The Sun.
London, England, 1840-12-24 00:00:00

the contracting parties might not observe. The
same fact is true of employers and labourers, who
make their mutual bargains and complete their mu-
' the( engagements, in the great majority of instances,
without any active interference on the part of the
Government. We may easily extend the observa-
tion to the whole business of production and. inter-
change, by which every portion and 'place of society,
without any
its share of all the ne
interference of fjovernmer.4 teeeives
("::ssary comferts and luxuries
of life. It is, ind:eed,
ference well established that any inter.°C 1/:,e Government with this most important
part Of the order of society does infinite mischief.
pow, compared to this part of social order, every other
part sinks into utter insignificance, and to have no
other idea of order in society than that it depends
on the gallows, the tread-wheel, and the police, is
to be ignorant of some of the grandest moral phe-
nomena that ever were offered to the consideration
of man.

The part of order which penal laws prescribe
and enforce, which a police is needed to preserve,
which au Established Church is supposed to re-
commend, and which a military farce is sometimes
employed to uphold, grows only from the
wickedness of some portion of society, or from the
multifarious and very often noxious regulations of
the Legislature, which; being unpalatable and un-
just, can only be maintained by the bayonets of an
army, or the truncheons of a police. In propor-
tion as a people are all virtuous, well fed, well ern-
ployea, and prosperous—in proportion as that so-
ci-al order prevails which grows from families, pro-
ducers, and interchangcrs—the other, or political
order, which grows from a police and an army, is
little required. Without any great stretch of ima-
gination, we can conceive a society so well off, fa-
milies so well regulated, producers and interchangers
so well instructed in their own business, and so just
in its perforur.:nce, that the political order may
have no existence. Wherever such a happy state
of thir.gs exists, and whenever it shall exist in
F;urope, to introduce or to continue the present
I system of police, would be no better than madness.
In fact the United States is very nearly in this
happy condition, though they are continually open
for the reception of all the cast-aways of Europe,
and are continually inoculated with all the vices and
crimes which are generated in countries less fortu-
nate dint they are, and less justly governed. They
do not need, therefore, the police of Europe, and it
would be extreme folly in them to adopt the institu-
tions of countries in which the healthy social order
established by families, producers, and merchants
has been hampered or stifled, and a political order,
prescribed by a despot and enforced by a police, is
substituted in its stead. No person acquainted with
the United States, who looks at American
Journals free to expose every occurrence,
and at the. Continental Journals placed under
many restraints—who sees in the former, now and
then, accounts of quarrels and of isolated acts of
violence ; and in the latter, continual accounts of
murders, poisonings, assassinations, and robberies
—can for one moment believe that life and pro-
perty are not much more safe in the United
States, where there is no police, than in France
or England, where the police is numerous and
watchful. If there be any American, therefore, as
the Globe implies, who wishes to have a police and
a strong Government in the United States, " to
put down public outrage, and to protect public or-
der," he is some fool who is smitten, like many
fools here, with a despicable and blind love of imi-
tation, and would fain transplant the contrivances
of despotism, intended to coerce an enslaved, amongst
a free and willing people, whose pride and happi-
ness it is to establish and cherish the social order
which grows up amongst families and neighbours.

We make these few observations to rebut, if we
can, a remark of the Globe, which argues against
democracy and the extension of the suffrage, that
where a democracy reigns order is unprotected.
The maintenance of such a police (it says) or
regular force, as would be necessary for that pur-
pose (especially in old and populous countries),
would never be long endured by the supreme ma-
jesty of the people." Certainly not ; because where
the people reign, where industry receives its due
reward, where that social order exists which has
grown up in America, the police is little necessary,
and probably would never be dreamed of, did no
Europeans carry their preformed ideas and preformed
vices to the United States. 'We should value the
progress of democracy very little if we did not re-
gard it as necessary, carrying with it a great increase
of national virtue, and a great protection of the
rights of the most numerous classes now grossly
and flagrantly and continually outraged by the le-
gislating classes. We believe that democracy would
carry with it a great increase of social order, an ex-
tension of well being to all, and a diminution of
the necessity of a police to enforce political order.
In fact, the Legislature, set in motion by a small
class, and making laws only in the interest of that
class, is the great parent of most of the crimes now
committed in Europe ; and if it abstained from at-
tempting by Corn-laws anti other similar scandalous
violations of all honesty and all justice to establish
a political order totally different from social order,
there would be less occasion for a police, and a
democracy, strong in its own good principles,
might with propriety refuse to support such an off-
spring of despotism.
Is the Globe aware of the aspersion it casts on
the Governments of Europe when it refers to old
countries, meaning countries long inhabited, and
of which the Governments have been long esta-
blished ? A new. country means a country recently
peopled, and of which the Government is recently
established. According to the Globe, therefore, it
is under old Governments, which ought to know their
business best, and under which the people should
be most prosperous and most happy, that a police
force, and all the apparatus of despotism, is espe-
cially necessary. That is a severe reproof, not to
old countries, but to old Governments.
If the Globe, and similar reasoners, take refuge
in the old, hackneyed, and false statement, that it is
more difficult to procure subsistence in old and
populous countries than in new countries, we must
inform it that any such difficulty arises solely in the
old countries from legislation. There is yet a vast
quantity of land untilled in Europe, America
also is open to the whole body of Euro-
peans, the new country offers all its advan •
tages to the old, but the legislators of Europe
will neither give free scope to the industry
of their people at home, nor freely allow them to
share in all the advantages—such as a free importa
tion of food—which America offers them. in old
countries the first difficulties are overcome, roads
are made, arts are acquired, the land is prepared,
machinery is good, and subsistence for an
increasing population is more easily obtained in
an old country than in a new country. It is more
easily obtained, for example, now in the United
States than it was in that part of America three
hundred years ago,, and more easily obtained for
the rapidly increasing population than it was for
the first settlers, 'many of whom perished
of hunger. The same fact is true of England, the
population of which increased much more in the
thirty years subsequent to 1800, than it ever in-
creased in any previous thirty years of its history.
It is not therefore the populousness of Europe, or of
Eigland, or the leogth of time which either has
been peopled, which: mikes police '—
cessary, but ill time"