The Sun.
London, England, 1840-12-18 00:00:00

offer no opinion. We put entirely out of view the

rigins ut capital atiU lauottr, in rciatiun to
each other, and confine ourselves to the respective
duties of the capitalists, the landowners, and the
priesthood, or the legislating classes, in relation to
the population of our manufacturing places.
It is, i❑ the first place, a mistake to assert that
the manufacturers have called this population into
existence, as we have more than once heard as-

serted, even by such a high authority as Lord

ASHBURTON, in the House of Lords. The ma•
nufacturers have had at various times and places a

great demand for labour, and finding certain la-
bourers in existence ready to comply with their de
mands, they have employed them and paid them
well. The labourers have begotten ether genera-

Lions of labourers, whom other generations of
master-manufacturers have employed and paid more

. _
or less, according to the demand and supply of

_
abour. Not the master-manufacturers, but the suc-

cessive generations of labourers, are to be consi-
dered as bringing this population into existence ;
the master-manufacturers have found them em-
ployment, and enabled them to subsist. If they
have not always had an abundance of subsistence,
and always lived in comfort, the masters are not to
blame for that ; they would have given the labourers
more employment and higher wages, if the Corn
and other laws had not prevented them ; but what
they have given, or what they have done, is de-
serving of praise. Individual masters may be se-
lected who have acted dishonestly and unjustly to
the labourers, but it would be as erroneous to as-
cribe their vices to the whole body of the masters,
as to say that all the clergy are firebrands, because
they number in their ranks a STOWELL or a
M‘GHEE. We speak not of individuals, but the
general character of the body ; and that, we say,
is praiseworthy, for the employment and wages they
have given to the town labourers.
We must insist, secondly, that it is not the duty
of the masters to trouble themselves about the
growth of a population, or to provide for it either
mentally or physically. If they provide for their
own families that is all which can be required of
them. They are not the State. It is the business
of the State—of the Legislature, which so carefully
makes laws to regulate the closing of public-houses,
and the number of passengers a man may drag with
two horses, to organise the new population, to pro-
vide it with magistrates, laws, parsons, and educa-
tion. If it had imposed such a duty on the masters
they would have been to blame in neglecting it.
Latterly the Legislature has actually made it their
duty to establish schools in factories, and has inter-
feted in several other modes, demonstrating that
the Legislature regards the organisation of this
new population as its duty. It refuses to trust the
masters. At the same time it has not ordered the
masters to provide parsons for the men or to teach
them a particular creed ; and while it has taken on
itself the regulation of the whole, if the moral
culture of the people have been neglected, the State,
and those who influence the State in such matters
—the priesthood, and not the masters, are to blame.
Socially, the duty of the masters towards the la-
bourers is limited to fulfilling the contracts they
enter into with them relative to wages; politically
they have not been ordered to provide religious in-
struction for their workmen, and that it has not
been provided is not their fault.
The Times, however, blamed the masters for not
making the provision. But many of them do not
belong to the Church of England, and are they to
make such a provision on dissenting principles for
all their workmen ? If they make such a provision
they must act on the voluntary principle, which the
Church abhors. To blame them for not making it
implies a sanction of the voluntary principle, which
we could not expect in a Bishop. Let the priests,
however, stick to one principle; not, as it suits their
pockets, play on both. If we are to have a union
of Church and State, and the State is to prescribe
the creed and incomes of the clergy, giving them
tithes, Easter offerings, marriage fees, church-rates,
enforced by Ecclesiastical Courts, we cannot also
have the voluntary principle. The two are directly
opposed to one another. Either the State must dis-
solve the union wifh the Church, and cease to ex-
tort a revenue for the priesthood from the national
industry, or it must prescribe all its duties, and not
rely on masters to provide churches and parsons for
the religious and moral culture of the people.
We have a national Church richly endowed in
connection with the State, and it was the duty of
these united bodies to have watched over the growth
of the town population as it arose, and to have pro-
vided parsons and churches, schools, and culture for
them, as parsons, churches, schools, and culture
were provided for the old population. The masters
are no more under an obligation to perform this
dutyjor the State or the Church, than are the re-
tail tradesmen or journalists, who grow rich, or
get a living, by supplying this new town population
with sugar or news. They are no more bound to
provide religious culture for their labourers, than
they are to provide soldiers to bayonet them, or
judges to order them to be hanged or transported,
both of which are provided by the State. It is a
piece of hypocrical humbug in the landlords and
clergy, and all the legislative classes and their or-
gans, to cry out against the master-manufacturers
for any deficiency which may exist in the moral and
religious culture of their work people.
When we before referred to this subject, we did
not insist on the fact, that all the soil is monopo-
lised by the aristocracy. The Crown is merely
their instrument, and the whole soil of the empire
vests in it and them. The Government or Legis-
lature claims not merely the soil of England, but, of
all our colonies, and it appropriates it to individuals
at its pleasure. At the meeting at Glasgow, to
which we yesterday alluded, it was stated that the
Governor of Upper Canada offered each emigrant
thirty acres of land, but the Government at home
reducs.d it to five. It will not allow an acre to be
occupied in New South Wales, without purchasing
it. Here, in England, there is not a rood of
land without an owner ; and the owners have,
in conjunction with the Crown, a complete mo-
nopoly as against the rest of the community,
particularly the labourers, of the means of sub-
sistence. Property, we have been lately told,
and properly and justly told, has its duties
as well as its rights, and the duty implied in the
monopoly of the soil, is to regulate and orga-
nise and take care of all those who come on it.
That right is in fact claimed by the supreme power,
consisting of the Crown and the landowners, and
consequently it was its duty to have organised the
new town population as it arose, and to have pro-
vided for its moral and spiritual as well as its phy-
sical welfare. We repeat in conclusion that in
comparison to the legislating classes—the mono-
polising landowners and clergy—who, being largely
privileged and paid for protecting and instructing the
people, have done nothing for them, the master
manufacturers who being neither privileged nor
paid, have employed and paid the new population,
have done their duty nobly, and will be remembered
with honour, while the others will be consigned to
disgrace and shame.

The Morning Chronicle and the Globe have
entered into a discussion about extending the suf-
frage, and we cannot agree with the principles on
which the former proceeds, nor with the conclu-
sions at which the latter a►rives. The Chronicle
argues the question on the principle of the exten-
sion of the suffrage giving more Or less influence to