The Sun.
London, England, 1851-12-20 00:00:00

SPIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS.

FROIII TILE MOT:SING PAPERS OP TUIS DAY.
liERALD.—Spitd of the angry growls of some
of our cooteniporeries' whose maxims of right and
wrong are measured by their prejudices, we must
uphold that Louis Napoleon was justified in the
course which he has punned. It may be very well
to tell U 3 that there were no overt acts on the part of
the Assembly which could warrant such violent pro-
ceedings ; it may suit the temper of losers to affirm
that the President was bound to wait and see what
his opponents would do before he resorted to force.
This is the language of men who have been antici-
pated in their designs by one more bold and more
energetic than themselves ; but it is not the dictate
of reason nor of sound policy. " There is no ques-
tion," says Lord Bacon, " but a just fear of immi-
nent danger, though there be no blow given, is a law-
ful cause of war." Tnat the danger was imminent
no one can doubt who has studied the temper of the
Assembly, or of the men whose names have gained
more than usual nototis ty by their present restraint.
That some of the most leading politicians who graced
the debates of the lszt two months with no common
share of fluency and virulence, made no secret of their
hostility to the very person f Napoleon, is notorious
enough. lied not their schemes been defeated, the
very men who are now loudest in their exclamations
at the outrage done to the laws would themselves
have been the foremost in elefendieg the line of con-
duct which Napoleon has turned against them-
selves. It is absurd of them to talk of law and
constitutional order, which they have daily endea-
voured to bring into contempt; it is monstrous
for men whose conduct was marked with the
selGsh and narrow, the mean and tricksy spirit which
characterised so large a portion of their political
conclave, to come forward and claim the sympathy
of Europe, as if their lives had been devoted to the
welfare of their country=as if; indeed, their con-
duct and votes in the Assembly had been such as
befitted immaculate statesmen, and had not been dis-
graced by intrigues, by insubordination, by con-
fusion, by clamorous ant furious passions, which will
long make it remembered in the annals f Europe as
the most disgraceful assemblage that ever professed to
deliberate for the interests of a great nation.
It is quite time that it should be swept away—
that the farce should have been played out—that
the possibility of a revival under any such adulterine
phases should be removed. We might have wished,
perhaps, that such a result could have been effected
without loss to the subject or without restraint to his
personal liberty ; but there are times and there are
men that cannot be judged by the ordinary maxims
by which other states and other men are regulated.
There are periods when in the body politic, quite s s
much as in the natural body, violent diseases admit
no other than violent remedies ; when the physician
who confines himself to ordinary rules is a traitor
to his psnient, and the strictest observer of the
letter of the law is the greatest violator of its siirit ;
—the summum jus is become summa injuria. That
the present conjuncture is such a one, no one can,
for a moment, doubt. The loudest oppugners of
Napoleon's coup de main do not attempt to justify
the proceedings of the Assembly; no one raises a
voice in defence of their doings, or pretends to see
in their conduct any real love, much less any indi-
cations of self-sacrifice, for those great principles of
government which can alone restore peace and order
to France. The only spirit by which they were go-
verned was that of hostility to the man who was the
most popular in their nation ; who alone has shown,
in all the convulsions by which his unhappy country
has been lacerated, some consciousness of his duty as
a ruler, and some ability to have his rule observed;
who alone, amidst the furious follies of the Mountain,
or the Utopian republicanism of Cavaigoac and his
followers, has shown some sense of what is prac-
ticable and useful—some indications, at all events, of
power and ability to rule, and rule well, as far as the
circumstances of the time will allow. No wonder,
that having treated him as a puppet, they are
now furious at their disappointment; that intend-
ing to have made the President a tool, they have
long found that the weapon has recoiled upon them-
selves. Their conduct towards him has been
that of mean and malignant spirits, who have fallen
into their own pit, and been duped by their own
devices. The offence never to be forgiven is to
have been outdone by a men whom they had intended
to over-reach, and whose intellect they had despised.
They have shown all along that they never intended
that Napoleon should rule de facto ; they have vio-
lated, if not the strict letter of the Constitution, yet
its meaning and its spirit, in making the voice of the
people, which they professed to respect, a nullity—
so far at least as that voice was heard in declaring
that Napoleon should be the head of the Government.
