The Sun.
London, England, 1841-11-22 00:00:00

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LONDON:
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1841.

The discussion, day after day, of the Corn-laws,
which is forced on our Contemporaries by the
condition of our trade, and the increasing (un-
happily) distress of the people, must be a war-
ranty to our readers, that by continually discus-
sing those laws for upwards of three years, we
have had a correct conviction of their vast influ-
ence on the public welfare, and have Only done
our duty. We may say the same of those en-
lightened politicians, Mr. WOLRYCHE WHIT.
MORE, Sir Wm. CLAY, Mr. HUME, and Mr.
VILLIERS, who, for several years, on various
occasions, have unsuccessfully attempted to
force the subject on the attention of Par-
liament. Whatever blame may be due to the
Whig Ministers, if any—fbr they had to con-
sider their party and. their means of retaining
the Government in their hands—for not .be-
fore taking up the Corn laws, none can be
thrown on. the Radicart.arty, which more
often brought forward: the:''question without
meeting adequate support: front the country or
Parliament, than neglected any opportunity to
enforce their views. Now the Corn-laws have
become the one engrossing question for poli-
ticians, which absorbs all others, and will con-
tinue to do so till the laws be repealed, or till
the denial of justice provOke some terrible cala-

mity.
The
present distress, which is felt in Spitak
fields as severely
as at Manchester, brings the
whole subject to a short issue. The people want
food. The Corn and Provision-laws are Passed
•-
expressly to keep fbod from being imported for
are expressly, intendej
their 116 e. to
TheY
our people from buying coiji
~,...,A
prevent
beef at all times from
.any . other
thiy.
per-
sons than the farniers of England;
are expressly intended to prevent the
farmers of the United k''States, of Russia, of
Prussia, and of Germany, front growing food re-
gularly for our people, and with greater effect
.
than most laws they have a nswered this end,
and have effectually kept a great quantity of
food from our people. This is the plain and pal-
pable cause why the people want food ; and why
should we look beyond this, or puzzle ourselves
about prices, and wages, and foreign tariffs, to
find out the cause of their want of food,
and of their great distress? If they have
not food, and plenty of food, it is clear
that they can have no comforts and no
luxuries, because these are only sought for
after food is obtained, and they will at all times
be sacrificed to obtain it. To seek fbr any
other cause of distress than the decree of the
Legislature, designed-to keep food away from the
People, is a mere idle waste of time. Ingenious
men may thereby show a great surplus of econo-.
mical learning, but it only serves to make dark'
that which was light, and perplex, under an
enormous mass of words, that which was per.
• fectly plain.
Of course, when the supply of food is limited,
the number of People is limited by that supply.'
p!.'t .. Tp limit the number of people stops enterprise,
~,....
r-. 7, _ ehesas invention,
k and arrests improvement, fur
4 all Ithese are iilvari
'ably the consequences of an
„likre4 of population. We talk_ vaguely:- about
447. 4;4,iliiis,dding,, to human
..
v'i'ii
~ a mere
rt `%ligriVae is knowledge dl4 skill,
abstract; ,terms .and.,the real
1.--7-Ti-,.:,, rce of extended knowledge :is : the greater
human beings who exist, or have 1

existed, in time, and who add, or have added,
their observations to the common stock. To arrest
the progress of population, by limiting the growth
and the supply of food, is, therefore, to arrest
the progress of civilization, and to doom the peo-
ple to all that poverty, misery, and crime, which
are the known attendants on a declining or station-
ary population. The Corn-laws, then, are more dis-
astrous than famine, earthquakes, or pestilence;
„and, supposing public utility to be the basis of
'the moral sentiments, the authors of those laws
far more deserve to be visited by the indignation
and wrath of the public than highwaymen or
Murderers.
Some of our Contemporaries, who have a wish,
if possible, to render the subject obscure, endea-
vour to prdve, from the late population returns,
that. the manufacturers have nothing to com-
plain ot; and that the fault is their own dishonest
or inhuman competition. At the same time

