The Sun.
London, England, 1841-05-24 00:00:00

SPIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS.
FROM 2HE YVENNIG rims OF THIS DAY.
GLOBE.—The public were prepared for the an-
nouncement of Lord John Russell, as to the course de-
termined on by Ministers in the present crisis. That
announcement has put the matter beyond all doubt ;
and the question, which the Tory Journals for seve-
ral days urged with a tenacity indicative of the deep in-
terest felt by the party in the result—" Resignation or Dis-
solution ?"—is now answered in a way which has in-
creased their knowledge, without diminishing their
anxiety, or relieving their suspense. The Government
will neither resign, nor dissolve Parliament; but will—
as we several days since ventured to predict—proceed
with the essential business of the country. On Mon-
day next the Chancellor of the Exchequer will move,
" That the House resolve itself into a Committee of
ways and means ;" and in that Committee will move the
usual annual resolution for the renewal of the " Sugar
Duties." Will the Tories, with all their vaunted strength,
and with their acknowledged desire to seize on the Go-
vernment, venture to obstruct the proposed course, by a
motion of "want of confidence," or by moving that
the House resolve itself into a Committee on the
" state of the nation," either of which modes will be
open to them ? Will they, we ask, by either of
these, or by any other of the various plans of obstruc-
tion which the practice of Parliament prescribes, venture
to refuse the supplies, and thus stop the machine of Go-
vernment ? We answer, No ! The Speaker will leave
the chair—and the House in Committee will adopt the
annual resolution, without any essential obstruction from
the disappointed and impatient Tories. The Whitsun-
tide recess will intervene ; and on Monday, the 4th
June, the whole question of the Corn-laws will be
brought forward by Lord John Russell—not with an
expectation that the House of Commons will affirm
the Government proposal, but that the country may be
fully informed as to the bearings of the proposed alter-
ation on the interests of the community, and be pre-
pared for the event which will immediately follow upon
its rejection—viz., a dissolution of the present Parlia-
ment, and a consequent appeal to the constituencies.
To the country the important consequences involved in
the issue of the oonflict will thus be committed. The
weal or woe of millions of our suffering fellow-country-
men will depend upon the result. The monopolists and
the masses—the cupidity of the class interests, and the
cravings of a suffering, despairing, hunger-bitten popula-
tion, shut out out from employment and thus deprived of
bread—such are the clients which appeal, in the language
which they are respectively capable of employing, to the
electoral bodies.
COURIER.—The Ministerial Press is most amusingly
indignant, forasmuch as the " Tory Papers" will not be-
lieve in the reality of the sham agitation in which the
country is asserted to be involved for the sake of keeping
Lord John Russell in office, and the people under his
grinding system of workhouse poor-laws. The Advertiser,
which really takes the lead in rampant Whiggery, and
which above all Papers used to affect to be the special organ
of the working and lower trading classes, whose cause for
some time past it has entirely deserted, is perfectly dole-
ful and desperate this morning at the scandalous ab-
sence of Conservative reports about the famous Anti-
Corn-law meetings of the " three Tailors of Too-
ley-street," in the Borough—of the Westminster
rump of two hundred Irish basketteors in Cabbage
Garden—of the renowned ticket of leave conclave,
held in some hole and corner at Manchester,
where the hustings were impregnably fortified against
any possible onslaught of the Chartists, and all other of
the like most gigantic and grandiloquent gatherings.
Our disinterested Contemporary should make some
allowance for Tory silence on such occasions, inasmuch
IS they at least are not among the recipients of Govern-
ment gold for these interesting advertisements of Anti-
Corn-law sedition. " Among the artifices of the Tory
Papers (says the Advertiser) at this moment, is that of
withholding from their readers accounts of the meetings
which are taking place in every part of the country in
favour of the Ministerial measures. They affect to
say the matter has made little stir, and the country
is wholly indifferent about it. This deception will
be all the worse for the Tory party, for the
truth will burst upon them in a form so overwhelm-
ing, and so sudden, as to make the consequences far
more disastrous than they might be if the prudence or
the fears of the more considerate of the party were inci-
ted to avert or mitigate them." When this extraordi-
nary storm does in reality " burst" upon us, it will be
mite time enough to reef every rag of sail and humbly
to scud along under bare poles ; but, so far, the gales
could not be more propitious, and all our anxiety is to
catch every breath of them, with top-gallants gallantly
flying as we make for the country to which our course is
bound, if the New Poor-law Papers may be believed.
STANDARD.—The violence with which a dissolution
is threatened by the organs of Ministers causes us, we
own, to doubt whether such a desperate expedient is
really contemplated by the Cabinet. We have long been
accustomed to interpret by contraries all announcements
from the same quarter, and we have generally found reason
to be satisfied with the interpretation. Besides,
there is an obvious motive for such menaces at
present, quite unconnected with any regard to the pro-
bability of their execution ; they serve to alarm all
hesitating Members of the House of Commons whose
seats may not seem to be very well secured, and to
awaken to activity the busy, bustling persons throughout
the country, whose ephemeral importance is born and dies
with a general election, and to engage them in the service
of the party in power to agitate upon those questions
which it is supposed may have an effect at the
hustings. Still it would be the utmost imprudence to
neglect a vigilant and energetic preparation under the
impression that no dissolution will take place. In poli-
tics, as in war, a feigned attack is sometimes turned into
a serious one with decisive success ; and if Ministers find
their opponents either negligent, or dispirited, or catch
them committing any fatal mistakes, they will cer-
tainly dissolve Parliament, whatever may be their pre-
sent intention, supposing them to have any definite plan
determined on. To us, however, it seems very apparent
that they have no such plan. The agitation is, as we
think, merely an experiment upon the fears of the
House of Commons and the sense and intelligence of the
people, with, of course, a reliance upon the chapter of
accidents, which has so often opened in favour of the
Cabinet. As far as the House of Commons and the
people are concerned, the agitation has most miserab
failed.