They could not shut their eyes to the fact, that the
vast majority of the nation gave their votes to him,
not on the mere supposition that he was to be a puppet
in the hands of the Assembly, but that he was to pos-
sess and exercise a far larger amount of power than
the Assembly ever felt it convenient or agreeable to
acknowledge. Throughout they ha.d been the ag-
gressors; they have been the men who have been
setting the constitutional liberties of the people at
defiance ; they have been undermining the right of
popular opinion in their attacks upon the President,
who is the representative of it. The people of France
must now be the judge--they alone can decide who is
the real aggressor, who has been the true obstacle in
the way of improvement and of good order. They
who have been so loud iu professions of respect for the
sovereignty of the people, who have lauded the people
of France as the light of the nations, who have spoken
of the late revolution and its consequences as " the
revelation of a new gospel"—they, surely, of all men,
will nut have the effrontery to decline a decision from
those whom they affected to respect and almost to
idolise. The men who professed to consider that
the remedy for all evils, social, moral, and intel-
lectual, was to be found in a republican mode of
government, can scarcely, with any degree of
decency, disclaim their own work; the idolisers of
republican enlightenment can only, with a very bad
grace, now turn round and condemn as partial, blind,
and frivolous, whats only a few weeks since, they
would have exalted to the skies as the very perfection
cf all schemes which it had ever entered into the heart
of man to conceive. Our contemporary pursues
another method. He has leave to be erratic—expert
in prophesying when the event is passed—slow, so.'
lean, and sonorous in administering advice when it
is too late—he gratifies his readers occasionally with a
long chapter on his political visions and experiences.
Monarchy, republicanism, and despotism fall before
bis pen like the hopeless Trojans before an intellectual
Ajax—" the Chamber of Deputies was too narrow"—
" the National Assembly had repudiated its own
existence"—" Monarchy failed from the obliteration
of the aristocratic element"—until the hapless
patient is left under this political physician in the
same state as Sencho Panza in his government of the
island of Barrataria. We will, however, do our con-
temporary one piece of justice, slow as he is in
rendering justice to other men—we will give him
credit for not being of that vile exception which he
has so readily applied to others of the morning prints.
He never formed an exception ; however erratic his
course may be, he is always sure to come in at the
death; aiunt ? aio ; negant ? nego. He will be no
martyr ; be has no inclination to suffer for any poli-
tical or religious pecuelaiarhitiya.
own
ao
hcaovinecibdeeeawraieth
uthae
opinions of others,h-
w
mrtyastoefr easiness
of
fee;
pa
no
dp u
wl a Ft
t,
his t
hbee cl
iokme eb
ewldiathes ha i
asin aa
gprreoapte
in former times, when the mountain will not come to
Mehemet, Mehoinet will go to the mountain. It
does not often happen that all prophets are so fertile
in expedients.
TIMES.--A very interesting return to an or-
der of the House of Commons has been made by
the management of Lloyd's. We find in it an abstract
of all collisions, accidents, and wrecks of vessels, and
the number of lives lost in each year, since the Ist
day of January, 1847, till the 31st day of December,
1850. In other words, here we have placed before
us a sort of index of all the misadventures that have
occurred at sea for the last four years, so far as they
have fallen within the knowledge of Lloyd's. The
register is sufficiently dry and bald. Sentiment is
sacrificed to statistics. We scarcely know how to
convey an idea cf this curious blue-book to our
readers otherwise than by superficial measurement.
It contains 193 pages, each page averages about 70
lines, and each line contains the record of a disaster.
Supposing we open the book at random, we find an
abstract of the mishaps that ,occurred on the 26th of
February, 1847. Thus ran the first half-dozen lines
of the page, line for line as in the original :
Vessels. Tonnage. Nature of accident.
Lord Ravensworth 361 Put back to Shields, laid on shore.
Andre Felix
Amaury
Ulrica At Malta, been on shore.
Horatio
Prince George 482 Wrecked at the Dardanelles.
To abandon the tabular form of the original, we find
that on the same day the Mogul was wrecked at
Barber's Point, the Aura went on shore at the Dar-
danelles, the Princess Royal got on shore at Bombay
the Surrey put back to Moulmein, having been on
shore ; the Lady Nugent, a 642 ton ship, in the
Straits of Singapore came into contact ; the Johns
sank off Point Roinania ; and the San Antonio was
abandoned at sea. Such are the contents of the
first thirteen lines of page 11 of Lloyd's register as
transferred to the blue- book. Now, if we mul-
tiply 193 by 70—the number of pages by the
number of lines—we find that the return com-
prises an account of 13,510 accidents at sea. Let
us divide this by 4, the number of years over
which the return travels, and we have 3,377
and a fraction to represent the mishaps of each year.
