The Sun.
London, England, 1834-12-30 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

The publication of the Address agreed on at the
City of London Tavern, with the signatures to it, is
so far a fair proceeding, that every one acquainted
with the metropolis may, by inspecting the names and
addresses, form his own opinion with regard to them.
The number of signatures is stated by the Times at
between 5 and 6,000. The first observation that
suggests itself on an inspection of the signatures is,
that at least three out of four are not electors of the
City of London. Indeed, the signatures range over
the whole metropolitan district ; and the Address may,
with as much propriety, be ascribed to 'Westminster or
Southwark, or any other part of the metropolis, as Lon-
don proper. That in a district containing a population
of nearly two millions, the Tories should be able to pro-
cure between 5 or 6,000 signatures, can surprise no one.
We have received a number of communications on the
subject of the Address, in which numerous errors
are pointed out. Some of the names, for instance, are
repeated three times : as Mr. Haggart, Old Broad-
street, three times ; Mr. Shuttleworth, Poultry, and
Mr. Burrell, Tokenhouse-yard, are repeated more than
once. Chapman Marshall, Alderman, is twice entered.
A device to swell the list has been frequently resorted
to—that of entering the firm, and then the different
partners individually. In numerous cases, the whole
establishment down to the porter at the door, has
signed. The same individual is often entered at
different places—as for instance Fred. Barlow Pratt
(wine-merchant and magistrate), Bridge-street, Black-
friars,.and F. B. Pratt, Kensington. Numerous clerks of
the Bank and the Establishments,who have no vote, and
many minors, are also stated to have subscribed. But we
should never have done, were we to insert the names
coming under this description which have been pointed out
to us. The number of merchants, traders, shopkeepers,
&c., entered in Tile London Directory and Court
Guide amounts to nearly 80,000 ; and it would be
strange, indeed, if the Tories, by exerting their in-
fluence over tradesmen, &c., could not master a six-
teenth part of the whole, even on the supposition that
the names to the Address are those of persons really in
business. There are, no doubt, many respectable
names to the Address ; but an inspection of a com-
plete list of " the Merchants, Bankers, Shipowners,
Traders, and others connected with the City of Lon-
don," will satisfy any one at all acquainted with the
metropolis, that the signatures in the Times, include a
-small proportion only of the rich and respectable
capitalists and persons engaged in trade. How-
ever, we have no wish to enter on the thank-
less labour of pointing out the number of boys,
warehousemen, porters, and others, who have
been entered among the traders of the port of London.
The task of analysing the list will, no doubt, be un-
dertaken by competent persons, when a very sorry
account will be given of a very large proportion of the
5,000 names. Our table is loaded with communica-
tions on the subject ; but we can only thank our cor-
respondents, and repeat that we must abstain from
entering into a detailed examination, which would be
interminable. This must be said, that the gentlemen
entrusted with the business of procuring signatures
displayed some tact at the Meeting yesterday, in ask-
ing all those who claimed admittance whether they had
signed the Address, and refusing such as could not
answer in the affirmative, and very charitably at the
same time informing them that it lay for signature in
another room, and that, on qualifying themselves, they
might enter the Meeting. This was turning curiosity
to good account.—Morning Chronicle.
The partisans of the ousted Whigs are more than
usually oracular upon the subject of the ensuing elec-
tions. According to them it is quite useless for any of
their opponents to go to the poll, every candidate in their
interest being, as they allege, " quite secure." It is
surprising, too, how this security has grown, or, as it
were, imperceptibly crept upon them. According to
the most learned in calculating this species of nativity,
it was only a week ago admitted that the new Adminis-
tration would gain 150 upon the aggregate of the elec-
tions. By degrees this number dwindled down to 40,
while the last authoritative announcement makes it 82.
In calculations so very variable and contradictory we
doubt whether the most credulous are likely to place much
faith. For ourselves, we frankly confess that we give
them no credit at all ; but look upon such prognostica-
tions for the most part as the mere dreams of that race
of quidnuncs, whose positiveness generally bears an
exact proportion to their ignorance. With reference
to the elections themselves, we believe it will be found
that in many instances the greatest uncertainty prevails
where the most positive certainty is professed ; and
then to anticipate what the votes of Members will be
before the points they will have to vote upon are
known, seems a strange way of dealing before-hand
with the members of a deliberative assembly. We are
aware that the language held by part of the Press
is, " oppose the present Ministers at any rate ;" and
there may be persons—only a few it is to be hoped--
self-degraded enough to work their way into Parliament
upon such terms ; but we have a better opinion both of
the reformed constituency and of the majority of those
who present themselves as candidates for their choice
than to assume that the one would dictate, or the other
succumb, to anything so degrading as this. As far as
the late Administration is concerned, .we believe that
the country in general entertains no kind of sympathy
towards it. Its dissolution seems very generally ad-
mitted to have been inevitable ; and, though it might
have been postponed, it could not be averted. If
the Reform Act works as it ought to do, the Mem-
bers electni under it must express the true feelings of
the country. Those feelings, if we rightly estimate
public opinion, are not with the Whigs. They have
been tried and found wanting. In no one department of
the public service have they realised, or were they likely
to realise public expectation.l bus circumstanced, the
King has called to his Councils a new Administration.
