The Sun.
London, England, 1841-06-24 00:00:00

THE
RAILWAY SUN

IS AT LENGTH COMPLETED,

AND WILL SHORTLY BE

HIGH WATER AT LONDON BRIDGE TO-MORROW
/doming 17 minutes after G. I Evening 42 minutes after 6

very seldom be found adapted to fill the office of
Lord Chancellor of Ireland, seeing that he must
be a Protestant, and tolerably free from local par-
tisanship, we are ashamed of our Irish brethren.
They have, on this occasion, totally forgotten
the general principle of an equality between all
the countries, and cannot possibly do themselves
a greater injury than to confine all Irish patron-
age to Irishmen, and thereby exclude them-
selves from holding office in England. It is for
their advantage that there should be an equal
distribution of offices and places, without distinc-

ion of nation or sect ; for that principle we con-

tend, and that principle the Liberal journals of
Ireland violate in their hostile remarks on the
appointment of Baron CAMPBELL.
We make these observations wholly irrespec-
tive of the cause of the vacancy. The Irish papers
and the Tory journals call the vacancy and the
appointment a job, but we have heard rumours
of the retirement of Lord PLUNKETT for many
months, and even for some years; and only those
can now call his retirement a job, who believe
the Whigs are about to retire from office.
That is not the belief of the Whigs, and they
make the appointment in the confident hope
of holding office for a considerable time. Lord
PLUNKETT has long been solicited to retire,
because his growing infirmities render him in-
capable of fulfilling the duties of his office. He
said himself, slow as he must be to believe
that he is growing old, "the regret I feel is much
alleviated by the consciousness that the period of
life at which I have arrived must have induced
me at no distant time, independently of the
events which have lately happened, to retire
from the discharge of my duties." His retire-
ment, then, is a matter of necessity, and it is
only called a job because it is supposed that the
Whigs make it, believing they must speedily re-
tire themselves.

Some of Lord PLUNK ETT'S observations,
we must add, appear to us to be uncalled
for. What business bad he to cast a slur on
himself for yielding to improper solicitations, and
on others for making them ? His gratitude is
strangely shown in the following passage, in
which he countenances some scandalous insinua-
tions against his benefactor :
With regard to the particular circumstances which
have occasioned my retirement, I wish to say a few
words. I think it a duty which I owe to myself, and to
the members of the bar, to state, that for my retirement
on this occasion I am not in the slightest degree answer-
able. I have neither directly nor indirectly sanctioned
it ; and in giving my assent to the proposal which was
made to me of retiring, I was governed solely by its
having been requested of me as a personal favour to do
so by a person to whom I owe such deep obligations,
that an irresistible sense of gratitude made it impossible
for me to do anything but what I have done.
The language of Lord PLUNKETT inclines us
to agree with the following remarks of the
Dublin Pilot :

-- -
We do not concur in the sympathy some felt, and
many feigned, for Lord Plunkett, or with the motives
ascribed to that person for resenting his ejectment from
the Chancellorship, nor in that wonderful array of vir-
tues and qualifications ascribed to him by the Post and
other papers, or that perfectibity of public life with which
he became all at once invested.
We same in the man, on this occasion, the same greedy
gripe-all he had been on_almost every other—we saw in
the mode of his disseminating the story, treachery to his
party and its principles, which he evidently sought to da-
mage, because he could not continue to control. We entered
cordially into the general feeling of the grossness of the job,
the unhappy juncture it was done in, and in its dispiriting
effects, and we felt the national wound and insult also, not
the less because it was such as we have been accus-
tomed to experience and resent from England ; yet to
Lord Plunkett himself we gave none of our sympathy
—to his conduct in the case none of our approbation—
to his professed motives none of our belief !
His retainers, Whig and Tory, were very busy in
circulating that Lord Plunkett chiefly felt, in the in-
stance, the insult to his country—that of placing an
English Chancellor over us ! We feel, because we al-
ways felt, such insults. But when did Lord Plunkett
ever evince this laudable indignation before ?—We do not
credit him now. His life forbids it. He never did remon-
strate in private ; we judged he did not at once, we now know
it. The resentment of Lord Plunkett had not one ingre-
dient of nationality, but every ingredient of selfish greedi-
ness. When taking leave to-lay, to be sure, of the bar
—in public, when it would produce its resentful effects
against his benefactors, he talked plausibly, as he is
capable of doing, about the insult to the Irish bar. But
we never heard of such indignation before, although
England has been constantly treating us similarly.
With his ejection from office, and all its patronage and
influence—" no more pickings for the Hannibals "
this was the predominant thought—it was this which
caused him reluctantly to leave office, giving a last kick
at the Government from which he received it, and from
which, if we are rightly informed, his obstinate resist-
ance to the purification of the Irish Magistracy caused
the necessity long felt of removing him.
Lord PLUNKETT has cast a blight on the la-
bours of a long and useful life by the manner in
which he has drawn them to a close. We must
reverse the often-quoted sentence, and say of his
public life, that " nothing in it so ill became him as
the leaving of it." He has clung to office till his
faculties have left him ; and, in resigning it, he ap-
pears to have forgotten discretion, and sacrificed
his honour.