This yields, within a trifling fraction, 65 accidents,
wrecks, &c., for each of the 52 weeks of every year,
and, consequently, rather more than 9 for every period
of 24 hours. As a last result, we may take as a fair
deduction from Lloyd's return that an accident of

some sort or other, within ¶he knowledge of the com
mittee, occurs at sea as nearly as may be at intervals
of 21 hours throughout the year. It must not, of
course, be understood that every accident implies a
total wreck, with the loos of all hands. If a ship
carries away any of her important spars, or, on en-
tering her port, strikes heavily against a pier, whereby,
serious damage is occasioned, the accident is duly re-
gistered in this pithy chronicle of Lloyd's. Never-
theless, as we glance up and down the columns, it is
no exaggeration to say that two-thirds of the accidents
recorded are of the most serious description. One ship
is crushed in the ice near Liebau—another is burnt out
at sea—a sloop is capsized at St. Kitt's—or a huge
merchantman founders off Cape de Gatt. Thus the re-
cord continues for well nigh two hundred pages, filled
with these brief memoranda of loss, and misery, and
death. We are unable to say to what degree this re-
gister of Lloyd's can be accepted as a fair index to
the tragedies which are of such hourly occurrence
upon the surface of the cceac. The rnachiaery
brought into action by the directors of this great
establishment for the information of the underwriters
and of the mercantile community certainly appears to
act upon every quarter of the globe. Would it, how-
ever, embody the information collected at New York
for the benefit of the United States ? In short, does
this register contain an abstract of all that is known
with regard to accidents at sea ? How does it deal
with the cases of those ships concerning which nothing
is known other than that they sailed away
from a
particular port, and have since not been heard of?
We can readily coeceive that whatever information
is received at any British port, or any port within the
British possessions, is transferred to the central
establishment at the Royal Exchange. Are
we also informed of what is known in fo-
reign countries as to the losses of their own
shipping on their own shores, when no British
seaman, or seaman trading to a British port, has
been a witness of the disaster ? We cannot tell how
this may be. It would have been very desirable, for
the information of the general reader, to whom the
system of Lloyd's register is not a matter of course,
had the return been accompanied with a few prefatory
remarks, explaining the sources of these returns, and
the principal points on which they were defective.
If all were known, we fear that the average of acci-
dent or wreck every 21 hours would be fearfully in-
creased. Let us take the case of the small fishing
craft which sail from our Cornish and northern ports
to the herring and other fisheries. A gale might
swamp one-half of the little squadrons—would
Lloyd's books record the fact ? So throughout the
world. A very heavy per-centage of the loss of life
which occurs by peril of the winds and waves happens
in the small coasting boats, whose owners, in one
fashion or another, seek a livelihood on the fringes of
the sea, We much suspect that, could we obtain a per-
fect knowledge of all the mishaps that occur on the sur-
face of this unstable element, the average loss would be
fearfully increased in amount, and would be repre-
sented by still more untoward proportion than 1 loss
to 2- hours. In all probability a serious loss or total
wreck every hour would tally more closely with the
truth of the facts. It would not, however, be to much
purpose turning over the leaves of this terrible record
unless we could derive from them some practical in-
formation whereby such disasters may be prevented,
or at least greatly diminished in number for the
future. It would be in vain for us to hope that nauti-
cal skill and the science of shipbuilding can ever be
brought to that degree of perfection, that sea and land
travelling shall be brought to the same level of se-
curity. But a very cursory glance will suffice
to show that the accidents which occur to ships
suited to the stations upon which they are
employed, and—according to the natural presump-
tions of the case—ably manned and commanded,
are comparatively few in number. Bad ships, bad
crews, and bad commanders afford but a sorry chance
for a successful voyage. The natural tendency of the
great extension of commercial intercourse, of the in-
creased necessity of high speed, and consequently the
employment of larger and better craft, under the com-
mand of more competent men, will infinitely diminish
the number of accidents at sea. How often is it that
we hear of a disaster occurring to any of the noble
ships owned by the leading members of the shipping
interest ? The truth, too, must be told. The inca-
pacity of too many of the masters in the British mer-
e intile marine has been the pregnant cause of loss to
-their owners and death to their crews. Men scarcely
competent to take the responsibility of an ordinary
day's work, or, if competent, of notoriously intemperate
habits, were placed in command of sea-going ships,
through the parsimony or nepotism of the
owners. The consequences that might have
been expected naturally ensued. We find the results
of these improper appointments in Lloyd's books,
There was no kind of security, no guarantee of any
kind, that a man was competent for the discharge of
the duties he undertook. The remark, we are
ashamed to say, applied with greater stringency to the
British merchant service than to any other. The
masters in charge of ships from the United States and
Baltic ports were far above the average of their British
compeers, if we except the commanders of the very
best class of ships, trading to the Indian and Chinese
seas. This evil, too, is in the course of remedy. The
result of the educational clauses in the Mercantile
Marine Bill of last session will no doubt be to provide
aof well-trained men, from among
persons for command. We will not, even so, presume
whom much
our larger
shipownerserli°dy can select the most competent
pests and collision, but at least it is not too much to
to say that there will be an end of all peril from tern-
predict that one-half of the accidents which occur to
seagoing ships might be avoided. The mere state-
ment that, according to Lloyd's books, a disaster at
sea occurs once every 2i. hours, should call attention
to the point.
