The Sun.
London, England, 1840-07-27 00:00:00

ROYAL SURREY ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS

GRAND FLORAL FETE! TUESDAY, JULY 28rit.
THE ROYAL SOUTH LONDON FLORICULTURAL
SOCIETY will hold their grand Miscellaneous Summer Show
on the above Day. The Exhibition will comprise extensive
and beautiful collections of Roses, Carnations, Piccotees, Eri-
eas, Heart's-Ease. Calceolarias, Pelargoniums, Orebidea,
Cock's-Combs, Balsams, Cut Flowers, Succulents. Pine
Apples, Grapes, Varieties of Fruit, Vegetables, &e. &c., for
which One Hundred Silver Medals, and other Prizes, will be
awarded by the Society, besides Eleven additional Prizes to the
amount of Thirty Guineas, offered by Amateurs for collections
of Piccotees and Bt itish Ferns. The Brass Band, under the
direction of Mr. Handley, the celebrated Professor of the
Cornet a Piston, will attend during the Day. The unrivalled Band
of this Establishment, conducted by Mr. Godfrey, will give a
grand Promenade 31usicale, including all the new and popular
introductions and Beethoven's Battle Sinf lila. The novel
,and highly interesting Illustration of an Exploring Party's
Adventures in the Frozen Seas, Eruption of a Sub-Marine
Volcano. and Breaking up oF the Le-floe will be exhibited.
Mr. H. Carter's " Koniaphostic" or Lime Light will illumine the
whole Gardens with the most extraordinary effect ! An Erup-
tion of Hecla will be represented with all its superb and thril-
ling incidents &c. Gates open at One.
ADM;SSION ONE SHILLING.

The INSTRUMENTAL CONCERT, ERUPTION of
HECLA, Re., on MONDAY and THURSDAY.

TO CORRESPON

The information required by " An Enemy to all Monopolies
and Oppression" would be of no service to him, as there is a
Bill before Parliament, the object of which is to prevent
Sugar being made from any materials whatever in this
country.
" An Occasional Reader" is correct. In the list of the Turkish
Fleet at Alexandria, given in The Sun, " guns" and " men"
should change places.

HIGH WATER AT LONDON BRIDGE TO-MORROW.
vorimig ...... 38 minutes after J. I Evening.-- 17 minutes atter '2.

The Publication of the Evening Edition of THE SUN com
menced at 10 minutes after Three.

3141
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4, pj •,-.; ;
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LONDON:
MONDAY, JULY 27. 1840.

The assertion made by Sir ROBERT PEEL in
the House of Commons on Friday evening, to which
we briefly adverted in The Sun of Saturday, in
speaking of JOHN THOROGOOD and the ecclesias-
tical law, " that if men were allowed to disobey the
law upon the allegation that their consciences com-
pelled them to do so, there would be a dissolution of
the bonds of society," seems to us to deserve some
further notice. It is plain from THOROGOOD'S
case that men cannot be prevented from disobeying
the law though they may be punished for disobedi-
ence. Unless the ruling powers could place a police
officer at every man's elbow,—and then we are not
sure that the project would succeed,—every man
will decide for hil-nself whether he will obey the law
or not. It is net in the power of the legislator to
make a man obey the law any more than an army
can make a horse drink, though a child can lead
him to a pond. The legislator may inflict stripes
for disobedience, he may crush a man's spirit by
cruelty, or take away his life by the sharp axe, but
he cannot reach the will of one of his subjects, and
they must be allowed to obey er disobey as they
please•
Sir ROBERT PEEL is one of those who would
crush the spirit of disobedience, even when con-
scientious, by severity. If the same case of refusal
to pay .ss. 6d. for the use of a Church which a
man never enters, and for the services of a parson a
man may thoroughly despise, were again to occur,
again, he avowed, he would incarcerate the honest
and upright man who resisted an odious species
of plunder ordained by the law ; and again the
righteous and religious Tory Baronet, careless
though it caused the lingering death of a human
being, would doom him to hopeless captivity,
terminable, as far as we at present see, only
with death. The Right lion. Baronet would do
this to make the law be respected. What a
knowledge does this display of the human heart !
He would support an avowed injustice by a scan-
dalous cruelty, to excite respect. Fear, terror,
hatred, he might excite by such means, but never
respect. Nor would he make the people obey the
law. JOHN THOROGOOD is not the only
man
.who would now resist the law as to Church-rates
for conscience-sake. Shutting him up in gaol has
made the iniquity of the law very generally known,
and strengthened in hundreds and thousands of
persons the determination to oppose and resist the
exaction. The blood of the martyrs has ever been
the seed of the faith, and the use of cruelty to pro-
cure obedience to a law which men are unwilling to
obey only increases the motives to disobedience.
The punishment inflicted on THOROGOOD came
after the offence ; and it has not diminished, but in-
creased, the motives in other men to disobey the same
law. Not only, therefore, does it lie beyond the power
of the legislator to prevent disobedience, but the
means he employs to punish it, when it occurs, fail
in promoting obedience.
It seems to us of great importance that this
subject should be fully examined, because there is
a very general and a very increasing disposition
amongst the masses to question the utility of many
laws and to disobey them. For example, the
whole of Chartism is founded on an opinion
that the present political constitution of society
is erroneous, and they try to overturn it.
Should they succeed, would society he destroyed ?
Unless men remain united in society there can be
no civilization, and they might look forward to a
dreary future if the existence of society depended on
their obeying ecclesiastical and other bad laws, or
on having those laws enforced into respect by such
cruelty as that inflicted on THOROGOOD. We
•lannot help concluding that Sir R. PEEL made a
Boss mistake, and that he should at least have
before the ord If ;
placed tha epithet "good"