CORN-LAWS, OR NO CORN-LAWS.
Although as a step towards justice we should rejoice
to see Lord John Russell's proposition for substituting a
fixed duty of Bs. a quarter on wheat, for the present slid-
ing scale, carried ; yet, believing a tax on food, be the
amount never so small, to be as contrary to humanity and
to the welfare of the nation, as it certainly is to the
Word of God, we should never have rested satisfied till
the trade in that great necessary, without which man
must die, was made perfectly free with every nation of
the world. That it must, spite of every opposition, even-
tually become so, we have not, nor ever had, the smallest
doubt.
We are not in the habit of quoting the opinions of
Tory Lords, and of calling upon the people to be guided
by them; nor would we, on slight occasions, wish our
readers to follow the standard of the Earl of Winchilsea
rather than that of Earl Fitzwilliam ; but on so important a
question as whether our bread shall be taxed—how-
ever lightly—or not taxed at all, we cannot allow the
emphhatic declaration of the former nobleman—all Tory
though he be—to pass unheeded, or to be lost to memory
merely because he happens to be a Tory. It has already
been extensively noticed, but we should not be doing the
cause of the people justice, if we did not pointedly bring it
before them, and call upon them to act on it. Speak-
ing
in the House of Lords on the Government plan
of substituting a fixed, for a fluctuating scale of duty on
Corn, the Earl of Winchilsea thus expressed himself :
" In God's name, let us all rise, let us rise in this House
and in the country to a man, and let the higher classes do
their duty to those who are beneath them, to the lower
and poorer classes—let us allow any tax to be
placed on the land, but never let us submit to a tax on
bread." We trust his Lordship's advice will be followed,
not only by the Lords, but by the people, and that they
will "rise as one man," and show the monopolists that
they will no longer " submit to a tax on bread." The
people have not forgotten that so odious was a tax on
bread considered, that in 1815, when it was imposed,
the Houses of Parliament were surrounded by soldiers
with loaded muskets and fixed bayonets to prevent the
people from wreaking their vengeance on those who vo-
ted for the accursed tax ; nor have the people forgotten
the Manchester massacre—that it was at a meeting
called to petition against the bread-tax that the field of
Peterloo was dyed with their blood. Let a dissolution
of Parliament come when it will, in a day, a week, or
a month, the cry of the people must be—No bread tax.
Let them assemble in front of the hustings, and tell the
candidates, whether they be Whigs or whether they be
Tories, that they shall not be returned to Parliament
unless they will pledge themselves to oppose any and
every tax on food. Let them do this and the day is
theirs.— Wilts Independent.

DEAR CORN AND HIGH RENTS.—The
farmers in this country are beginning to suspect that
something like selfishness may have prompted their
landlords to support the Corn-laws. They have found
out that they are not satisfied with the rents they have
been receiving for some time, but are determined to take
a little more on the strength of the high prices at which
corn has been lately selling. The Marquis of Ailesbury,
the Duke of Marlborough, Mr. Walter Long, M.P., and
the trustees of Mr. Watson Taylor's estates have served
their tenants with notices to pay an increased rate of
rent ! This, as would naturally be expected, has caused
a good deal of dissatisfaction, and has set the farmers
asking one another—" What do we get by the Corn-laws?
As soon as prices have risen and seem inclined to con-
tinue high, our landlords come down upon us, and ad-
vance our rents. We should be better off with uniformly
low prices than we are with these fluctuations and ad-
vances of rent," &e., &c. Their eyes are beginning to
be opened, and the Corn-laws will not serve as a rallying
cry at the next election as it would have done had not
their landlords shown the cloven foot quite so soon. In-
deed many of the more thinking of the farmers begin
to intimate that they been altogether deceived about the
operation of these laws, and that they have been acting
the part of tax collectors for their landlords.— With In-
dependent,

A wonderful specimen of the Green Brocoli
is now growing in Mr. Tilly's garden at Grittleton, which is
now in b 1 .-tom, and moasures eight feet round and ten feet
high I— Wilts Independent.
We have it from excellent authority that the
Court will visit Brighton in the autumn, whilst certain repairs
are going on at Windsor. —Brighton Herald.
A STRANGE IMPRESSION.—"
Dr. Conyers
dissected a person not long since, that died for love in Lan-
don ; and they found (at least they fancied) the impression of
a face made upon his heart."—Diary of the Rev. .1. Ward.
The Queen has been pleased to appoint the
Rev. Archibald Bennie one of her Majesty's Chaplains
in Ordinary in Scotland.