The Sun.
London, England, 1838-12-20 00:00:00

, the libel can fairly be considered to bear. The main ques-
tion, therefore, for you to consider on the present ocea-
, sion is, whether the libel before you carries with it the de-
, famatory charge of which the prosecutor complains. Had
the present proceeding been one by way of indictment, the
question of truth or falsehood must have been, from the
very outset, altogether laid aside. Likewise in a case of
criminal information a jury must leave the question of truth
or falsehood equally out of view." His Lordship pro-
ceeds to state, that "at the preliminary stage of the
, present proceeding, before it was ripe for the considera-
tion of a jury, the defendant might have offered evidence
to the Court of Queen's Bench to show that the
allegation of the prosecutor as to its falsehood was
• without foundation." His Lordship must know that we
had no such power. We could not compel an affidavit :
we could not compel the attendance of a single witness,
or examine one if he had attended in any stage of this
monstrous proceeding by criminal information. We were
by the very form of the process gagged and bound hand
and foot. Our advocate alluded to two cases where the
prosecutors, not availing themselves of the enormous
powers granted by this anomalous form of action, came
themselves into court and submitted themselves to the
strictest examination on every point connected with the
case in issue ; but Lord Denman, who was Counsel
in one of those cases, and judge in the other, speaks
of these frank and voluntary inquiries as " idle parade,"
and " mock issues." What ! Does his Lordship
mean that any Judge would waste the time of the
public by allowing two or three hours to be spent in
any examination not sanctioned and required by the
law ? Is it meant to be asserted that the trial in which
the character of the Duke of Cumberland was so tri-
umphantly cleared was a mere farce—a Westminster play ?
His Lordship cannot mean so ; he knows as well as we do
that the inquiry on that occasion was legal, or he (as
Judge) would not have allowed it—that it was of infinite
importance, for it cleared beyond the possibility of future
suspicion the innocence of the manly prosecutor. This
trial we have published in another part of the paper. We
conclude by stating that, on reading the charge of yester-
day, we were again and again seized with a fit of incre-
dulity as to the possibility of Lord Denman having lent
his sanction to a form of trial in which, according to his
own statement, " A JURY MUST LEAVE THE QUESTION OF
TRUTH OR FALSEHOOD EQUALLY OUT OF YlEW."—Tinzes.
Far be it from us to underrate the vast and incalculable
evils, moral, religious, and social, to which such an altera-
tion must necessarily have led the way, or to depreciate the
meritorious efforts which have been made to avert them.
But we must express the confidence which after much
reflection upon the subject, we sincerely entertain, that
enough has been done to guard against these evils, in the
expression, almost universal, of metropolitan opinion, that
the delivery of letters in London on Sundays, or their
receipt at the Post-office, for conveyance by the
Sunday mail, would be a pernicious and irreligious
alteration, and in the attestation which the loud
and general expression of sentiment has called forth
from the Queen's Government that it fully par-
takes in the feeling which pervades every class of society in
the metropolis. In saying this we of course intimate our
confident belief that the transmission of letters between the
provinces on opposite sides of London without arresting
them for twenty-four hours in that city, as they are now
arrested, is quite compatible with the continued and undi-
minished observance of the Sabbath in the metropolis ;
and our very decided opinion that this paramount object,
with respect to London, being secured, the suggested im-
provement in the despatch of country letters is due, in
strict justice, to our provincial fellow-subjects. It is said by
some of those who advocate continued adherence to the pre-
sent very clumsy and absurd system, that if bags are to be
made up at the Post-office for the country towns on a
Sunday, it will be impossible to leave out of them what-
ever letters the people in London may choose to send.
We do not very clearly see how this is to be made
out. How does the opening of the country bags and the
sorting of those parts of their contents which are to go
forward involve the necessity of receiving and forwarding
London letters ? The whole business of opening and sort-
ing the country bags may easily be completed on a Sunday
morning, and every clerk and officer employed in the busi-
ness have returned to his own home by the usual breakfast
time of the inhabitants of the metropolis. All the duty
that would remain to be done after this would be keeping
the letters safe, which we suppose is not now neglected,
and delivering their respective bags to the guards of the
different mail-coaches. The clerks employed may, perhaps
—although this, if it were thought worth while,
might easily be guarded against—smuggle in a Len-
der' letter now and then, upon an emergency, and
for a gratuity. But the same thing in substance, and to
an equal extent, is done at present ; for anybody can
now get letters conveyed to the remotest extremities
of the three kingdoms, by the Sunday night mails, who will
take the trouble or incur the expense of sending them by a
special messenger to the post towns at ten or twelve miles

