The Sun.
London, England, 1841-08-13 00:00:00

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LONDON:
FRIDAY, AUGUST 18, 1341.

The Corn Averages, published yesterday, show
a rise in the weekly average 70s. 5d., which is
above the average published yesterday week, of
2s. 2d., while the average of the six weeks,
665. 4d., is ls. 2d. higher than the average of
the preceding six weeks. The prices continue
to rise, therefore, throughout the country, and
there appears no probability of their soon coming
to a still stand, or falling. The additional 2d.
that has been recently put upon the
loaf may be nothing to the man " whose
every- single morsel, which lie pokes with
his golden fork between his teeth, costs
more than a hard working man's pay per
day," but it will be most severely felt by the
overworked hind in Dorsetshire, with Gs. 6d. a
week and a sleeping-berth in the hay-loft, by
" the poor sempstress, whose thousand stitches
can earn her at the utmost one penny in the
hour," and by the " poor widow laundress, who,
up at three in the morning, labours through
weeks, months, and years, and takes in wash-
ing at a penny a piece to preserve herself
and her poor orphans a shadow of honest inde-
pendence." All these, and they are chosen as re-
presentatives of the millions, will shower their
curses, if deep suffering and toil have not effaced
from them all the imprint of humanity, on the
cruel system which withholds from them the
boanties of nature; and their curses, like the
prayers of good men, will surely be heard at the
throne of grace, and will wither the system which
blights and blasts their happiness and their being.
Many things combine to assure us that the
accursed system must speedily come to an end.
Our opponents are giving way ; but they talk of
a compromise. The great London merchants,
who have stood aloof during our three years'
contest, a little alarmed at the decay of trade, are
beginning, by their various organs, to advocate
a fixed duty. They see in prospective that their
own pockets will be assailed, and that touches
them more than the seared hearts, wasted limbs,
and miserable deaths of the suffering hand-
loom weavers. Some of the clergy, too, more
alarmed, we believe, at the pecuniary disasters
which they apprehend than at the moral de-
solation which is spreading over the land,
have taken up their pens in favour of
an alteration of the Corn-laws—speaking, how-
ever, in favour of a fixed duty, and carefully
shunning the noble principle of a perfectly free
trade in food. An alteration, then, we must
have in the Corn-laws, and it will depend on the
Manchester men whether that shall be a fixed
duty or a total repeal. Their maxim is, that a
fixed duty is a fixed injustice. _That is our
motto; we would not leave even Mr. M'GRE-
GOR's one shilling a quarter as a rag of the sla-
very from which, with perseverance and courage,
we are sure to be emancipated. We trust, there-
fore, that the League will not accept the
compromise, and will remain firm to their
principles, despite the coaxing of lately converted
fr. ends and half inclined enemies. They must
be true to their principles for the sake of rais-
ing up the morality of the people, not for the
sake of lowering the price of wheat one or two
We trust, too, that the ministers who are to
meet in Conference at Manchester on Tuesday,

Henry Parker and William Johnson, severally aged
twenty-nine and twenty-two, pleaded guilty to an indict-
ment charging them with unlawfully and maliciously
killing, at Rumboldswyke, a lamb, the property of
Thomas White, and were transported for ten years
and on sentence being passed, they made low bows to the
Court, and seemed well pleased with their fate.—[This
was the case referred to by the Learned Judge, in his
charge to the Grand Jury ; and it was understood about'
the Court that the prisoners had presented a petition to
the Court praying to be transported for life.]
We should like to know more of the history
of these two young men, and what motives led,
them to prefer transportation for life to a resi-
dence in that elysium of the ELLmArrs, the Ibex-
MONDS, and the IDARBYS, the purely agricultural
county of Sussex. We hope that the Brighton
Guardian, or some other local paper, will find
out all the circumstances connected with these
young men, and make them known, for the in-
struction of the world; or that some of our cor-
respondents in that part of Sussex will ex-
plain the matter to the public. As it appears at
present it is calculated to excite suspicion and
much alarm. Transportation is one of the pet
punishments of the "day—for legislators have
pets as well as ladies ; it is that punishment most
relied on by squires and farmers for the protec-
tion of their stock, their sheep, and lambs, and
horses—their hedges and hop-poles, their woods
and hen-houses; and if this punishment be des-
pised, but above all if it become a temptation to
commit depredations and slaughter animals—if
the inhabitants of the rural districts go on kill-

ing sheep in order to be transported from their
father land, which has no longer any charms for
them, whatever it may have for the squires
and the parsons ; if transportation, on which the
Magistrates almost exclusively rely, have lost

all its terrors, they must begin to doubt whether
they will much longer find safety for their per-
sons and property in England. Hanging men,
except for murder, has gone into disuse ; solitary
imprisonment, and the silent system, notwith-
standing the New Model Prison, which is fast
encumbering and disfiguring the fields about
Battle-bridge, are both decried as more inju-
rious than beneficial, awl now we have common
imprisonment courted as a refuge from utter des-
titution, and transportation invoked, through the
commission of a heinous offence, because men
are, from some cause or other, completely dis-