We will concede, for the sake of argument, that it may
in appearance be of a more anti-Reform character than
the country in general might have wished ; but as yet
this is mere conjecture. As yet the new Administration
has done no one act, and expressed no one opinion
which calls for condemnation. Nor is the bulk of the
people so unjust as to condemn them unheard and by
anticipation. To say, then, that there will be a trial
of strength on the very first day of the meeting of the
new Parliament, on the question of the address,'if not
on the election of a Speaker, and that the majority
will be precisely what these political oracles choose to
pronounce, is, in our estimation, the greatest affront
which they can offer to the persons whom they thus
choose to pronounce the ready-bespoke tools of fac-
tion. On the contrary, we are rather inclined to give
Members of Parliament credit for a little more wisdom
and prudence than this ; and that they will, at least,
wait to see what it is that they have to approve or
condemn, before they pronounce a judgment upon it.
It will be the fault, we readily admit, of the new Mi-
nistry if they do not make out a case, and chalk out a
line of policy, both foreign and domestic, which may
ensure a verdict in their favour.--Morning Herald.

" A good beginning makes a good ending" is an old
English proverb, the truth of which will be manifested
at the ensuing general election. We need scarcely say
that we refer to the City meeting of yesterday, which
has (as was truly observed by one of the speakers)
never been surpassed as to the respectability of the
persons composing it. Nor was this all. A degree of
sober, rational enthusiasm, an absence of all personal
bitterness and asperity, pervaded the assemblage, which
afforded an honourable contrast to the evening orgies
of the Destructives, to the rabid vituperation of the
Lushingtons, the Duncombes, and the other
turbulent and foul-mouthed individuals who play
the principal parts on such occasions. The men-
tion of the names of
.Ward, Lyall, and Wilson,
called forth (as will be seen by our report) hearty
and long-continued cheering ; while the senti-
ments expressed by these gentlemen, and their deter-
mination to give the electors of London an opportunity
of recording their opinions by their votes, strengthened
in no ordinary degree the feelings manifested by those
cheers, and pledged each individual present to do all
in his power to secure to country the services of
men whose names, whose characters, 'hose talent, and
-whose station are guarantees for their fulfilment of the
duties they undertake. We call, then, upon every one
connected with the first city in the world to support,
both by his purse and influence, the cause of order
and good government, and thus to maintain to the ut-

most of his power the just and undoubted prerogatives
of the Crown, the best security for the liberties of
the people. Let the inhabitants of this mighty city
reflect, that to them, as the constituency of the
most powerful metropolis in the world, their brother
electors throughout the country look with • anxious
eyes, in the earnest hope that they will set a
bright example. On that city whose merchants are
princes, surely our expectations and wishes are well
based. Where, indeed, can institutions be found to bear
comparison with her's ; and what a stake has she in
the general welfare of the kingdom ? Yet if energy,
activity, and union are wanting at the present moment
all these institutions will perish as though they had
never been—their place occupied by the hasty and
unseemly contrivances of wicked and foolish men—
contrivances which, possessing neither use nor beauty,
whose only charm. being that of novelty, will soon pall
upon the taste. Up, then, electors of England
Support your good King in the peaceful struggle for
his rights and our privileges which is about to ensue.
London has taught you the excellent lesson of com-
mencing well. Be it your task and theirs to follow up
the good beginning, and to select men as your Repre-
sentatives who, pledged to no particular party as a
party, will exert themselves diligently and steadily in
the public service—men unbiassed by any considera-
tion save that of attachment to their King and country.
Electors of London, you have not to seek such Re-
presentatives. Let Lyall, 'Ward, and Wilson be the
objects of your choice, and the day on which their
return is made will be a day of jubilee to the good and
loyal throughout the United Kingdom.—Morn. Post.
The voluminous and important list of names which
we yesterday published, in connexion with the well-
timed address to his Majesty, agreed upon at the meet-
ing of the 23d instant, was sufficient to demonstrate
one valuable truth,—namely, that the sense of the
people of England is not fairly expressed by those who
put themselves most arrogantly forward, and talk most
loudly as representatives of the mind of their fel-
low-citizens. Such a body as that, whose members
have just been described, and their names and stations
in society recorded through the columns of this jour-
nal, answers to our notion of what ought to be con-
sidered par excellence the " people of England." In-
dustry, intelligence, affluence, the love of order, the
dread of multitudinous violence, anxiety for the main-
tenance of all those diversified rights and powers which
the Constitution has established for its own security,
and vested in certain hands, and determined to specific
uses, and which, by their natural and regular opera-
tion, propel and control, and charaaterize the march
of our constitutional Monarchy,—these are the attri-
butes of that class of Englishmen who may be justly
regarded as forming the essence of the British nation.
