The Sun.
London, England, 1840-01-08 00:00:00

cloth for Poland and Hungary, prevent our mer-
chants from making many useful exchanges, and
.our shipping from having much employment. They
greatly diminish the sum of national wealth and
the amount of well-being they destroy is greater
even than the amount of property they plunder.
Some people suppose that the stimulus they give
to agriculture adds to the sum of national wealth.
But all experience proves that individuals are
better judges of the means of enriching themselves,
and thereby of enriching the nation, than the Le-
gislature. The Corn-law, directs the employment
of capital, and makes it flow in a less productive and
less profitable channel than it would flow in were it left
free. The true encouragement of agriculture is the
increase of people, of manufactures to exchange
for the produce of agriculture, and in the growth of
a town population, all of which are checked by
taking away property from the manufacturers to give
it to the landlords. The Legislature has no means
of adding to the suns of national wealth, except by
removing its own restrictions ; and all that it ever
does when it pretends to encourage this or that
branch of industry, is to tax some persons to en-
rich others. That is the true operation of the Corn-
laws, and they are worse than all other laws of the
kind, because they plunder the industrious to in-
crease the wealth of the idle.
We affirm that this is a most heinous offence on
the part of the Legislature. The law is made by
those who profit by what it extorts, and the law-
makers make laws to enrich themselves. There is
more danger in this than they are aware of. Ac-
cording to the universal creed, laws are the means of
preserving the peace of society. If, by thus making
laws to enrich themselves, they bring law-making
into disrepute and jeopardy, they strike a heavy
blow at the peace and order of society. In fact,
they make disobedience a duty, and give a bounty
on anarchy.
Moreover, the law-maker asks obedience on
the single principle of protecting the property of
the people. According to Mr. LOCKE, that lies
at the foundation of political society. For the
Legislature to take a single farthing away from
any person or any class of the community, except
for indispensable public purposes, is therefore a
grave offence ; but when it takes away property
from one class to enrich its own members, it strikes
at the root of social order. Many complaints are
now made of the disobedience of the people. .Anar-
chical principles are gaining ground, and the anar-
chical principle which the Legislature has adopted
of plundering one class to enrich another, is at the
root of this frightful evil. All who have the
peace of society at heart, all who desire to see
property preserved and protected, ought to unite
and compel the Legislature—which is the servant,
not the master of the nation—which is bound to
obey, and cannot alter, the eternal laws of justice—
to return into the paths of honesty.

Sir FREDERICK POLLOCK'S defence of Mr.
FROST is temperate and judicious. Whether he
succeed in rescuing his client from the danger im-
pending over him or not, Sir FREDERICK has
added very much to his own reputation. Not spe-
culating so much on what he has said and done as
relying on the assertions of those who are on the
spot, we continue to believe that Mr. FROST will be
exonerated from the charge of treason. At the same
time, the strong light which Sir FREDERICK has
thrown on Mr. FROST'S objects, the doubt he has
thrown on the evidence of TIIOMAS BEVAN OLI-
VER, and the discredit into which he has brought
the testimony of MATTHEW WILLIAMS, of HA R-
FORD, and of the two boys, have not weakened but
much strengthened that belief. It will, as Sir FRE-
DERICK said, be generally satisfactory to the public
to find, from Mr. FROST being acquitted of treason,
that the number of men assembled on the 4th of
November had no such mischievous and even
murderous object in view as would be implied in
convicting him of the offence of levying war against
her MAJESTY.

In the course of his speech Sir FREDERICK
POLLOCK, in accordance with the views of
the CHIEF JUSTICE, described the great
meeting of the working classes, who carried their
petition by assembled thousands to Lord MEL-
BOURNE, during the Reform agitation, as guilty
of treason. Such a deduction we believe to be
strictly in accordance with the spirit of the law,
which is so hostile to our practices that it may be
described as having almost fallen into abeyance.
That, however, is of less importance than the
impossibility of carrying such a law into exe-
cution, without causing all the mischief treason
laws are intended to avert. The strongest
'Foiy Government which ever existed could
not put down such meetings as the one Sir
FREDERICK alluded to, and as are now holding in
Ireland, which are said by the Tories to be treasonable
But a law which cannot be executed, with all de-
ference to Judge TINDAL, who has strained it till ,
it has broken, is worse than no law at all, which is
a sad and sorrowful conclusion for those lovers of
coercion who now rely on the treason laws to pre-
serve the public peace. They are, and will be,
ineflicacious ; they have never been tried against
the irritated and
.outraged mass of society, and we
respectfully advise all those who have relied on
terror to secure public tranquillity to bethink them
of some rxore humane, more kindly, and more just

tneaus.

Towards the end of November the Standard,
for some delusive purpose or other, grew quite
mcderate and rational, and admitted that " the Act
of 1829 destroyed the Protestant character of the
Constitution through all its branches." It had a
controversy with the Herald on the subject, and
emphatically repeated " that the Act of 1829 did
destroy the Protestant character of the Constitu-
tion." It explained, too, that the vicious and
weak character of GEORGE IV. so degraded the
Government that it had no power to resist, and we
then praised the Standard for seeing at length the
inevitable necessity of yielding. In six weeks
what has appeared in the Standard, the Editor natu-
rally concludes, will be wholly forgotten, and, there-
fore, last night he wrote a long article to prove the
continued existence of Protestant ascendancy, and
that the Act of 1829 is only "an anomaly in our
code," to be got rid of, we presume, like other ano-
malies, as soon as circumstances will enable the Pro-
testant ascendency boys to resume their tyranny. He
even indicates by a quotation from Sir W. SCOTT,
and by some extravagant praise of the Orangemen
of Ireland, how Protestant ascendancy may be re-
stored by the re-conquest of that country. A
change in the form of Government by violence
a ce
lightsuclr
as is sought by the Chartists, seems to us
evil compared to the reducing to abject slavery a
large mass of the community, such as is demanded
.by the Protestant ascendancy zealots. Food-
irately, however, for the public welfare the
zealots are not united as to the means of
accomplishing their object, nor of the same opinion
concerning it for two months together. Society has,
in fact, quite escaped from their control ; it is gone
entirely out of their bounds, and they are as much
alarmed and bewildered as a poor hen who sees her
Brood of ducklings take to the water, and anxiously,
but in vain, calls on them to return. •

1* It. is stated by a Morning Contemporary—We
have reason to believe pretty correctly—that Lord