The Sun.
London, England, 1841-01-22 00:00:00

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ant, .as starved to death many thousand people,
but its gigantic wickedness has nevertheless not
kept tin the price of wheat to the hc!L,,ht it designed,
nor has it been enabled to levy the duty it ordained
in proportion to the price. It has decreed that
30s. sd. shall be levied when wheat is 565. ld. per
quarter ; the actual sum levied at that price was
ss. 54. It has been baffled therefore. It has earned
for itself an immense deal of odium, and has been
unable to produce the effect it desired, though that
is one of arithmetic. It has endangered the peace
of the country and the stability of our institutions,
while it has not kept up the price of coin nor been
able to give the farmer the protection it has pro-
mised. In short, while it has starved the people it
has cheated the farmer.

A lesson, as it seems to us, of more importance
even than the instruction of the farmers, is taught
by these facts. Though meddling quacks go on
year after year enacting or demanding laws, as if
the power of the Legislature was superior to nature,
and could over-rule time and space, it turns out,
whe❑ we come to examine effects, that its power is
much less than these persons suppose. It cannot
control nature. It can only do good by studying
her ways ; and when it departs from justice, it is
sure, in the end, to be defeated and disgraced. If
its power be limited,—if it be, in fact, impotent to
attain much that it commands,--4hose who arc now
so very eager to set it in motion, and multiply laws,
will probably relax their zeal, and the community
may be spared some of the disturbance caused by
the perpetual interference of the most contemptible
and hateful charlatans.

The Supplement to the Malta Times of the Gth
instant has the following importaUt news from the

East :

By the arrival of the F: ench 'steam-packet Tanerede we
have received advices from Constantinople to the 28th ult.
from Smyrna to the 29th ult., and from Egypt to the
26th tilt. The news from Constantinople is very impor-
tant, but miy be given in a few words:--The Porte re-
quires Mehemet Ali to give up the Turkish fleet—to re-
duce his army and navy—to proclaim the Hatti Scheriff—
and then the Sultan will most probably reinstate him in the
Pachalic of Egypt, and cede to him its hereditary posses-
sion for his family. Admiral Walker has already left
Constantinople for Egypt, to take possession of the fleet.
Our Correspondent from Alexandria says—" that all
communication with Syria is cut off by the desert, and that
there is mnch doubt as to the real position and move-
ments of Ibrahim Pacha. It is said he has 37,000 troops
under him in pretty good eondition somewhere in the
neighbourhood of Damascus, on which city he has levied
very heavy contributions. Nlehemet Ati had asked Ad-
miral Stopford to communicate a ith his son to announce
to him the cessation of hostilities, and the Admiral had
kindly placed at his disposal the Hydra to convey the
letter."

We like not this form of dictating terms to the
PACIIA, nor ought the Four Powers to permit it.'
Having been invited by the Porte to interfere b -

tween the SULTAN and his vassal conqueror, and
having pledged themselves to certain conditions in
the exercise of that interference, they are bound to
fulfil them in the spirit in which they were made. To
talk of the indecency of preventing the SULTAN
treating one of his own subjects as he pleases is a
farce, now that the reduction of that subject to a
condition in which he can be the object of Impe-
rial vengeance has been the act, not of the Porte,
but of Foreign Powers. The SULTAN left the settle-
ment of the dispute between himself and MEHEMET
ALL to the Four Powers. They, on behalf of the
SULTAN, offered conditions to MEHEMET ALI,
which, not being able to refuse, he:has accepted. The
principal of these conditions was that, on restoring
the fleet and evacuating Syria, the SULTA N would
grant him the hereditary administration, civil and
military, of the Government of 'Egypt. It now
appears that after MEHEMET ALI shall have given
up the fleet and evacuated Syria, the SULTAN will
consider about giving him the Egyptian Pachalic.
This will not do. When MEHEMET ALI
has complied with the terms proposed by the Four
Powers the hereditary administration of the Pa-
chalic of Egypt is his, not as a matter of 'tripe-
rial grace and clemency, but as a right. That
right he derives from the convention made bet-.veen
him and the representatives of the Porte, the Com-
manders of the British and Austrian blockading
squadrons. It would, therefore, be infamously un-
just, on the part of the Four Powers, to suffer the
Porte to violate the terms of that engagement.