distance from London. And is it not unjust, palpably and
absurdly unjust, to the inhabitants of Norwich and of Bris-
tol, and of many hundred other considerable towns, whose
reciprocal letters pass through London, that their means of
intercommunication shall be interrupted one day in every
week, not on account of enforcing the observance of the
Sabbath in respect to themselves, or the society with which
they have to do, for this is totally, and, as we think, scan-
dalously neglected, but for sake of the London Sunday, which
after all derives no advantage from the embargo thus
inflicted on the provinces ? We men of London are apt
to be righteous not over much, but in the wrong form and
place, and spirit. To make amends for our own personal
violations of the Sabbath, we seem willing enough to
sanctify the Sabbath vicariously with the additional
blunder of making our substitutes keep it on any day but
the right. We write letters without the least scruple or
reserve on the Fridays and Saturdays to the men of Bath,
and Bristol, and Norwich, and Liverpool, and Leeds, and
Manchester, and Newcastle, and Edinburgh, and Glasgow,
&c. &c. &c., and receive them from the same quarters on
the Mondays and the Tuesdays, just as if we did not
know that the letters we so write and so receive must

reach their destination or have departed from their source
on the Sunday. And while we do this we insist wpon it
that the Government is bound by its Christian duty to
assist us in compelling the men of Bath, and Bristol, and
Norwich, and Liverpool, and Manchester, and Leeds, and
Newcastle, and Edinburgh, and Glasgow, to keep our Sab-
bath, by its partial observance, not on the Sunday—for we
care, or seem to care, nothing whatever about the day—
but on the Friday or the Saturday, the Monday or the
Tuesday, according to the distance from town of the place
where our London Sabbath-keeping is thus to be assisted.
But this is not the most ridiculous part of our vicarious
metropolitan Sabbath observance. We, in London, having
a right to say that we will not receive letters on the Sun-
day, say rightly, by implication, to the men of Bath, that
they need not write them on the Saturday, and to the men
of Edinburgh, that they need not write them on the Fri-
day. But, as between the men of Edinburgh and the
men of Bath, what right have we to say to them that they
shall not write to each other on the Fridays or the Satur-
days, or receive letters from each other on the Mon-
days or the Tuesdays ? This is what we really say to
our provincial fellow-subjects, not promoting thereby
the observance of the Sabbath, or anything else that is
good, but exhibiting merely a very egregious specimen of
metropolitan tyranny and folly. Why do not the religious
people of the metropolis exert themselves, in conjunction
with the religious portion of the inhabitants of our provin-
cial towns, to secure fbr the Sabbath of the latter the same
immunity from Post-office desecration and disturbance

which London happily enjoys? In such exertions we
might recognise the character of wisdom, benevolence, and

genuine piety ; while in those which, whatever may be
their design, are effectual chiefly to prevent the writing
of letters on the Fridays and Saturdays and the receipt of
letters on Mondays and Tuesdays throughout the greater
part of England, we confess our inability to discover any-
thing but an arbitrary and silly disposition to impede the
useful and genial intercourse of commerce, literature, and
affection.—Morning Post.

CHILDREN'S HAIR.--This is a subject upon which
mothers naturally feel deeply interested. The hair, like the
human mind, requires early attention to its culture to ar-
rive at future excellence. This fact, Mr. Rowland, of Hat-
ton-garden, clearly makes evident in his Pamphlet on the
Hair, which has already gone through thirty-one editions,
and is given (gratuitously), with each bottle of ROWLANDS'
MACASSAR OIL. Mr. Rowland lays down the following
advice in reference to Children's Hair. " When the hair
first begins to appear, the head should never be touched
ttweinthdear,figniNese.tooth comb, as it renders the skin extremely
great pain to the infant, and raises the dandrf
o to hissuc an alarming degree, as renders it almost impossible
be persed. Instead of using combs, apply a flannel
dipped in the MACASSAR OIL, which, when rubbed in for
a short time, will eradicate dirt, remove the scurf, and
render the hair beautiful."

ANOTHER BRUTAL
day, and after our summary
bad been put in type, we received thed State of the Country
fIVIURDER.—Late in the
thatae ,
Oahl e tFtreird faryo mevening
t hal
re-
spectableen
correspondent, informing us ,
arien-thaker on the estate of
man named Boland
road,
en
of some
The
unfortunate Ennis, was brutally murdered
twe
nhte
i!nhteor they
unfortunate man went to his door to inrisoci
per-
sons whom he heard speaking on the
was crossing
had seen some carmen of his whom he hacinos
Ath-
lone. On being informed that they had
then,
Boland returned to his house, and just as he
the threshold of his door, a gun was dischargedwas aaatshhhoimt, the.
contents of which entered his body, and he
stantly a corpse. Boland had received several threatening
notices within the last month,—Dublin Mail.