The Sun.
London, England, 1841-09-08 00:00:00

SPIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS.

FROM THE DAILY PAYERS OF YESTERDAY.

CHRONICLE.—The landlords' majority has now the
mastery of the nation. The Parliament and the Sove-
reign, the Government and the country, it has theaa.all
in its gripe. It has made a Ministry ; and it cal, when-
ever offended, unmake the Ministry it has made. The
Duke of Buckingham and Sir Edward Knatchbull in the
Cabinet are the outward and visible sign of a compact,
with its most selfish interests and its blindest prejudices,
like the bloated figure in Shel'ey's " Masque of Anarchy,"
"it is law, and King, and God." The efficiency of Par-
liamentary opposition to this enormous and triumphant
power must depend upon its complete superiority to
the ordinary tactics of the party. They are not merely
the measures of the Whirrs that have been defeat al, but
their principles. The late Ministers have not been eje ;ted
from office for the sake of this or that amount of
reduction in timber or -surer duties, but because
they touched monopoly by attempting any reduction.
They have not forfeited place on account of their attempt
to mitigate the bread-tax to Es. per quarter, but for
contemplating an application of Vie principles of com-
mercial freedom to the trade in corn. Nor will
they recover what they have lost by the propositlon of
any extent of reduction, or amount of duty. `1 he new
Opposition inParliament must shun points of petty con-
flict with its predecessors. The country took its propo-
sitions, as embodied in the Budget, not for a complete,
final, and. satisfactory arrangement, but •as the indica-
tions of a Ministerial adoption of sound principles in
eommercial and fiscal legislation. Moral forca aed public
efficient, opinion,
by
require the
which alone
broad a
an Opposition
irt u
o canu s
assertion be rendered
of
those principles, in whatever form they may be invaded
by the victorious monopolists. Free trade is the banner
round which their future strength must rally, for it to be
that growing strength which will obliterate the late is -
verses in a coming and complete success. But it is mainly
out of doors that the form and colour must be given to
such resistance as, may keep the spirit of Toryism in
check, avert the worst excesses of its former domination,
and preserve or obtain the means, as well as the will, for
destroying any power not based tit o.a public opinion ald
public interests. The people's party must follow the peo-
ple's lead.
TIMES.—The correspondence which we published
yesterday relative to Mr. Nixon's dismissal from the
High-Sheriffship of Fermanagh, is perhaps as discredit-
able to the ex-Lieutenant of Ireland as anything his
Lordship has yet done to signalize his ardent Whig
reign. How Lord Morpeth! with the symptoms of im-
proved feeling lately evinced by him in Yorkshire, could
allow himself to be instrumental in ministering to the
paltry party-spite of his vice-regal chief in Dublin,
does, we confess, surprise us. Had the noble ex Se-
cretary been at due pains to acquaint himself with all
the facts before he undertook to write a letter to Mr.
Nixon so offensively prejudging that gentleman's case
as to have compelled him, from self-respect, to decline
an explanatory reply, we cannot doubt that instead of
havings consented to be the vehicle of Earl For-
tescue s political venom against one of the most
estimable public functionaries that Ireland can
boast of, the same high regard to character which
induced Lord Morpeth to decline the degrada-
tion of occupying one of O'Connell's spare seats,
would have indisposed him to act the part of
a mere dirty utensil at the conclusion of his
official career. Of the general policy of the late Lord
Lieutenant we have no wish to speak in terms of severe
censure. As a guardian of public order, his practical
enforcement of the laws has rendered his administration
considerably less objectionable than that of his prede-
cessor. But when we have said this, we have said every
thing he can fairly lay claim to. With professions of
the strictest impartiality as an evea-handed mediator be-
tween the political and ecclesiastical parties which diride
Ireland, the Noble Earl has uniformly falsified his pro-
fessions by a systematic favouritism on behalf of those
whom he believed to' be best able and best disposed to
prolong the ascendancy of his English colleagues. In-
deed the discrepancy observable between Earl Fortescue's
promises and performances has been such as can in no
sense be ascribed to a mere error of judgment. His Lord-
ship, while affecting to maintain an inflexible indepen-
dence, has on many reprehensible occasions been the wil-
ling sycophant of a faction.
HERALD.—Witlrthe prospect of infinite honour to
themselves, by responding to the expectations of the
country at large, the new Government have certainly a
prospect, also, of duties to be performed involving an
awful extent of responsibility. Never did public men
present themselves on the stage of their trial before the
country which they are to serve, under a greater cer-
tainty of encountering more highly-wrought expecta-
tions. The imbecility of the Whig-Radical Ministers,
their failures and their follies, their hollow faith and
large professions have generated such incessant dis-
appointments to the nation, that, from those who—by
the mere force of sounder principles and steadier con-
duct have ousted them from office, an account of their
stewardship, -somewhat unreasonable, even, as to the
products it will anticipate ; and somewhat minute in the
particulars it will require—may be certainly looked
for. But that they are to hold office under a liability
of this sort should never be felt as any hardship by
the leaders of the Conservative party. What have they
to dread from the strictest investigation into their mode
of carrying out the most salutary and enlightened prin-
ciples of government, if they be always prepared to show
that they have manfully endeavoured to make the best
use of the means presented to them for honestly redeem-
ing the pledges they have given to their countrymen ?
They have no " irrevocabl compacts" to bind them to
the evil purposes and unremitting machinations of reck-
less intriguers. They are under no moral necessity to
vote, at the dictation, or for the purposes of a faction,
" that black is white or white is black." They have no
guilty adhesion to testify in secret to a treacherous cabal,
the insolent head of which exacts from his creatures
and dependents a divided homage and allegiance (in
effect) with their common Sovereign. We dare answer for
them, that no Minister of a foreign country, in a season
of fierce hostility against Great Britain on the part of
those whom his bad arts are working to a pitch of frenzied
resentment—will ever be able' to adduce in their open
senate, letters of encouragement and intelligence from
councillors of the British Crown, who deem themselves
not precluded from revealing the deliberations of the
Cabinet, by the solemn and exigent terms of their
oaths ! The Conservatives will never have to fear such
a challenge from delinquents who are arraigned for high
treason, found guilty, and sentenced, as this,—" We
have but followed your example ;—we have' but com-
plied with your own invitation, to meet for the discus-
sion of our grievances in this tumultuous way, and at
dark midnight ; you are bound to advise the Crown to
remit to us all penalty for what the law has branded as
the highest of offences." The new Government will
never afford to any individual or any community an oc-
casion for taunting them with having, through their own
supineness or their own mismanagement, allowed one
colony to be enveloped in the flames of a civil war, and
another to be brought, by illegal and unconstitutional
interference, on the part of the Colonial-official at home,
with their legislature, to the very verge of a rebellion.
POST.--If it be true that her Majesty, in acting faith-
fully upon the principles of the Constitution, has sacri-
ficed some personal predilections, the readiness and
frankness with which her Majesty has made these sacri-
fices, will not be lost upon the nation, nor upon the party
which, under. her Royal permission, now holds the reins
of Government. It is for mean' minds to cherish re-
sentment against what may be supposed to be an unwill..
ing compliance with circumstances. No such feeling
exists in the breast of any true Conservative. The party
has sense enough, and principle enough, to view the
reality of things through the medium of duty. If they
believe that her Majesty's personal preference was not
towards them, they are not the less, but the more sensi-
ble, of the devotedness with which they ought to serve a
Sovereign, who not only complies at once with the re-
quirements of the constitution, but does so even against
the bias of her personal inclination, who makes a sacrifice
of her own liking in order to discharge the duties ins -
posed upon her by her high position as constitutional
Queen of a free people. As to the assertion of the Whig
journals that the people are against the party now in
power, we can make nothing of it by any process of rea-
sonable examination. It seems to be the mere raving of
Whigs whom failure and disappointment have driven out
of their wits. The Whigs who constructed the Reform
Act must condemn themselves, if they say that the
House of Commons, as at present constituted, does not
represent the people, and they are well aware, as we have
already stated, that the voice of the House of Commons
is certainly not with them, nor against the Conservative
party.

