by Lords
MELBOURNE and GLENELG, when they pledged them-
selves to render the Order in Council virtually a dead let-
ter—for such it will be from the moment the Duke of
WELLINGTON'S plan for the importation of free labour is
adopted. As this Order never appeared in the Gazette
and was unknown to nine-tenths of the people of England
until Lord BROUGHAM called attention to it, we may be
rendering a service to our readers to give the substance of
it in a few words :—ln 1836 the Legislature of Guiana
passed a law permitting the planters to import labourers from
any country upon condition of their being compelled to serve a
seven years' apprenticeship by way of indemnity for the
cost of their importation. This law was not approved of by
the Home Government ; but, after long explanations and
discussions, an Order in Council was issued in the summer
of the following year, granting the right of importing la-
bourers from any country save Africa ; and restricting the
apprenticeship to five years instead of seven. All the
world must see that this was virtually a revival of the
Slave Trade in a mitigated form. Vessels were
fitted out for this horrid traffic, and to lull the suspicions
of the Slave Emancipationists, India was selected instead
of the African coast, for the scene of atrocities, till then
unknown among the helpless Ilindoo race. Lord GLENLLG
himself admitted that the so-called apprenticed labourers
were kidnapped—that the bulk of them knew not where
they were going—how they were to be worked—or in
what way remunerated. Many of them fancied they were
only to be absent a few weeks, and that they might return
to their friends at any moment. They knew nothing of the
sea—nothing of the habits, the language, or the designs of
those who dragged them from their friends and country.
Once on board they were treated as slavers have ever
treated their wretched cargoes of unfortunate human
beings ; and on landing the only consolation held out to
them was that after five years of exile and toil, they
would be at liberty to return to the land of their nati-
vity ! Imagine the agony of a crowd of poor, super-
stitious, ignorant, Hindoos thus thrown naked, desolate,
and defenceless upon a foreign land, doomed to toil daily
under a tropical sun, and without the power of making
their sufferings known to their cruel task-masters. Ministers
may talk as they will about free labour—this is slavery.
In the eloquent speech with which Lord BROUGHAM
introduced his motion, his Lordship alluded to a false
and scandalous attack made upon him by a Minis-
terial Evening Contemporary, en the occasion of his
well-remembered denunciation of the colonial policy of the
Cabinet. This Journal had the effrontery to characterize
the Noble and Learned Lord as one of those juggling
friends--

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" Who never spoke before,
But cried, I warned you,' when the event was o'er."
Whereas it is notorious to every man in England, that
the Noble and Learned Lord was the only friend of the