The Sun.
London, England, 1846-10-15 00:00:00

SPIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS.

FROM THE MORNING PAPERS OF THIS DAY.
_ _ _

TIMES.—Lord Westmeath's views of the rights and
liabilities of landed proprietors, to which we have on
two recent occasions given publicity, however natural,
however common, however unstriking to Irish land-
owners, are, nevertheless, based on an utterly erroneous
view of their duty, and if carried out into action without
limit, would result in the most abject misery of the great
majority of mankind. His Lordship came into the pos-
session of certain portions of the soil of Ireland, which
his ancestors had possessed before him. He found divers
tenants occupying parts of his estates under leases.
When these leases fell in, he found more occupiers than
had been bargained for. The soil was encumbered with
humans, and their condition was such, that they were
by no means profitable cattle. Had they been as pro-
fitable to him as so many sheep or pigs, he would have
rejoiced at their being part of the live stock of
his farms. He objects to them, net as bipeds, but as
squatters. He could not, owing to the cost of litiga.
tion, put a stop to the squatting while the leases sub-
sisted. If he could have done so, he would. Now
that the leases are ended he wants the law to make up
for lost time ; and cooly proposes that he shall be en-
abled by Act of Parliament to transport to some other
country—no matter which—the uncomfortable surplus
population ; that a new felony shall be created for the
benefit of his "order," the landed proprietors of Ireland;
that the crime of having been born into Ireland, and
having survived the perils of Irish infancy, shall be
placed in the same category with forgery, burglary, and
arson. If this is a specimen of what an Irish House of
Lords would do in the way of domestic legislation, it had
better be avowed generally at once. It might have some
effect even in that focus of nonsensical extravagance, the
Conciliation Hall. Now, it may be as well for the Irish
landowners to consider what would be the case of the
population if Ireland, like Egypt, had only one land-
owner. Would they, then occupying the position in
Ireland of tenants of the soil, deem it just that this
monopolist of " the first gem of the sea" should prohibit
their marrying and having families ? or that he
should only permit a given portion of them to marry,
and endeavour to place a limit on the number of chil-
dren which should be born? If not, they must give up
Lord Westmeath's proposal for the expatriation of his
countrymen as equally against the inalienable rights of
man. If the landowner—the solitary lord of the soil—
whom we have supposed could have no right to prohibit
or attempt to restrict the multiplication of his species,
50,000 landowners combined could have no such right,
nor could any one of them have it. Again, this landed
oligarch could only enjoy his insular estate by having it
tenanted by others besides himself. Were he the sole

inhabitant of his own territory, he would be as badly
off as Robinson Crusoe before he found Man Friday.
lle must have tenants to enable him to enjoy his own
property. Without tenants he would have no profits.
If he introduced a tenant population, unless he made an
express bargain with them, at their first introduction