ADVERTISER.—The more carefully we examine
the composition of the new Tory Cabinet, the more
thoroughly do we feel persuaded that the advent of that
Cabinent will prove to the country a calamity of the
most fearful magnitude. There is no expectation of
good more generally entertained from the Peel Admi-
nistration than that of some substantial amelioration in
the financial and commercial relations of the country.
Be it our duty to expose the utter groundlessness of this
expectation, and to prove beyond all question that come
of the trade and commerce of the country what may—
nay, come what will of the country itself—the interests
of the landed monopolists must be inviolably upheld.
First of all we beg the people to remember that all the
avowed partialities of the Premier are in favour of the
landed interest. 'Whenever, in times past, the claims
of corn and commerce have come into collision,
Sir Robert Peel has always evinced a decided
predilection for the former. He is notoriously
a proud and ambitious man; and like most
other men of ambitious aspirations, is ashamed of
the commercial pursuits to which he owes his opulence
and elevation in society. For cotton, which has made
him, he feels a sovereign contempt, and wishes that all
the spinning jennies in Lancashire were cast into the
depths of the sea, rather than come between the wind
and his aristocratic pretensions. The very name of cot-
ton, spinning-jennies, or anything else that brings to his
mind the remembrance of the humble origin of Isis fa-
mily, grate on his ear, and are odious in his eye. He
aims at being considered a landed gentleman, and all his
sympathies and leanings arc with the landed intere:it.
As, therefore, the interests of commerce and corn a: e,
in the existing posture of affairs, in a state of necessary
and irreconcileable antagonism, and as the triumph of
the one can only be achieved by the temporary prostra-
tion of the other, there cannot be the shadow of a doubt
as to the interest over which the new Tory Premier will
throw the shield of his protection.
GLOBE.---The only remaining form through which
such of the members of the. new Government who have
seats in the Lower House have to pass, previous to their
entering upon the exei.cise of their duties, Parliamentary
as well as official, is td be re-elected by their constitu-
ents—their seats in' the House of Commons becoming
vacant on their acceptance of office under the Crown.
The forms of Parliament require that several days shall
intervene before they can appear in the complex cha-
racter of Ministers of the Sovereign and Representatives
a the people ; and, until they-do so, little will bo known
of the policy oil which their administration is to be con-
ducted, except so fiur as that pslicy can be pretitetar from