the Stanclard admits that " the increase of po-
pulation " (the source of national greatness, and
the sign of national welfare) " bears an exact
proportion to the commercial property of the.
nation." Have they not, therefore, a right to
complain ? and have not the people a right to
blame those laws which, like the Corn-laws,
impede our commerce with Germany, Prussia,
and the United States, and, of course, impede
prosperify; and Atop the increase- of the people ?
Compared to this view, all the other presumed
consequences of the law, or of repealing it—such
as raising or lowering rent, placing a few acres
of land more or less under the plough, impover-
ishing or enriching a few thousand landlords—are

trifles of the least possible consequence. The
law withholds food from the people ; the law ar-
rests the progress of population; the law stops
civilization ; the law dooms a portion of the
people to death ; and a large number of those
whOm it fails to starve it dooms to po-
verty, misery, and crime. It is no longer
a question whether the law be good or
bad, and it is idle now to discuss it. The question
is, how can it be maintained in the face of a
starving and indignant people, and how long will
they submit to the cruel oppression? We have
seen it eloquently stated in that excellent journal,
the Nonconformist, that the people display a
noble self-denial by foregoing plenty of food,
which, by coalescing with the middle classes,
they could command, in order to obtain their
political rights. But of what use are political
rights, compared to food, to starving men ?
The hunger in Spitalfields, Manchester,
and Paisley, ought to satisfy the probably
well-fed leaders of the Chartists that it is
impolitic as well as unrighteous to seek,

if by that means even it can be obtained, univer-
sal suffrage at the expense of the prodigious suf-
fering to which the manufacturing poor, from the
continuance of the Corn-laws, are now exposed.
It is no longer for them a question of voting or
not voting, a question of life or death; and the
Chartists will act most cruelly—as cruelly as the
landlords, without their excuse—if they do not
relieve their suffering fellow-labourers, by at
once making common cause with the rest in
demanding the total and immediate repeal of the
Corn and Provision-laws.

The fire at Woolwich, the attempt to set fire
to the Horse Guards, and the various acts of
incendiarism in the country, beget a suspicion
that the Tower was burned by design. Out of
that grows the suspicion that the Royal Ex-
change and the Houses of Parliament were both
wilfully burned—that Plymouth Dock-yard was
designedly set on fire—and now, as far as we can
learn, the suspicion is general that we live sur-
rounded with would-be incendiaries. The ques-
now asked is, which is the next building to be
destroyed? and a prayer follows for the safety
of Buckingham Palace and the Museum. We
are far from saying such suspicions are well-
founded ; we continue to believe that some
of these fires may have been accidental, but it
implies a horrible condition of society that such
suspicion can be for one moment entertained.
There is no portion of the people not in-
terested in the public buildings. They are the
property of the people. With several of them
are associated many traditionary feelings, which
the lower classes cherish as warmly as the upper
classes and which they are more slow to discard.
Sad and desolate must be their condition, and full
of terror the condition of the other classes, when
suspicions can be entertained that amongst the
people are to be found a number of willing incen.
diaries.

The only appropriate epithet for the state of
society which such suspicions imply is horrible,
and for this horrible condition our rulers arc
answerable. We do not confine the term to the
present Ministers, and to the members of the
Legislature; we embrace in it the aristo-
cracy, the clergy, and the upper classes, and
we lay on them the responsibility of this
horrible condition of society. If they know
that they are unable to prevent such wickedn ess—
that it is, as.they, say, natural to the heart of man
—why, in the name of common sense, do they
assume the power of making man other than he
is? As long as their ambition or their avarice
prompts them to assume exclusively the guidance
and control of society, refusing the multitude all
share of it, so long will they be exclusively re-
spon%ible for every evil in its condition.
They will not be able in this case to make the
Press their scape-goat. On other occasions, when
the people have been driven by oppressions into
untimely insurrections, our self-constituted rulers
have been able, by artful management, to threw
the blame of the public discontent on the Press,
which has reprobated their doings. The Press,
however, discusses laws and politics, not the
art of setting buildings on fire. It has pointed
out the errors and the mischievous designs of
Tory legislators, and may, therefore, have roused
the people to oppose the Legislature; but it has
never in any shape,orform, or degree, advocated,
approved of, or recommended the incendiarism
of the national buildings. If a desire to perpe-
trate such crimes exist, it must be the sponta-
neous consequence of the peculiar condition of
the people, and has never been generated or
fanned into force by any public writer. The
law-makers will not, on this occasion, therefore,
be able to escape the responsibility of causing
the present horrible condition of society by
throwini, the blame on the Press.

