The Sun.
London, England, 1841-04-13 00:00:00

tions have given to the soil new masters. The
conquests and new partitions of the country in the
reigns of ELIZABETH and JAMES 1., under CROM-
WELL and WILLIAM 111., went so far as to oust,
we believe, nearly all the previous possessors, and
has made historians say that the whole soil of
Ireland was confiscated three times over.
These latter confiscations, too, were all made
from a religious as well as a political motive ;
they were to convert the Irish, first into English,
afterwards into Protestants. The result is, the
soil has become Protestant and English, but the
bulk of the population remain Catholic and Irish.
Hence, for the last century and a half, while all
the rest of the empire has been gradually amal-
gamating into one homogeneous mass, and differ-
ences of race and of religion are passing into
oblivion, or attract no attention, a feud has been
kept alive in Ireland, and is growing and ex-
tends to this day, and is now breaking forth in the
cry for Repeal. As long, undoubtedly, as the
present appropriation of the soil of Ireland is
continued that feud will continue, which makes
us say that the Irish, in now turning their atten-
tion to the relation between landlord and tenant,
have got on a new and a right tack. Whether
they will have political sagacity enough to carry
their barque into the haven to which its prow
points, we must leave time to show.
It is well and truly said by the Southern Re-
porter, speaking of those who wrested the land
by force from the original landowners :
The Irish are inured to suffering and oppression. They
would tolerate the monopoly and extortion of their roan.
tars—but then their masters have been for the last hundred
years the law-makers I Statute after statute has been en-
acted, conferring new and formi:lable pow. r,, and these
powers have never been anon el to he inactive. A deadly
nystem of exterrninalion has been adopted and worked out
on cold calculation, so the., with a soil capable of main-
tairisg its present population. thtl'e are many hun-
dreds cf thousands who cannot obtain, at any rent, bow..
ever extravagant, permission to live otherwise than on the
roads or in a workhouse.

There we see evidence that the wrongdoers have
always laboured to keep alive the memory of
their oppression. Should the landowners com-
plain, as perhaps they may, that the length of
time they have held their land has now
given them a prescriptive right, and that
there would be no end to disturbance should
such a possession not confer a safe title,
they are answered by the assertion that, as
law-makers, they have passed statute after
statute confuting new and formidable powers,
and so always keeping the people in mind of the
original wrong, and of their perpetual slavery.
In fact, these successive statutes were successive
encroachments and usurpations, like the first,
though not so outrageous, each of whichprevented
that return into the right path, by which nature,
if not thwarted, sinks the minds of nations, in
time, into forgetfulness of injustice, and converts
a fierce usurpation into a beneficial holding.
It is not in Ireland alone that landlords, who
have been law-makers, by passing statute after
statute, conferring new and extraordinary
powers or wealth on themselves, have kept con-
tinually encroaching on and continually usurp-
ing the right of others, so as continually to
force back the public mind to the question
of their original right. They have, unfortunately
for themselves, done the same in England. Not
contented with occupying the highest station in
society—not contented with being far more abun-
dantly provided with all the good things of life
without labouring, than the utmost exertions of
industry could command—not contented with the
great honour and political superiority which were
secured to them, they have sillily, meanly, and
basely made statute after statute to curtail the li-.
berties, or appropriate the wealth, of the people;
the consequences are, they are forfeiting the
public respect, bringing all their rights into
question, and making men turn their attention
in England, as in Ireland, to the peculiar appro-
priation of the soil as a source of many political
evils. We wish it were otherwise; but the ex-
treme and obstinate folly and injustice of the
landowners are forcing on the public the ominous
question, by what right do they hold their pos-
sessions and their power ?

When we yesterday made a rough comparison
between astronomy and morality to vindicate the
unfitness of those who are educated exclusively
to honour antiquity, to preside over the moral
education of the community, we understated our
case. Whatever might have been the knowledge
of astronomy at any particular period, there can be,
and is, no question,—since celestial phenomena,
like eclipses, recorded in early Greece, have been
verified by modern calculation—that the physi-
cal system of the universe has been the
same since the beginning of history. Though
men may have held very different opinions at
different times, there is no doubt whatever that
the earth has always revolved round the sun and
round its own axis, as our NEWTON demonstrated,
and we believe it now revolves. But though the
physical laws which have regulated and deter-
mined the multiplication of our species—expressed
shortly as the relation between population and
subsistence, like the laws of gravity—have always
been the same, there seems to be some reason
to doubt whether the moral laws or moral
relations have remained unaltered. As the
progress of population has gone on, and as
mankind have multiplied, new moral relations
between them individually, and between them
and the physical world, have come into existence.

For example, when population was scanty,
a fitmily might wander whither it would, and
trespassed on no rights in pitching its tents
where it pleased, and in felling the timber
which grew around. But when many families
came to require the same conveniences, and
when a rude appropriation of coming to a spot
ensued, the first corner acquired a right to the
,soil, and it became wrong in other men to inter-
fere with that which, before his appropriation,
was as freely given for their use as his.
Carrying our thoughts from that first great
change over to the present crowded condition of
Europe, and of our country in particular, where
not merely every foot of soil, but everything the
earth bears, has an owner, we must see that, with
every successive change between these two ex-
tremes, new relations between man and man, and
between man and the soil, have come into
existence. At present, as one consequence of
the great multiplication of the species, a
minute division of labour, both territorial and
individual, prevails, of which the consequence is,
that the produce of labour, whether agricultural
or manufacturing, belongs in right and in fact to
several different persons, who assist in its pro-
duction. •It has to be divided at least into
rporifit,eeaonfd
a rent.piec
piece
So o
ffa
finer iis this
muslinn owh
Nthat etsee
shared, in order to reward the many perscaoansrstroNiveldtboe,
assist in producing it, amongst a greater. number
than we can tell, including the Glasgow weaver
at one end of the long chain, and at the other,
the cotton-grower of Alabama, with all the inter-
mediate assistants of sailors, merchants, carriers,
shipowners, &c. &c. We know that this elabo-
rate division and appropriation is easily and uni-
versally made by the " huxtering of the mar-
kets;" but surely the several. relations in which
these various workmen stand to each other,
and to the web of cloth, are moral relations
which had no existence in the early ages.
We might extend the deduction, and the great
use now made of paper money would be rich in
illustrations ; but we only wish to indicate a
principle, and show that while the laws which
regulate the solar system have been
since the beginning of human knowledge, the
moral relations of mankind have undergone
great alterations consequent on that which may
be called a new Physical flict, the filling of the
surface of the earth with human beings. Now,
it must be plain to the meanest capacity that the
knowiedfre which is necessary to our earthly
happiness is a knowledge of these new relations '
and a:1 their consequences, not a knowledge of
the different relations and their Consequences
which prevailed in antiquity. The natural
laws, for example, which regulate wages and
profit, grow out of them, and we need not re-
mind our readers that a knowledge of these laws
is now of essential importance to the peace of
society. The State, we have already said, aspires
(Illy to provide for the earthly happiness of the
people —it has no power nor means to
promote their salvation ; and the State conse-
quently commits a fatal error when it confides
the control of education to men who disregard