The Sun.
London, England, 1836-09-01 00:00:00

SPaIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

An event has just occurred which will, we imagine,
lead to a new election for an Irish county. Viscount
Forbes, the eldest son of the Earl of Granard, and one
of the representatives in Parliament of the county of
Longford, has. 'been declared a lunatic. It appears,
from the ee,idence adduced on the inquisition taken
before the Commissioners, and from the verdict of the
Jury, that the Noble Viscount has been of unsound
mired, and totally incapable of transacting business, or
managing his affairs, since September, 1835. During
the last and the greater part of the preceding sessions,
Lord Forbes did not appear in the House of Commons.
Now that he is declared unfit to manage his personal
affairs, we presume he will forthwith cease to be a
trustee of the affairs of the nation. We accord.
ingly look forward to the speedy issue of a new .writ
for the county of Longford ; though we have heard it
asserted that lunacy does not annul an election, and
that to give the electors an opportunity, in such
an event, of sending a person into Parliament " fit
and proper" there to represent them, the lunatic mem-
ber must procure the Chiltern Hundreds. This
strikes us to be a palpable absurdity, inasmuch as the
verdict which disqualified the lunatic from managing
his private affairs, incapacitates him from managing
the affairs of his constituents, and also destroys his
power to ask the stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds.
So that if the verdict of lunacy has not already caused
a -vacancy in the representation of Longford, that
county must continue to be represented by a lunatic
until the dissolution of the present Parliament—pro-
vided Lord Forbes live until that period I This is so
monstrous a view of the question, that we cannot for
an instant adopt it. We have looked into the
chapter "On the Parliament" in Blackstone, but
could not find there any guide for the judg-
ment on this point, unless as such the note to
page 161 be considered. There it is given, as
the doctrine of Lord Coke, that " a Parliament
man" should possess the following properties :
'" First, that he bath no gall ; secondly, that he is in-
flexible and cannot bow ; and, thirdly, that he is of a
most ripe and perfect memory." However, a fee:.
days must remove all doubts about this important
subject ; and in the mean time the eleetois of Long-
ford should be organizing their strength, and making
the necessary preparations for an election, so as not to
be taken by surprise whenever the new writ shall be
issued from the Crown-office. The popular party
in that county require to act with rapidity as well as
firmness. They have a powerful and vigilant foe to
contend against. The power of that foe is seri-
ously weakened by the melancholy affliction that has
fallen upon Lord Forbes ; whose defection to the ranks
of the Tories, we have reason to believe, contributed
in no small measure to those mental annoyances
which have produced this unhappy wreck of the No-
ble Lord's mind. But though weakened, the fanatics
and Orangeists in Longford are far from being impo-
tent. They not only possess a large tract, of the
county, but know also how to push the powers of
the landlord. Formerly the Bible crusade sent hun-
dreds of the Longford tenantry into the world ; a ma-
trimonial alliance, and the political ambition of a parve-
nu, have since added largely to the motives for persecut-
ing the Catholic occupiers in that county. Still, though
there is much probable, perhaps certain, peril to
b er countered, we have no doubt that the friends
of civil amid religious liberty in Longford—and they
compose full four-fifths of its inhabitants—will, by a
bold step, and by union, redeem their county from the
disgraceful Orange thraldom in which the extraordinary
combination of two patrician houses—up to 1831 most
irreconcilably opposed in interests and in politics—has
bound it. It is impossible to suppose that the
Granard interest will any longer be found in revolting
coalition against the rights of the people of Ireland,
with the Bosses, Lefroys, Jessops, and the rest of the
pharisaical coterie who have for the last few years ha-
rassed the county of Longford. And deprived of :hat
sy.pport—which was great not only in a territorial
point of view, but also on account of the hereditary
claims which a member of the Forbes' family had upon
the good wishes of the Catholics—the Tory interest
would be a ineee sound. A second situation will, we
suppose, be vacated by the painful event already an-
nounced. Lord Forbes was also Lord-Lieutenant cf
the c...mnty of Longford. His father, Earl Granarl,
beiug too old—having, in fact, retired long since into
secinded life—some other person fit to discharge the
duties must be appointed to the county Lieutenancy.
nod the appointment will, of course, fall upon a friend
of liberal principles.—Morning Chronicle.
It is hinted to use on something like authority, that
Lord Palmerson has got himself into another scrape
with his Portuguese relations. When the Queen's
Government rejected the old commercial treaty with
Great Britain, it declared that we should be in future
Tut on the same footing with the most favoured nation.
Now it appears that Brazil either has made a treaty
with the Parent State, or is about to conclude one, iii
which peculiar advantages are to be given to its coin
coerce ; and that it is a main condition of the tic,ocia
tion, that no European Power shall be placed on the
.same footing. England, Must, therefore, be content
to play a secondary part in future, and to submit to
all the insults and indignities that the ungrateful and
imbecile Cabinet of Lisbon choose to offer. We arc
f 2 lad of it—for perhaps the slothful soul of our non-
interfering Secretary of State may be roused to deed,
of arms, and he may have at last the spirit to ten his
ancient ally that the connection is closed altogether,
and,,as we suggested in a late article, declare that the
political parts of the treaty are terminated, as well as
the commercial. It will be a pretty answer to give the
heroes of the Coes Sodre, when they call on England
to fight their battle for them—a necessity which is
likely to occur, if the Carlists continue a forward
movement. The three Noble Dukes who divided
90,000/. of British coin among them, as a compensa-
tion for their having emigrated, may be assured that
England has no desire to be the most favoured nation,
in the sense only of providing money for their plunder.
We will transfer the honour to Brazil, in conjunction
with those commercial advantages she has just ex-
tracted from them.—Morning Post.
Those of our readers who have done us the honour
to continue the perusal of the columns of the Morning
Advertiser during the last four or five years, will rea-
dily remember that during some twelve or eighteen
months of that period, the second great question
which divided the opinions of all men
of all parties,
was " What will the Lords do" upon this or that
question, whatever it might be, which at the moment
engrossed the national feeling ?—the House of Lords
being at the time considered an integral part of the
lk Constitution, and, not even exempting the question of
Catholic emancipation, having evinced an ordinary
share of liberality and sympathy with public feeling.
Up to that period, in fact, it had done nothing to
induce the people to dream either of its destruc-
tion or its reformation. True, that it was considered
by many, and with no small portion of justice, a
House of Incurables—a place of refuge for the use-
less or worn-out Members of the House of Com-
mons ;--but then it was judiciously and charitably
allowed that as there were common workhouses and
hospitals throughout the country for those who had been
born paupers, or had become such through inability or
unwillingness to work—so also should there be, for
the sake of uniformity, a state refuge for hereditary
paupers, and incapable and indolent legislators. The
burthen was borne just as the poor rates were borne—
as a necessary evil ; and if, as in the case of the great
.
lazar-houses throughout the country, were the natz
consumere fruges rebelled against their too easy sup-
porters
in every species of vice, the Lords had kept
themselves to themselves, and not attempted to gain a
mastery where submission would have better become
them, the question, not unfrequently to be debated,
even at this time of day, would have been, " What
will the Lords do ?" Excessive indulgence, how-
ever, is no less certain to breed insult and tyranny than
the latter arc to produce dissatisfaction and retalia-
tion. The House of Lords began to think them-
selves of importance to the country, and in an evil
hour determined to erect themselves, not merely
into a separate and independent branch of the legis-
lature, but to assume a correcting and controulling
power. In a word, they "grew fat and kicked." They
forgot their real position in an overweening fondness
for that which they imagined it to be, and instead of