e I::
. ,
fWe see it stated that a conference is to be held
"Frame
atondon to consider the affairs of Spain.
and England 'mot° be the active parties to
thC:
rence, which is to do for Louis PHILIPPE
l!h4t- his owintrigues
n have failed to accomplish.
Neither any
hasrt ion of the Spaniards nor their
Government
asked any of the Powers. to
interfere with Spain.r
They abhor and repudiate
all such interference.
their blood to ence. They are ready to shed
keep Madame MUNOZ out of
Spain, and to escape
the wily tyrant at Paris, They
grasping influence of
s.
They have selected
their own Government by them se -
se
N
interfered with no ot es; they have
her people,
and have
molested no person's rights. For England to be
a party to any such conference—for England
to attempt to interfere in any way
with
Spain in conjunction with LoufsPHILIPPE—
is quite uncalled for and unwarrantable. We
hope, therefore, that the report is untrue,
and
we console ourselves by believing, if
it be
not untrue, that the Governments of France and
England will have so much business to attend to
at home that they will be compelled to leave
Spain to take care of herself. If they look at
their own subjects, society being in a distracted
state in France, arid the people starving here,
they will see a much more pressing case for
their exertions than Spain, even were she in the
very height of a revolutionary fever.

The Report of the Peers' Committee
on the subject of QUENISSET'S conspiracy,
occupies the leading . columns of the French
journals. Those on the Liberal side ridi-
cule, as they well—may, the solemn Tomp of
the Chamber of Peer 'to try
handful of madmen, whom the Journal I