into his domains, that they and their posterity
should at all times remain at his absolute disposal, and
renewed that bargain with their descendants, they would
bring with them, and retain, their rights as human be-
ings; and if he took the benefit of their labours, he must
also take the liability of satisfying such of their physical
wants as should enable them to fulfil the conditions of
their existence. But if, instead of introducing a labour-
ing population, he became the owner of the soil already
occupied by his fellow-creatures, and availed himself of
their services to obtain some enjoyment from it, he must
take their consequences with them, permitting them to
propagate their kind and to people his domains. He
could only have a conditional right to the land—a limited
proprietorship. The Aborigines would possess their
ordinary rights as human beings, and transmit them to
their descendants. Their children would be born
into the country with his express or tacit consent,
and with the rights of fellow-countrymen with him.
It would not be difficult to convince even an Irish land-
holder that Mehemet Ali has no right to screw his
Fellahs down to absolute starvation, or to drive them
wholesale into the desert. They would admit that those
Fellahs, as Egyptians, have a right to live in Egypt ;
that if they perform their duty to the Pacha of cultivat-
ing his corn and cotton estate, they may require in re-
turn the means of subsistence and of subsisting in
Egypt ; and that, however absolute may be the Govern-
ment under which they are placed, they are entitled to
their share of the rights of man. Follow this out in
Ireland, and there is no logical possibility of denying
that those who are born in Ireland have by the mere
accident of their birth a right to stay and subsist in Ire-
land. It may be a hard task, and one of slow fulfilment,
to convince the majority of the proprietors of the Irish
soil of the truth that the whole of God's earth is intended
for the enjoyment of the whole of God's creatures ;
that when a child is born into that world it is gifted by
God's providence with a right to a subsistence during
the whole of its life on and from that earth ; and that
whatever may be the artificial division of that earth into
continents, countries, or counties, no combination of men
whatever can, without a violation of their duty to God
and man, make such an appropriation of any portion of
it as shall deprive a single fellow-creature of that right,
or hinder him in the reasonable enjoyment of it ; but it
is the truth, and it must be recognised and acted on.
CHRONICLE.—The meeting of the working classes
of Manchester, held in their Town-hall on Tuesday
evening, for the purpose of memorialising Lord John
Russell to open the ports, is a sign of the times which
cannot fail of receiving the deliberate and respectful
attention of an enlightened statesman. From the report,
which appears elsewhere, of the brief, quiet, and per-
fectly business-like proceedings on this occasion, it will
be seen that our manufacturing operatives have made
great proficiency in that most useful description of all
useful knowledge—knowledge of the facts and laws
determining their own social condition. The compulsory
and disagreeable lessons of the best of schools seem to
have been mastered by our working-men, in Lancashire
at least, with a very satisfactory completeness. Their
own experience for many successive years—as interpreted
to them, first, by the League, and more recently by
Cabinet Ministers who vied with one another, through
the greater part o fa protracted Parliamentary session, in
expounding the economies of the working-man's life—has
been largely effectual in imparting the wisdom more im-
mediately profitable for their political guidance. They
know all about the doctrine of wages, and its relation to
prices. They understand their concern in that political,
or state, economy, which is neither more nor less than
the aggregate of their own particular domestic econo-
mies. They have learned to respect the facts and figures
of that political arithmetic which does but sum up and
epitomise the more familiar domestic arithmetic of their
own cupboards and firesides. They appreciate their
interest in that cheapness of the primary necessaries of
life, which enlarges the surplus of national income
available for the comforts and luxuries that consti-
tute the subject-matter of manufacturing production
and commercial interchange. The difference between
cheapness and dearth of the nation's food they know to
be so much added to, or taken from the nation's capi-
tal—which capital is the fund out of whose increase
their wages are paid. They have acquired considerable
skill in this very interesting species of computation.
So much added to the price of the 41b. loaf they
find, on casting up, to be so much of extra weekly taxa-
tion on a town and neighbourhood of such or such a
population—the amount of which tax " is, of course,
abstracted from the receipts of the general tradesman,
and is thus operative to the destruction of the home
market for manufactures." With this expert intelli-
gence of the law of wages and the nature of the wages
fund, our working men are, of course very watchful of
dangers that threaten that fund with diminution—espe-
cially with gratuitous and preventable diminution by ar-
tificial causes. They look with jealous alarm on those
shillings of the scale, which, as u now easy
and familiar
logic has taught them, stand for shillings abstracted
from their pockets. They dread and deprecate the
effect, especially during a season of severe national trial
and difficulty, of even four shillings artificially added to
the natural price of a quarter of wheat—such addition
really and practicably meaning, to them, increased com-
petition fur diminished wages. With prices rising to
the point at which a fixed four-shilling barrier will
abridge and retard the very supplies of whose necessity
the Legislature has made that figure the index, they are
keenly alive to the danger and absurdity of a policy, the
principles of which have been explicitly condemned by
every statesman of weight and repute, and whose results
are so dismally illustrated in their own well-remembered
experience. It is just the old story beginning over
again, and they know it all too thoroughly by hearl not
to beg fervently that it may be cut short. This is really
a very striking feature of this working-class meeting.
The alarm which prompts Manchester operatives to
pray for open ports, is a reasoning and prospective
alarm. Their meeting and memorial are no passionate
utterance of irritated or desponding misery, but the
quiet and sober-minded expression of a logically justi-
fied fear. The whole proceeding is very much of a pre-
cautionary character. These are not " distressed
manufacturers') clamouring for a "boon," but men enjoy-
ing a very tolerable amount of prosperity, who see
natural ai_ir.tis i....t work that must imperil and abridge
their prosperity, and are anxious that a natural and in•
evitable evil should, at least, not be artificially aggras
vated. The memorialists have nothing to say of
great distance, and for which they
" distress," except as a future event, which they
welldistress,"prepa re.
anldtwoiuls d onlyhave t thath ithis
distress t hey
" apprehend
great
would be be tie
minimised down to its natural limits, by the instant ex-
tinction*oust, more or less,
enh a
n
c
e
speak under no other
Fe,fessure than
that or deliberate and sober apprehension of evil But
oi
tf. a fiscalTey injustice whici%
after all the teaching they have had, this is enough to
make theta speak plainly and strongly. They have
learned to read future events in present tendencies.
They are great believers in cam and effect. They scent
danger afar oil; and are wise in time. We cannot en-
tertain the fear that the chosen of our statesmen will
show themselves less sagacious in their interpretation of
familiar facts, or less far-seeing in their prescience of a
certain and not very remote future, or less prompt and
earnest in warding off preventible aggravations of a corn-
ing , " than a miscellaneous assemblage of our working
vil,
men. Lord John Russell must be as well able as these
operative memorialists to draw the right conclusion from
dataof fact and principle which are common to both
parties.
We feel persuaded that, to a prayer so just and
reasonable, and so thoroughly accordant with the maxims
efarefieetive
and experienced statesmanship, there is
hut one answer possible. After all, our Manchester
working men
only ask, that the settled and fundamental
.
policy of thebe consistently applied to meet
empire may y
the special wants of a crisis for which it has an obvious
special fitness.
ADVERTISER.—The subject of punishment in the
navy, to which we referred yesterday in our correspond-
ence,
is one which ought to receive a large share of
public attentio •
he court-martial on board the Vic-
is T
tory (off Portsmouth) reveals to the public a practice in
whichqought immediatelybe discon-
our steam navy
tiuued, and whiel
a humanity should ever have permitted.
an
• The chance against \ . to .
in-
telligence
i it is strange that men of ordinary
Lieutenant Story was, " that he, on