The Sun.
London, England, 1836-11-12 00:00:00

same terrible bui instructive era. The first act of
those precious Independents—those preachers of the
voluntary principle—was to annihilate under severe
penalties all liberty of conscience and privilege of pub-
lic worship, for the followers of the Episcopal doctrine!
There is a blessed " voluntary principle ' for your!--
and such, our single-minded countrymen may assure
themselves, is the precise spirit which now impels the
bitterest enemies of our venerable Church to clamour

for its extinction. There are no more intolerant despots

on earth than the brawling zealots of the " voluntary
principle," your factious, boisterous, coarse, intriguing,
cunning, rapacious, political Dissenters. Then, lastly,
what will the educated and civilized inhabitants of any
portion of the United Kingdom gain for themselves or
for those who come after them by the overthrow of the
Protestant Episcopal Church, and the erection of a
Roman Catholic priesthood on its ruins ? For the
fruits of a demolished Peerage, and of a pretended
" voluntary principle," we have referred to the records
of Charles I. and of the Commonwealth—for the
blessings of rampant Popery (passing by the times of
the bloody Mary), we turn to the more modern reign
of James 11. !—and now, with these refreshments to
the memory, and lessons to the common sense of our
Protestant brethren, we leave the whole case of Whig,
and Radical, and Popish grievances in their hands.—

Times.
, The prospects of Ireland begin to brighten. Not
only is the Administration of Lord Melbourne, which
has proved itself pre-eminently the friend of that
country, pursuing its steady course of justice to it, but
those who have hitherto shown themselves its most im-
placable enemies, are now beginning to withdraw their
opposition to the wise and enlightened policy of the
present Government. This is of most hopeful augury.
The violence of party feeling has for centuries been
the great evil of Ireland. Even the streams of justice
were corrupted by that unworthy feeling. The Mel-
bourne Ministry, however, having in c'the outset de-
termined to do every thing in its power to level
party distinctions—to extinguish party feeling—and
to treat both Protestants and Catholics in the same
way, have acted up to that determination with so
much energy, and with such an untiring perseverance,
that the more cool and calculating of the Orange
party now see it to be a hopeless task any longer
to strive to thwart the Government of Lord Mulgrave.
They consequently act like wise men in retiring in
time from the unequal conflict. They might, it is true,
have for some time longer interposed obstacles to the
administration of equal laws in that country ; but they
must eventually have been defeated, and their defeat
would, in all probability, have been attended with the
most serious consequences to those Protestant inte-
rests for the protection of which they professed, and
no doubt sincerely, to have hitherto waged war with a
liberal Government. That the more enlightened and
prudent of the Protestants of Ireland have fairly with-
&awn their opposition to the Administration of Lord
Melbourne, is a fact which is established beyond
ill
doubt by the organa of the ultra Orangemen on this side
the water. It was only the other day that the Thou-
derer loaded them with the most opprobrious epithets
which a W ell-stocked vocabulary could supply, because
they are now remaining inactive, while the liberal party
are straining every nerve, by attention to the registra-
tions and otherwise, to secure justice to Ireland. The
journal in question stigmatizes the Protestants of that
part of the. empire as " execrable," " cowards," " effe-
minate," and so forth, merely because they will not,
ni
the true spirit of partisanship, labour asbcforc to goad on
the Catholics to rebellion, by offering them every conceiv-
able insult, and by seeking to perpetuate their exclusion
from those privileges to which the voice both of nature
and of sound policy proclaim them to be equally en-
titled with the Protestants themselves. The " thun-
der" of our contemporary, however, will produce no
effect—not one particle more than would the squeaking
of the penny trumoet through which Master Punch is
supposed to express his indignation at the refractory
conduct of Judy. How changed the present estimate
formed by the " Jove of the Press," of the character of
the Protestants of Ireland, compared with its estimate
of their character some ten or twelve months since!
Then they were the stay and support of the Church of
England in that island—the grand bond of union be-
tween the two countries. They were then the noblest
and best of men ; in them centered all that is virtuous
under Heaven. They were living martyrs for their
religion, and for the connexion between the two
islands. How fallen now in the view of the Thun-
derer ! How exalted, let us add, in the estima-
tion of all rational and reflecting men ! The
happy change which has come over the spirits of
so many of the Protestants of Ireland, will not only
facilitate the administration of just and equal laws
by the Mulgrave Government in that country itself,
but -it will be'of infinite service to the popular cause
in the empire generally. Hitherto the resistance of
justice to Ireland has been the grand bond of union
among the Tories of all grades in both Houses of Par-
liament, and the pretext for the refusal of equal rights
and privileges to the sister island, was that it would
be incompatible not only with the safety of the Pro-
testant religion, but with the existence of the Pro-
testants themselves, to concede those rights and pri-
vileges to the Catholics. What will they say now,
when the Protestants of Ireland make no further op-
position to the extension to the Catholics of the same
civil rights as they themselves possess? The present
apathy of Protestants, while the Catholics in Ireland
are so active in pressing their claims, must strike
dismay into the minds of the Lyndhurst faction in this
country. We see clearly, in the present aspect of
affairs on the other side of the water, the speedy and
complete triumph of the appropriation principle. We
see still more than this : we see the breaking up of the
present Tory combination, and the eventual extinction
of the party.—Morning Advertiser.
It is now quite certain that the French telegraphic
dispatch, which officially announced the raising of the
siege of Bilboa on the 29th ult., was, like many other
telegraphic dispatches and Spanish expresses with
which the public of France and England have been
favoured during the progress of the war in Spain, a
mere fiction. It is equally certain that our Corres-
pondent at Ainhoa was correct in stating the con-
tinuance of the siege, at the time when the morning
and evening organs •f the French Government an-
nounced that it was raised. Whatever may be the
final result of the Spanish contest, there can be but
one opinion as to the use that has been made of the
French telegraph, from the time that the standard of
Don Carlos was first planted on the mountains of
Biscay to the present hour. It is eminently disgrace-
ful to the French Government that the exclusive
means which it has in its hands of acquiring and com-
municating intelligence from Spain, almost with the
rapidity of thought, should be grossly abused to pur-
poses of public deception. It is not by communi-
cating false intelligence alone that the French Go-
vernment deceives the people ; accounts which are
not directly falsified are often suppressed, while
false rumours are put in circulation that are only
dissipated by the truth reaching the public ear
through some ordinary channel of conveyance. No-
thing can be more unworthy of the Government of a
great nation than thus tampering with public news,
more especially as such acts of falsification and sup-
pression tend to promote frauds in the national funds,
and to expose the public to systematic depredation, far
worse and more injurious than any of those modes of
obtaining money by false pretences which the law pu-
nishes with ienommious severity. It was in conse-
quence of the falsehoods which constituted the staple
of official intelligence in Paris, in the earlier part of
the Spanish contest, that we determined upon sending
a correspondent of our own to the seat of war in the
northern provinces. At that time both the Madrid
and Paris news from the actual scene of conflict then
confined to those provinces, was for the greater part
concocted or coloured to serve Stock Exchange pur-
poses. The communications of our correspondent
threw a new light upon Spanish affairs, while the
Christine Papers, both in France and England, inva-
riably represented the Carlists as undergoing a pro-
cess of " annihilation —a word then very much in
vogue among the 13ohadil Generals of the Queen—our
correspondent related facts woolly irreconcileable with
such a state of things. He described the Carlist force
as gaining gth instead of sinking into extinction
a • stren s
beneath the vigorous and repeated blows of the Queen's
commanders. These statements drew upon him the
abusive attacks of a host of enemies. The cor-