The Sun.
London, England, 1841-02-27 00:00:00

though they will get as much profitand as much
political influence under the present system,
from splitting their estates, as under the
rate-paying test, will not grant leases, and
are exerting themselves in every possible
way to limit the franchise. To enable them
effectually to do that, is the object of Lord
STANLEY'S Bill; and yet SIT ROBERT PEEL as-
serted—and asserted of the men who have suf-
fered so much from creating voters—that they
will, under Lord MORPETH'S Bill, make a larger
constituency than household suffrage. A more
marvellously inconsistent argument we never
heard, and yet that bug-a-boo was all that Sir
ROBERT PEEL could object to the rate-paying
test, supposing the amount to be fixed at
5/. When we heard him dwell with such elabo-
rate minuteness on the miseries of the 40s. free-
holders, in order to frighten the House, by put-
ting before them the idea of the Protestant land-
lords making a great Catholic democracy, we
were forcibly reminded of the horror he excited
against the Irish when the Coercion Bill was un-
der discussion, by disingenuously quoting a pa-
thetic account of a murder committed 30 years
before. There was a host of dependent voters,
argued Sir R. PEEL, created under the old and a
totally different law by the ignorant and innocent
landlords, and therefore he affirmed that the
bitter and informed landlords will do the same
under the new law.

This was the only argument this statesman
urged against a measure which is to satisfy the
bulk of the Irish. Poor Sir ROBERT. He is a
sorry advocate of a cause he knows to be a bad
one. His fallacies are of the head, and are trans-
parent. Lord STANLEY'S are of the heart, and
are made consistent by his bad passions. In spite
of the observation of the Standard, that " there
is no living orator with whom the Right Honour-
able Baronet can be compared without a dispa-
ragement of his merits, and that last night he
excelled even himself," we must assert that
he was as much overtopped by the thorough-going
Lord STANLEY and even by the bigoted and
heavy GRAHAM; as he himself overtopped Mr.
MILNE or Mr. LASKILL. To oratory, sense and
consistency are necessary as well as sound and
manner; but Sir R. PEEL'S speech, though it
told well on his Tory claquers, was remarkably
deficient in sense and full of inconsistency. Re-
membering his eulogium last year on manufac-
turers, and looking at his bitter satire on Thurs-
day evening against the landlords, we must con-
clude that Sir ROBERT'S reign as the political
chief of the Tory landlords is at an end.

It is quite right that t'ne people of England
should be continually reminded that the authors
of the accursed Bread-tax, the landlords of Eng-
land and Ireland, are the persons who especially
seek to narrow and destroy the franchise in Ire-
land. Lord STANLEY has avowed this, and Mr.
SHELL pointed it out in the debate, and was not
contradicted. From the same class of men, then,
the English receive starvation and the Irish sla-
very. In this we see an ample reason why the
people of England should make common cause
with the Irish, as they are doing at Manchester,
Liverpool, and other populous places, in resisting
the meditated aggression of Lord STANLEY, and in
supporting the measure of defence proposed by
Lord MORPETH.

No man who has looked at passing events
in Ireland, who has heard of the cruel manner
in which the suffering and patient people have
been rooted out from the homes of their fathers,
and who knows that the great mass are reduced
to the very lowest state of social existence, can
be at all surprised at the great desire of the Irish
landlords to control and usurp the franchise. The
'preservation of their ruinous power, and the ex-
istence of the least particle of freedom, are
thoroughly incompatible. They must put it down,
extinguish it, trample it out, or it will rise up in
judgment against them, and shove them from their
stools. They never knew any of the kindly ties
which did once fill the rustic population ofEngland
with love and respect for the landowners. Of a
different religion from the people, they have long
been nothing but oppressors, and the people no
better than slaves. The least portion of freedom
would help the latter out of this condition, and
the Irish landlords perpetually try to crush it as
it grows, in order to prevent it stifling their ruin-
ous power.

