The Sun.
London, England, 1847-12-13 00:00:00

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LONDON, MONDAY. DECEMBER 13, 1847.

The Committee to inquire into the causes of the
recent commercial distress is to be nominated this
evening. At present it is intended that it should
consist of twenty- six members. Many very able and
influential persons are included in the list of which
the Chancellor of the Exchequer has given notice.
'We regret, however, to find that a very large pro-
portion thereof consist of the most strenuous advocates
of the Bank Charter Act of 1844„'while few, if any, of
itA avowed opponents have been selected ; and although
the anti-bullionists now number many Members of
Parliament amongst their ranks, we believe that Mr.
SPooNEx is the only person professing that class
of opinions, or who has placed himself in
decided opposition to the Act of 181 Q,
whose name will be proposed to the House. 'Ws
have never anticipated much benefit to the nation, or
indeed any practical results from the intended in-
vestigation. We have already had five Committees
sitting (with a single exception) during five succes-
sive sessions. Vast r umbers of witnesses were exa-
mined ; upwards of fourteen thousand questions were
asked, and answers returned ; and yet nothing what-
soever was done—the last Committee having stated,
" in reference to the great question involved in
the inquiry, that they felt it to be impossible,
before the probable termination of the session,
to give that consideration to the many im-
portant points suggested in the evidence which
would enable them to report a well-grounded and
definitive opinion to the House." Three years after-
wards the Act of 1844 was introduced on the re-
sponsibility of the Government of the day, without
any opinion
of
opinion having been pronounced on the enormous
evidence that was taken. The Committee
now about to be appointed have a still more extensive
field of inquiry before them, and we can scarcely
hope that any conclusive
very
considerable time.
will be pronounced
(if ever) for
ozdtei:able time. But even as
it is, although the
importantshl question of the
present day has been thus
for. an indefinite
period—although the Financiale shelved
dinister has evaded
measures re-
the responsibility of introducing the
the Cum_
re-
nutted by the exigencies of the nagtion th
mittee shall have made their report (probably on the
arrival of the Greek Kalends), we should
sired that the Committee had been differenthlave de.
posed, and :that all varieties of opinion haYd com-
posed,
thereon. Our monetary laws may
n
be maintained in their present condition until
another crisis:— a panic of still greater intensity,
a more universal and wide-spread ruin, and a still
greater depreciation of the value of every description
of property—shall arouse the British people from
their lethargy, and convince them, by too painful
experience, of the absolute folly of sacrificing the
national prosperity to the attempt to maintain a gold
standard at a fixed and uniform value, or to have the!

entire internal commerce of the country carried on
with a wholly inadequate and insufficient cir-
culation, and a rate of interest so high as
to deprive the manufacturer of the legitimate
profits of his industry and enterprise ; bat it
would be desirable that general confidence
should be reposed in the impartiality of the Com-
mittee, from the result of whose labours some reforms
might possibly be introduced. We do not desire to
be understood as conveying any doubt as to the in-
tegrity of the gentlemen that are to be placed thereon,
or that they will not return a report in accordance
with what they believe to be for the best interests of
the country ; but their sentiments are well known,
and it will be almost hopeless to attempt to shake
their deep-rooted convictions. It would not be very
difficult to foretel the nature of the report that would
be made by a Committee so constituted. Mr. WAILLET
has given notice that he will move that the name of
Mr. MUNTZ should be added thereto, when the Chancel-
lor of the Exchequer shall bring forward his motion ;
and Lord GEORGE BENTINCK has stated that it is his
intention to give notice of other names. We trust,
however, that Sir CHARLES WOOD will accede to
the suggestion of the Member for Finsbury, and that
the addition of several new Members, more parti-
cularly of those who support the Scotch system of
banking, may render any division unnecessary, and
that all parties, being fully and fairly represented,
the House and the nation may feel confidence in the
conclusions that may be arrived at.