The Times yesterday blundered in a paren-
thesis on a very sensible remark. It said " full
employment and cheap bread (benefits which
no Legislative measures can ever secure to the
people)." That is very true, and proceeding on
that principle the disciples of free trade demand
the abolition of measures intended, as it is said,
"to secure cheap food and full employment to
the people." The bread tax is expressly main-
tained because it gives full employment to the
agricultural labourers, and because in the long
run it secures the people cheap bread. The
Times avers, and so do we, that no measures
can effect that, and therefore we demand the
repeal of the starvation laws, while our Con-
tempory, with marvellous inconsistency, mocks
at those who act in accordance with his principle.
The great distinction between free traders
and traders in fetters, is that the former
believe in, and act on, the axiom we have
quoted from the Times; the latter do not believe
in it, and act in opposition to it. They pretend
that legislative measures can accomplish all
things, and they make laws to regulate and re-
strain trade, because, as they say, their laws will
provide cheap food and full employment for the
people. Those who demand the abolition of the
Corn-laws expect, or at least hope, that cheap
food and full employment will be the conse-
quence of getting rid of the legislative measures
which have been enacted to effect what the
Times says is an impossibility. The free traders
demand the abolition of legislative measures, not
to replace one bad measure by another. Our
Contemporary has heretofore smitten the land-
Aods and their absurd schemes very hard, and
is plain, from the sentence we have quoted,
iat he cannot get out of his old habits,

We have before us a copy of the Imperial Fir,
man, despatched by the Porte to MEHEMET
ALI at Alexandria by the Russian steamer
Silatsch, on the Ist inst. This firman embodies
the ultimatum of the SULTAN, whose 'concessions
to the VICEROY are greater than those indicated
in the collective note of the Four Powers recom-
mending a modification of the former firman. It
was accompanied by a separate Imperial rescript,
fixing the amount of tribute, which we have not
received, but which tribute is stated in letters
from Constantinople of the 2d instant, to amount to
80,000 purses, or about 365,000/. British currency.
The succession is confined to the descendants of
the VICEROY in the male line, and that line be-
coming extinct, the male children of the female
branches of MEIIE?IET'S family are to have no
claim to the Government of Egypt, which the
Porte is then to dispose of at its pleasure. In
the East, where the extinction of the male
branches of a family is rendered almost impos-
sible by polygamy, this limitation of the succes-
sion is by no means so important as it would be
in the West. It, moreover, tends to check a
disposition to intrigue for the supreme power
on the part of the collateral branches of the
governing
family. The equalization of the in-
trinsic and extrinsic value of the coin of
Turkey and Egypt is an excellent mea-
sure, and will greatly facilitate the pro-
gress of commercial improvement. The tone
of the firman is exceedingly mild and
conciliatory, but there is one clause in
it which appears to us surrounded with peculiar
difficulty. The Porte says that on the failure
of any of the conditions which it imposes upon

ft
*Oa
'
„T M 0 S ,
! W..." 1513
• ,11