The English landlords are, we admit, very bad,
quite bad enough; but there being no differ-
ence of religion here to exasperate the great
feud between industry plunged in poverty, and
idleness lapped in wealth, and maintaining
power by injustice, they do not appear
so very bad as the landowners of Ireland. We
therefore are surprised that they should, by
making common cause with the most useless
class of men in existence, not to say the most
mischievous—for we believe they are surpassed
by the endowed priesthood—in inflicting injuries
and insults on the Irish degrade themselves still
more in public esteem, and hasten their Own ex-
tinction. But they are not sensible, we are afraid,
of the state of public opinion, or they would be
more anxious to make reparation, and, if possi-
ble, win back lost esteem than to add by outrages
on Ireland to the distate with which they are re-
garded. •
Let us therefore remind them that for many
months this Journal has habitually described the
bread-taxers as no better than robbers and mur-
derers, and has repeatedly brought overwhelming
evidence to prove that they largely plunder and
cruelly starve the people out of existence. Now
these accusations and this language have been
repeated again and again at most of the Anti-
Corn-law meetings, and in most of the Anti-Corn-
law journals of the empire. They have made—
unanswered and unrefuted as they have been,
though not unnoticed—a very deep impression on
the public, and the bread-taxing landlords are
now generally described as plunderers ..and
murderers by means of law: To suppose that
sentiments corresponding to those words have
not grown up, and that words have lost their in-
fluence, is contradicted by all experience, and
the landlords have accordingly become objects of
public contempt and hatred. •
We will place before our readers two distinct
proofs of this : Mr. MARSHALL, in his celebrated
letter to Earl FiTzwlLLlAm,,which Sir JAMES
GRAHAM quoted on Tuesday night in the
House of Commons, after referring to " the desti-
tute condition of both agricultural and manufac-
turing labourers," "reduced to the verge of
death by hunger," after declaring that " the
laws deprive the people of food," after affirming
that all this sad misery is of "man's ordinance
and contriving," adds, I have not space to depict
one-tenth part of the misery that THE CRUEL
LAWS OF OUR ARISTOCRACY heap upon our people."
Who, then, is Mr. MARSHALL, so speaking of
the cruel laws of the aristocracy? An opulent
man, an aristocrat himself in his own way. One of
that class whose highest ambition it is to be trans-
. planted into the ranks of the landed aristocracy ;
but he cannot shut his eyes to the painful con-.
viction of their misdeeds, and he publicly brands
them as the authors of the destitution, starva-
tion, -and misery of the people.
Again, we have lying before us " A Letter to
the Duke of Wellington, by a Forfarshire
Merchant," printed at Arbroath, in the eastern
part of Scotland (a letter, • be it said by the
way, which is. excellent, and we regret that want
of space has hitherto prevented us from noticing
it), and this letter, which is a well reasoned pro-
duction, highly and deservedly complimentary to
the Duke of WELLINGTON, has passages like
these :

Squalid poverty, no longer confined to the merely dissolute,
is now almost universal amongst the working classes through-
out the manufacturing districts. It is idle, in such circum-
stances—nay worse, it is madness—to think of stifling the cry
for bread by rhetorical flourishes and lordly sneers. Either
the Corn-laws must be abolished, or my Lord of Buckingham
in the one House, and the pious Mr. Gla lstone in the other,
must obtain the sanction of the Legislattre. to a Bill for razing
to the ground Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds, and Glas-
gow, Paisley and Dundee, and consigning to the deep seas
our principal maritime towns.
But, without the interference of your Grace, this act of
justice may be procrastinated—procrastinated till questions
may arise, not amongst the common people only, but amongst
the educated, the calm, the prudent middle classes; questions
which would nut merely embrace the right of a given number
of individuals to confer exclusive privileges on their own class,
but would extend to the still more dangerous inquiry—upon
what tenure land itself was held ?—thus suggesting ideas sub-
ver:ive of the whole social edifice, and calculated to peril the
Constitution itself. One, certainly, of the proximate causes
of the French Revolution, was the immunities and privileges
enjoyed by the Noblesse. Look to the Corn-laws, the Sugar,
the Coffee, the Timber-laws ; look, in short, to the whole of
our table of Import Duties, and say if it have not been indus-
triously framed to protect the landowner, at the expense of the
rest of the community ?
The existence, for so long a period, of such a monstrous sys-
tem of international policy as ours, can only be ascribed to that
leaning to aristocracy—to that servile worship of every man
who owned a few acres of land—which, at one time, was so
striking a peculiarity of the national character; but
6' lempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis !"
The illusion is vanished. Lord and laird are estimated now
only according to their intrinsic worth—according to their wil-
lingness to do good to, or to injure their fellow-raen. The
effects of cheap literature are beginning to make men think,
and to talk about what they never thought or talked of before.
The so-called representatives of the people may shout and howl
dTofheopnperxetssogresneral election
when the question of the Corn-laws is under consideration, but
ohl:nbdan.
will
So comes the reckoning, when the banquet's o'er—
ebuotfiotnheiswaht
The dreadful reckoning—and men smile no more I"
when such sentiments,uttered by a For-
Now, • • f.
the dayseal otfher
are to be traced through the
extre-
mity of Scotland,
dth of the land, it is idle folly in the
farsh ire Merchant, writing from nearly the
length andbrea
landowners to suppose that they can any longer
carry things with a high, band. Nor would they