On Friday evening a memorable event for the
constituency of Stockport occurred in the Lyceum
of that borough. On that evening their illustrious
representative, Mr. COBDEN, took his farewell of
those electors who first returned him to the Imperial
Parliament. Happily, the retirement of Mr. COBDEN
from the representation of Stockport has not origi-
nated from the impediment which was at one period
anticipated. His constitution has been so far re-
invigorated by his continental pilgrimage as to enable
him to resume his legislative labours at Westminster,
and to sit henceforth in the House of Commons as
Member for the West Riding of Yorkshire. There
is, consequently, in this movement of our
distinguished countryman matter for congra-
tulation, not merely for the electors of the
most populous county constituency in the
United Kingdom, and for the Liberal population
generally, but even for the inhabitants of the
borough town from the political interests of
which the Honourable Gentleman is compelled,
in a great measure, to disconnect himself by
an irresistible concurrence of circumstances.
In receiving the adieux of such a man as the Apostle
of Free Trade principles without any manifestation
of chagrin, but, on the contrary, with a certain degree
of spontaneous enthusiasm, the enfranchised people of
Stockport have shown that they have sufficient pa-
triotism to sacrifice their own local predilections
whenever the advantage of the nation generally
seems to be implicated in the selection. And
in this particular they constitute a brilliant
antithesis to the petulant citizens of Bath. At Bath
the gratification of individual prejudices and the
triumph of municipal partialities, has been considered
as so far superior to the maintenance of a great prin-
ciple and the benefit of the community at large, as to
lead to the rejection of a debater so eminent, and, in
his way, so invaluable as Mr. ROEBUCK, and that,
moreover, after fifteen years' service within the walls
of St. Stephen's. Bath has proved itself to be as
ungrateful and as unsteadfast as Stockport has just
proved itself to be self-forgetful and patriotic. In
the former a protracted interval of labour is
overlooked by reason of its fickleness, and for
the satisfaction of a petty and momentary
displeasure. In the latter the admiration inspired
by the intelligence, the ardour, the eloquence, and
the industry, both physical and intellectual, of a re-
presentative of only five years' standing, survives his
separation from them and his removal to another
constituency of greater numerical importance. Such
is the contrast afforded by the electioneering proceed-
ings of Bath and Stockport; such is the selfishness of
the one and the magnanimity of the other ; such have
been the different receptions of ROEBUCK and
COBDEN,—the first sacrificed to the spleen arising
from a sentiment of sectarian fanaticism, the la- t
welcomed, even in his final appearance before them in
his political capacity, with that respect to which he
is entitled alike by his celebrity as an orator and his
genius as a statesman.
To all those gentlemen, dukes, lords, squires, and
burgesses who are still devoted to the inanimate idol
of Protection; to those pertinacious monopolists
whom Mr. COBDEN mentioned in such felicitous
terms as "curiosities and eccentricities ;" to Lord
STANLEY, b Lord GEORGE BENTINCK, to Sir JOUN
TYRRELL, to Mr. MILES, to Mr. NEWDEGATE, and to
all the rest of those Parliamentary oddities, who
either can't see the folly of their arguments, because
of the innate obfuscation of their intellects, or
won't see it, because of their intensity of
reverence for party ties and party principles—we
commend the plain and unanswerable remarks made
by Mr. COBDEN, on the occasion of his farewell to
the enlightened electors of Stockport. Each sentence
is "a palpable hit." Each fact is a homethrust. There
is no escape from the inferences drawn by the Mem-
ber for the West Riding of Yorkshire—inferences as
overwhelming to the Protectionists as any ever
enunciated by the same lips from the Opposition
benches of the House of Commons, or from the
stage of Covent-garden Theatre. After observing
that there was nowhere discoverable, throughout
the country, anything like a re-action in regard to
the principles of free trade, and that " every man
whom he believed to be a free-trader five or six years
ago was a free-trader now," Mr. COBDEN reminded
his auditory that those principles had not as yet re-
ceived any trial whatsoever. To the clamour raised
by the Country Party, that freedom of commerce was
already showing itself to be a most destructive
chimera, Mr. COBDEN replied that freedom of com-
merce had not as yet been tested as the
motive power of the mercantile machinery.
When the Protectionists exclaim that so
far from proving the redemption of the
community, free trade has, at the very outset of its
operation, led to a monetary panic, to a drain of gold 1
and to a diminution of employment, Mr. COBDEN
responds, Not so : these calamities are the results o
thirty years of monopoly, coupled with the failure o
the potato crop, the scantiness of two successive bar.
vests, and the almost unparalleled destitution of Ire.

and. Instead of having in any manner put the effi