DAILY NEWS.—The Chancellor of the Exche-
quer, in his speech to the people of Halifax on Thurs-
day, described his great faith
in the value of know-
ledge, and his conviction that education should be'
extended in this country. Mr. Cobden, who sat be-
side Sir Charles Wood, made the Most of this admis-
sion by reminding the Hon. Member of her Majesty's
Ministry that every particle of the substance on which
knowledge is conveyed—every printer of the child
and every newspaper of the mane-hags to bear a heavy,
mischievous, and indefensible tax. The earnest and
intelligent men who exerted themselves at the close
of last and the beginning of the presant year to pro-
cure the abolition of the paper duties, mean, we un-
derstand, to renew their exertions before Parliament
again assembles. They are prepared to contend that
the paper duties—being
an injurions restriction on
praiseworthy industry, a sto
PPage ()Abe very sources
of revenue, and suicidal therefore to the purpose
proposed—ought to be abolished.
Though it may
be alleged by nonchalant or greedy reeepients of taxa-
tion, that the wants of the Government will not permit
the smallest diminution of revenue, the advocates of
the abolition of paper duties have much
,
cause to be stopped by such flimsybarrier. A.
tnhaetiirosn. rich
The
and
proper r o
sur-
plus, let it be reiterated, always has.reference to ex-
isting expenditure, which is never likely to be more
wantonly excessive than when self-Beide too good a
at Ministers
nosvtehranaotherpexreesritdioesPeutorirfsorby
propos-
ing the abolition of taxation is not die supposed ex-
igencies of the Government as mapped out by Lord
John Russell and Sir Charles Wood, st the suggestion
of the Horse Guards and Admiralty.and Ordnance
Boards; but the injustice or inconvenience of a tax,
compared with the value of the services it is imposed
to pay for. Before restrictions on eadustry be tole-
rated—because Sir C. Wood has expended every
farthing he can lay his hands on—it must be demon•
strated that no portion of the Government expenditure
can be dispensed with. The usual official insinuation is,
that the dividends will be unpaid and national credit
annihilated—that the navy will. be dismantled and
national security endangered—that the judges will be
unsalaried and justice not administered, if all the
money be not granted which the Government
demands. No just man would impair the national
credit, endanger the national security., or lessen the
efficiency of the courts of justice. But, with the
performance of great duties, numerous assumptions
of injurious power are coupled, for which men in
office make the people pay as munificently as for
essential services ; and a reduction of taxation which
would compel the Government to lessen these as•
Bumptious, and limit the sphere of its operations,
would be doubly beneficial. We are advocates of
a reduction of taxation, because we believe that the
expenditure of the Government is in various
ways wantonly excessive, and might be greatly
reduced—with! great advantage to its cha-
racter and great benefit to the public. The
question at issue is not whether the Government will
come to a standstill if it be required to forego the
810,555/. ss. 711.—the produce of the paper duties, as
stated for 1849—but whether that sum might not
be saved by wise retrenchments. In fact, a large por-
tion of the public expenditure is wasted on "services
which inflict injury on the nation, and should be dis-
pensed with even if given gratis, instead of costing
vast sums of money as they do. The Government is
a trustee for the taxpayers, and every farthing of the
money it expends for purposes not conducive to popu-
lar advantage, is surplus revenue which ought not to
be levied at all—much less levied by duties restricting
industry. The first step towards levying the paper
duties is, to make every man who desires to become a
paper-maker register himself and take out a licence.
The next is, to have his premises surveyed by an ex-
cise officer, and every room in them marked and num-
bered. Before he commences business he must make
a true and particular entry, in writing, of all his
mills and premises, and every implement he uses in
the manufacture of paper of every description ; he
must state v hat kinds of paper he means to make,
and every engine, press, vat, and machine, is to be
distinguished and numbered. The Government as-
sumes a lordship over industry, and claims a right to
control its exercise. It requires to be paid four pounds
four shillings before it will allow a man to become a
paper-maker, The licence confers a privilege; it is