THE SUN, LO

Debats and the other organs of the Court
had previously represented as formidably
menacing the existence of social order
in France. Had a conspiracy existed of I,
the intimated by the Debats, it is riot
in the columns of that paper that we should
first hear of it. The National contrasts the
conduct of the Belgian Government in the affair
of the conspiracy at Brussels with that of the
French Ministry in the case of QUENISSET and
his accomplices, . from which it draws conclu-
sions most unfavourable to the SOULT-GUIZOT
Cabinet. "In Belgium'? says that Journal,
" where the conspiracy had ramifications ex-
tending even to the army, the Government
thought it wise and . prudent to give as little
importance as possible, to the affair, and
even to turn it into ridicule. ' Here the'
direct reverse of, such, prudent conduct. is.
shown." - The. National:forgets. that it is becausc
the conspiracy of QUENISSET is so very ridiculous
that the Government' exaggerates it so `much.
The Government is afraid of setting all France
laughing at the solemn humbugging of the Court
of Peers. This Journal says :
" Here a handful of madmen receive as theories the
dreams of some enfans perdus of the materialist philo-
sophy of the eighteenth century, and whose means of
action consist of only two pistols and a bad receipt
for making gunpowder. Why is so much importance
attached to these poor creatures, that in order to try
them one Of the great political bodies of the State is
called together? Why, even in acknowledging, as M.
Bastard has done in his Report, that they are a handful
of men too feeble and too disunited to merit the name
of a sect, is a quarto volume printed to show that
this handful of men places the State in peril ? The
reason of this difference between the Belgian and
French Governments is, that in Belgium the Orangeist
conspiracy is a real and serious affair, and it is felt that
it is good policy to diminish the importance of it in
the public eye ; whereas, in this country, the men who
govern, us, think they incur no danger in giving such gi-
gantic propositions to a plot, which had its birth in a
tap-house, from which it never emerged into the world.
If there had really been any danger for the Govern-
ment, for property, and for established order, in the
petty communist and other associations, on which M.
Bastard has bestowed his Incubrations, so much
would not be said of them, and certainly so much
pains would not be taken to exaggerate their import-
ance. If they are held up as a phantom to terrify the
public mind ; if by bringing the Communists before the
Court of Peers, a sort of pedestal is made for them, it is
because it is well known that their folly is not conta-
gious, and that there is no danger in assigning to them
an importance which they do not possess."
The article of the National concludes as follows :--
"We should never finish if we were to examine
in all its details, the long and indigestible report of M.
de Bastard, and to show how all this grand scaffolding
of conspiracy has been built upon the pretended
disclosures of a wretch, who, upon his own con-
fession, became an assassin from fear, as he
doubtlessly from fear has now became a denunciator.
We think the Court of Peers will be weary and ashamed
of the part which it is called upon to perform, and that
it will disperse with a breath these phantoms of imaginary
plots got up by an odious Ministry, in order to maintain
itself in spite'of France and against France."
The Commerce takes nearly the same view as the ,Na-
tional. We have room only for the following extract :
" The extreme indifference with which the report
of M. de Bastard has been received shows that
the public mind is no longer to be worked
upon by the phantasmagoria with which it has
been continually terrified for the last ten years. There
must be other and v v y different men from Quenisset and
Boucheron to make us believe that society it in danger
of or near convulsion. There are in France, as in all
countries, turbulent and bad passions, which require to
be watched, but when they are manifested in so absurd
and impotent a manner, the danger is certainly not great."
It was reported in Paris on Thursday that
Prince METTERNICH had entirely approved of
Louis PHILIPPE'S plan of an European Con-
gress to settle the affairs of Spain. There is sonic
difficulty about Prussia, as that Power refuses to
enter into the question at all, unless Don CAR-
Los be first set at liberty.
The Clermont papers state that the number of per-
sons in detention for participating in the late disturb-
ances there is 60, and that from 30 to 40 of them will be
brought to trial. An extra Session of the Court of As-
sizes is to be held for this purpose.
A female, aged 23, an inhabitant of one of the com-
munes of the Basses-Pyrenees, was lately brought to
bed of three children, who are all living, and suckled
by the mother.
"A letter," says the Sentinelle of Bayonne, "has been
found written by Montes de Oca to General O'Donnell,
in which he says:—'This infamous town (Vittoria) has
sold us: Its municipality has written to Zurbano that it
wilt not resist, but will deliver me up. 'We must, there-
fore, abandon Vittoria, and take our departure this very
night. We shall go to Bergara, where I hope your Ex-
cellency will join us ; for to-morrow the town will be
occupied by 6 battalions and 300 horse, commanded by
Aleson.' "
A letter from Tabriz, in Persia, dated the 3d of Sep-
tember, in the Leipsic Gazette, says:—" The English
Ambassador, Sir John M'Neil, has arrived here, and
been received by the Shah in the most flattering manner.
It is hoped that English influence will regain ground—
that of France is entirely gone, and Russian influence
is on the decline. General Damas is the only Frenchman
who has arrived in Persia who has found means to:get
into favour with the Shah. Some Lazarist Missionaries
having lately resorted to violent means for the conversion
of the infidels, it is believed that the Persian Govern-
ment will order the Lazarists and Jesuits out of the
country, and the French Ambassador will find it diffi-
cult to prevent the order from being carried into exe-
cution."

