The Sun.
London, England, 1840-01-20 00:00:00

sun

Why does not the House of Commons establish
its privilege on that broad and durable basis
Never mind the House of Lords ; if it refuse to
concur in so equitable a law, let it be left to public
opinion, and it will not hold out long. But we are
afraid the House of Commons would be jealous of
allowing others to share the privilege of cheap
justice. Amongst the Members of both Houses
there is a strong desire to hang up the present
anomalous mass of fictions, called the libel law,
as a scourge over the press. The law-makers are
afraid of the newspapers, and will not give
the public a good libel law, though that would
secure their own privileges beyond question,
because it would remove an unjust means of co-
ercing and damaging the press.
But if the House of Commons will not give us
a good libel law, now that they feel some of the
inconveniences of the present law, then they ought
to establish their privilege by a declaratory law.
At present it has to be hunted out from their own
multiplied and sometimes contradictory pro-
ceedings, and from the still more multipiied
and contradictory decisions of the Courts.
The whole arguments on both sides have
turned on what my Lord HOLT said, on
what was done in the Earl of SHAFTESBURY'S
case, on the decision in the case of ASHBY and
WHITE, and what has been said and done by
Judges and men who lived a century or two ago,
in cases the exact counterparts of which are never
likely to occur again. Such is not the proper
basis for a law, and no person can be justly
blamed for violating a law that has so to be dis-
covered. To shut Mr. STOCKDALE up in Newgate
for violating these uncertain privileges (that
the House will shut up the Sheriffs, who have
conducted themselves with great propriety, and
dignity, we have not the slightest appre-
hension), to wrangle about these privileges for
three nights more, will leave them just as
uncertain, just as liable to be opposed, and
just as liable to bring the House again
into a conflict with the Courts of Law as at
present. Such a course will do nothing for
settling the privileges of the House. But the
House is bound to settle them, and bound not to
leave them in so uncertain a state, that it can,
when it will, play the tyrant. As a component
part of the Legislature, it is the duty of the House
of Commons, in conjunction with the two other
parts, to prescribe the duties of the Judges, to
make laws for them to administer, and not to tole-
rate the possibility of such a conflict being renewed
as now threatens to bring discredit both on the
Courts and the House of Commons. To persecute
and punish Mr. STOCKDALE, and to leave the
question of this important privilege unsettled, of
which we earnestly desire to see the House in the
full and undoubted exercise, is consistent neither
with the dignity of the House, nor with doing jus-
,ice to the individual.

The polemical propensities of the Rev. T. G.
GREGG are pretty well known. He is, in fact, the
most pugnacious of the whole squad of divines of
the " ascendancy" school--the semper paratus of
the Orange faction in their intolerance towards the
Catholics of Ireland. It appears from the follow-
ing letter, which we copy from the Dublin Pilot,
that GREGG has been baulked in a meditated on-
slaught upon the Catholics of Lucan, in which
parish his old antagonist and conqueror, the Rev.
Mr. MAGUIRE, has lately consecrated a new cha-
pel. Such an occasion for an outpouring of the
rancorous spirit of Orange Protestantism was too
good to be lost, thought the champion of bigotry,
and out came a notification to the godly, that the
celebrated T. D. GREGG was to hold forth in the
parish church of Lucan on a stated day. The
Archbishop of DUBLIN, however, was beforehand
with TOMMY. His Grace having heard of the