gusted with their native country. This straw
may show rent-owning legislators which way
the gale of moral desolation is blowing Over the
hearts and minds of the people.
The coolness, may we not call it the callous-
ness, with which the venerable Chief Justice,
with this example of punishment tempting men
to commit crime, went on ordering prisoner after

prisoner to be transported, even gratifying the
lamb-killers, except that he made the punish-

meat fall short of their desire never to return
home, is to us quite as astonishing and as shock-

ing as the conduct of the men. This is not, in-
deed, an isolated case of that callous disposition
in the Judges, which to us appears most offen-

sive. We know they perform what is called a
duty ; we know, too, 'that they sometimes weep

themselves, and sometimes draw tears from

others in doing it ; and yet they go on, assize

after assize, circuit after circuit, condemning
scores and hundreds of their fellow-creatures to

one cruel punishment after another, without ever

starting back with affright and horror at seeing, as
almost every reflecting man but themselves sees,
that the vast system of pain they are the instru-
ments of inflicting has lost all terror fbr

evil doers, and while it is a grievous of-
fence to humanity, has long ceased to
repress, if • it does not greatly encourage,

crime. A pamphlet was lately published
entitled " The Crimes of the Law;" and if this

•
plan of inflicting great pain, which answers not
the desired end, be not included in those crimes,
it ought to be; and when we look at its extent
and its perpetual repetition, we may almost doubt
whether all the other crimes committed by the
community equal the crimes of the law. The
venerable Judges, however, administer the sys-
tem with great apparent self-satisfaction, making
us fancy that there may be things more extra-
ordinary than skinning eels alive, or pegging
lobsters, to which custom reconciles the perpe-
trators.

We have more than
once explained that the
Deficit Ministry,
as the Tories call the Whigs,
are no more to blame for the deficiency of the
revenue than
Tory journals continue to blame the Ministry
Sir R. PEEL. Nevertheless the
because the revenue does not equal the expendi-
ture. Let us again, therefore, remind our readers
of the facts.

When the postage was reduced, in accordance
with the wishes of the bulk of the population,
it was distinctly stated by the Ministers that
ofM Commons.
they would call on the House
make good any deficiency that might occur to
in
the revenue. Accordingly,
in the followin.
year, 1840, they proposed an increased per
centage on taxation, which theY calculated
would make good the deficiency. The Tories
neither said it would not, nor proposed any other
plan. They acquiesced in the Ministers' scheme.
Sir R. PEEL did more than acquiesce; he ex-
pressly gave his approval to the plan, and in
1840 it was fully expected by all parties that the
increased per centage on taxation would bring
up the revenue to the expenditure.

And so it would, had the country continued to
be prosperous. But, instead of the new taxes
yielding upwards of 2,000,0001., they yielded, in
fact, little or nothing. They only checked con-
sumption, and the increased revenue-they caused
in one branch was compensated by the falling off
in another. The result could not be known till
1841, and when it was known, the Ministers pro-
posed a plan which they supposed would apply a
remedy. The Tories, headed by Sir R. PEEL,
resisted and defeated that plan, and consequently
the Tories are as much or even more responsible
for the deficiency than the. Ministers. They ap-
proved of the plan of 1840, and when that failed
they objected to another, without suggesting any
better scheme in its stead. They have now taken

will stick to the moral principle of this now
great and absorbing question, and not heed the
jeers or flippant observations of that class of
public writers and politicians who will see nothing
in politics more important than a means to enrich
the aristocracy, or more sacred than the success
of their party.

We adverted yesterday to four cases of per-
sons committing offences that they might find
shelter and food in a. prison. It is unnecessary,
perhaps, to inform those who rely much more: on
police and law than on morals—they themselves
setting the example of doing justice to others—
that their hopes of checking crime must be at
once extinguished, when the very punishments
which they have devised to repress it actually
become, from the. miserable condition of the
people,-temptations to commit crime. If they
imagine that these are the only cases, or that
the temptation can only arise in large towns, and
when the punishment is trivial, we must, by
quoting another case, undeceive them. When
Lord Chief Justice TINDAL addressed the Grand
Jury at Lewes, on the 3d instant, he made the
following observations :
His Lordship observed that there was also a charge
against two individuals of having maliciously killed a
sheep, with intent to injure the owner, and the circtit-
stances of the case were of a somewhat novel kind, for
it appearod that the moment the act was committed the
prisoners gave information to a policeman, and said that
their object in committing the act was, that they might
get transported. It would be difficult in such a case to
suppose that they were actuated by any malic? towards the
owner of the sheep, but it was his duty to tell the Grand
Jury that the law did not require any evidence of the.
malicious intention, but the mere act was sufficient to
constitute the offence.
Two men killing a sheep or lamb, without any
malice towards the owner, and not to carry away
the meat, but informing a policeman of what
they had done, in order to get transported, is
something like a novelty in the history of crimi-
nal jurisprudence. It teaches a most important
truth. The terror of transportation is, and will
be, of no avail in preventing crimes. The con-
clusion of this case is thus stated in the Brighton
Guardian :