The Sun.
London, England, 1849-09-29 00:00:00

Li 4 ninit 2"111t

LONDON, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1849.

One or two circumstances not already referred
to by ourselves in reference to the recent court-
martial on Mr. PITMAN are eminently deserving
of consideration. Scarcely any one, it must have
been observed, has dared to exonerate that person
from the blame under which he has been professionally
excommunicated ; hardly a single individual has for
an instant presumed to question the justice of the
authority to which he has become amenable. Never-
theless the haughty spirit of the service, or rather of
the superior officers in the service, has become occa-
sionally manifested in indignant allusions to the
manner in which the late Commander of the
Childers was tried—through the evidence, it is
superciliously remarked, of witnesses whose
characters were already tainted. Now, we
should be gratified to learn in what way the re-
putations of either MT. ELLIOTT or of Lieut. GRA-
HAM have been exposed to the obloquy of the world.
IVhose assertion, whose sole assertion is it which has
been accepted in testimony of the badness of the
character of these unfortunate young officers and
gentlemen ? Is not the solitary evidence adduced
against them, the evidence of a man who has been
convicted of cruelty, for inasmuch as he drove sub-
ordinate officials to desertion, to suicide, and to the
madhouse—of purloining, for inasmuch as he appro-
priated the ship's stores to his own use—and of
falsehood, for inasmuch as he deliberately made
a false entry in the log-book ? Why, if nothing else
were requisite to reveal the rottenness of the cause
of this Mr. J. C. PITMAN, it would be sufficient to
point in proof of it to the disgraceful document ridi-
culously called his " defence." Defence, forsooth !
Why throughout the whole of that miserable produc-
tion there was not one word in extenuation of his
conduct as Commander of the Ganders, there was not
one intimation of the fallacy of the facts alleged
against him, there was not one syllable in vindication
of a name held up by the charges preferred against it
to profound and universal abhorrence. The whole of
this so-called defence was composed of—what? Of
abuse of the prosecutors— mere abuse couched in the
language of vituperation. Supposing there were no
other indication of the nature of Mr. PITMAN'S tem-
perament beyond that furnished by this wretched
document, it would have been immeasurably more
than enough to damniry him in the estimation of the
community. And yet we are told that Messrs.
GRAHAM and ELLIOTT are persons of damaged repu-
tition, when their sole accuser is this very reputable
ex-Commander. Seriously speaking, condemnation
from such lips ought to be regarded rather in the
light of panegyric, and so we are satisfied it is re-
garded at this moment by the mass of the population.
A very few days have elapsed since the publica-
tion in our columns of a letter addressed to ourselves
by the esteemed father of Lieutenant GRAHAM, the
unfortunate young officer now being punished as a
convicted felon in the county gaol of Exeter. In that
interesting communication each of the accusations
levelled against his son by Mr. J. C. PITMAN in his
" defence" was considered categorically by the Rev.
Mr. GRAHAM, and to all intents and purposes was,
to our thinking, most clearly disproved. The
robbery said to have been committed by Lieute-
nant GRAHAM on the mess funds of another
vessel of war was shown, for example, to be a gross
and heinous calumny The charge of intoxication
turned out to be equally, if not more egregiously,
slanderous! And the imputation as to his having
fabricated lying stories was proved, on the authority
of a shipmate, to have been literally nothing more
nor less, than the perversion of some incoherent ex-
pressions uttered by Lieutenant GRAHAM when
almost distracted to a state of madness by the brutal
treatment received from his Commander. We
have really no words at our command
sufficiently emphatic to express our feelings
of indignation and disgust at a course
such as this, a course in which tyranny and false deal-
ing are followed up by the slanders of vindictiveness.
Less, however, could scarcely have been anticipated
from a man who has not sense enough of common
decency to prevent him from giving way to a burst
of passion on the quarter-deck, so as actually to call
the Lieutenant "a liar " before the whole ship's
comp.any.

In our impression of last evening will doubtless
buve been observed a suggestion thrown out
by one of our correspondents, which, if correct
in its premises, would at once procure the libe-
ration of the unfortunate gentlemen now pri-
soners in the Exeter County Gaol. While we are
sP.nguine that this hint may lead to the release of
I%lr. ELLIOTT and of Lieutenant GRAHAM from their
present cruel and unjust incarceration, we are far
indeed from regarding even this as sufficient compen-
sation for all they have undergone through the
domineering insolence and vindictive machinations of
Mr. J. C. PITMAN. Expelled from the service in
consequence of this man's unparalleled harshness,
they would still continue the victims of his cruelty
and malevolence. Something more would yet
remain requisite before in their instance the holy
cause of justice could be vindicated. 'We submit this
reflection to the public as one eminently deserving
the consider;.tion of the people of the United
Kingdoms.

It appears somewhat extraordinary that a country
s') especially remarkable for the extent and variety of its
manufactures as is Great Britain—a country whose
vast wealth at home and whose wide-spread influence
abroad is mainly the result of her unparalleled com-
merce, and whose commerce, again, is the result of
her manufacturing skill—it is extraordinary that
0 1.-1 tba,tl,l3ritain should have hitherto given so little en-
-0 .44 lent to the development of the ingenious and
r t,tr*us arts. Other countries have
had their
tlets and their competitions, but in England
. k•
ite ..;although we count manufacturers among
Vitr, -pea and manufacturers' sons among our
manufacturers themselves have never re-
f •