There was a rumour on Change (says the Courrier
Francais) of the approaching dissolution of the Ministry.
Some persons announced that M. Guizot and M. Hu-
mann would retire ; others contented themselves with
saying that the Ministry was in such a state of dis-
organisation, that it could not survive the week.
The Minister for Foreign Affairs is himself sensible
of the necessity of a ministerial modification ; some say
he has made overtures to Messrs. Dufaure and Pussy.
The lesson has not been thrown away, only there are
persons who, instead of striving to support M. Guizot,
think they can exclude and supplant him.- Comsat/aimed.
The mails from Havre, Bordeaux, Marseilles, and
London, had not arrived this morning when we went to
press. We never before had such a delay at this season
as we have had within these few days.
While corps of observation arc forming in the North
and the South, the disarming of the coasts is commenced
as a preliminary to disarming the fleet. We have
already published some notices on the subject. To-day
we find in the National de (Orient the following letter
from Belle Isle en :leer of the 10th of November (the
date is recent):—
" The disarming has commenced to-day ; the De la
Montagne has been disarmed. The soldiers of the gar-
rison are employed in removing the bombs and balls to
the citadel. The soldiers who occupy the forts round
the coasts are -to return immediately to the Ville
de Palais, as the coast is not to be any longer guarded."
We ask again what is the meaning of all these con-
tradictory proceedings? All the journals of the northern
departments are still full of details of the movements of
troops for the formation of the corps of observation.
Wo should not be surprised to learn soon, from the
same journals, that all these troops are moving in a con-
trary direction, and are returning to the places from
which they came, for we are told that counter orders
have been sent from Paris. It was said long ago
Order and counter-order—disorder. This is surely the
motto of our War Department. Who gains by all this?
The army contractors of all kinds. But the Budget is
swelled and useful public works arc delayed.—Continerre.
The Gazette de France states that the cavalry of the
corps darmee said to be now collecting on the north-
eastern
frontier of France,is to form three brigades under
Generals Letang, Bro, and Lanthonet. The Valenciennes
papers say that six batteries of artillery have been
ordered from Metz to that place. At Avesnes, the town
has been so completely drained of troops, that the na-
tional guards have to do permanent duty.
On the complaint of Messrs. Seveste and Co., paten-
tees of the theatres of the Banlieue, Messrs. Guyot and
Sardon were yesterday brought before the Correctional
Tribunal for opening a theatre at the Batignolles, without
a license. The defendants suffered judgment by default,
and were condemned to a month's imprisonment, and a
fine of I,ooof. each, and also to pay 2,100 f. to Messrs
Seveste and Co., as damages, with the liability to 200 f.
more for every subsequent representation. At the same
sitting, Messrs. Guyot and Sardon were again prosecuted
for performing several pieces belonging to other theatres
without leave, and were sentenced to pay 700 f. more as
damages.
President Debelleyne has prepared a statistic of the
labours of the Tribunal de Premiere Instance, during
the judicial term of 1840-1841. It exhibits important
improvements in the despatch of business, and the im-
pulse given to its proceedings has produced the most
beneficial results, although the number of causes has
this last year been increased by 1,084. The number of
judgments delivered was 10,294, and of orders issued by
the President 25,717. The three Correctional Cham-
bers decided 11,663 cases, and the complaints dismissed
amounted to 12,944. The number of criminal prosecu-
tions before the Tribunal exceeded those of the preced-
ing year by 4,830.
" We learn from Bayonne," says the llioniteur
Pa-
risien, " that a priest had been shot at Bilbao, by order
of Zurbano ; that the Duke de Castro Torreno, formerly
Minister of War, and now eighty years of age, had been
arrested, but subsequently released ; and that the Regent
published, on the 9th instant, a manifesto at Saragossa,
severely condemning the occurrences at Barcelona, and
denouncing prompt and severe punishment to the agi-
tators."—The Messager states that two French sail of
the line, the Santi Petri and Ville de Marseille, arrived
on the 12th haste at Barcelona. The Regent was ex•
pected there with fifteen battalions and some cavalry.
The Gbtihaheezacrett teptodeur ddtnoeei .svrthshTmheribeeaux states that Mme. Lafarge
was put in a separate room in the prison at Montpellier on
arriving there, until it should be known whether she was
undergoitot badds,esu
awvehoof
commondbauececnoriltransmitteddi
nigstaoy treatmentsth te h
strict
thftrai tcthht
her
prison.hlrefeet
tsenhrimaolfemme
taenadrsiipolincetaloiffingceires
the law. The courrieaevnret
de chambre has-, been separated from her, and that the
escheorrtaetd
mheornftrpoemlliTera.lle
I ‘• The St. Petersburgh papers mention a violent storm
gendarmes burst