The address to the Crown, which was approved by
these 5,000 or 6,000 representatives of the commercial
capital and political creed of London, contained senti-
ments which could neither be rejected by the Royalist
as too democratic, nor by the Liberal as too servile; they
were those which any independent Reformer of abuses
and Conservator of principles ought to avow, but by
which knaves of either party could not fail to be embar-
rassed. Torrents of foul slander have been poured upon
us for having upheld the objects and vindicated the
character of that independent meeting: but the virulence
has flowed from the same polluted source whence we
have been charged since the very outset of these po-
litical movements with being " renegades"—with being
" apostates"—with having abandoned our " declared
principles"—with having turned against the " cause
of the people." Now it will, we presume, be ad-
mitted—for these accusations assume it as a fact—
that the Times has ere now been the advocate of
public liberty—that it has defended the national rights
—that it has resisted the inroads of arbitrary power
—that it has flung the shield of truth and reason be-
fore the feeble and oppressed. If our revilers, in
their rancour, deny this obvious inference from
their own reproaches, we may be excused for touch-
ing on a few points of modern history, all confined
within the term of a twenty years' peace—we ask
forgiveness of the thousands whose confidence in us
has been strengthened and rivetted by our late pro-
' oeedinas ; but there are enemies to be shamed, our
friends will, therefore, pardon us this digression. What
journal was it that in the year 1816 roused the nation
to such a pitch of just hostility towards the oppressed
and odious income tax, as forced a corrupt House of
Commons to strike it by a single vote out of the
Budget, and released Great Britain from a burden of
14,000,0001. sterling per annum ? What was the
course of the Times journal in the year 1819, when
the Peterloo massacre of our fellow-citizens was vindi-
cated by the Sidmouths of the day, its authors re-
warded, and its accusers threatened. with the whole
weight of official vengeance, for daring to cry out
against the shedders of innocent blood ? If the ser-
vices of the Times at that dark and disastrous period
have been forgotten by those who style themselves the
people's friends, they have not been so by the yet
surviving enemies of the people. Who was it
that by a humane, generous, and intrepid develop-
ment of its power over the sympathies of a
charitable nation, rescued an unhappy and ill-
used Queen from the gripe of her revengeful and un-
manly persecutor ? What was our temptation to that
discouraging course, what our safeguard against the
risk of sharing deeply in the punishment designed for
that most unfortunate of women, should our efforts to
save her prove abortive, as at first all the world anti-
cipated ? We had no temptation but our reverence
for right—we had no security but the consciousness of
our own honour and of our country's justice. The
triumph was pure as it was signal, and the death-blow
to Royal tyranny will never, at least in England, be
retrieved. Was any portion of the British press before
us in our denunciation of the abominable Six Acts ?
Who so strenuously or so daringly as the Times
fought that virtuous and constitutional battle ? Who,
with such stubborn perseverance as this journal, in
the teeth of obloquy—in contempt of bigotry—borne
up by the spirit of religious freedom alone—when
Catholicism was execrated in this island—when
Irish Catholicism, albeit, for a long time unleavened
with politics, was abhorred—who, we say, stood the
onset of public feeling and opinion which then for
many years pervaded Great Britain—who, onward,
through good report and evil—under circumstances
which would have filled all breasts with despair save
only those whom the sense of duty animated—all save
those whom the conviction of eternal truth inspired,
though charged with Popery by our own brethren of
the Church of England, though our perennial efforts to
lift the Catholics from degradation were spitefully and
meanly disparaged by those for whom we struggled—.
who,' we repeat, so vigorously, so bravely, so consistently,
so successfully as this calumniated journal laboured for
more than 14 years, until the toilsome eminence was
gained, and equality of civil rights was won for all per-
suasions of Christians ? This is not a boast, it is but
an appeal to history, and an illustration of our own
character, to which, by the systematic, foul, and dis-
graceful, as it is in its nature, the despicable calumny
of a grovelling faction, 'we have (perhaps needlessly)
been provoked. The foregoing are some among many
proofs which might have been adduced had time per-
mitted, or necessity prompted us, to establish the pub-
lic spirited and popular habits of the Times newspaper.
But the Reform Bill came, and did we then desert the
people ? The people will answer for us. It is true
we often enough deserted the Whig Ministers when
they deserted the principles of the Bill, or when, neg-
lecting to push forward and accelerate, they might be
said to retard its progress. It is true that we spurred,
and lashed, and tormented, and enraged the Ministers,
and drew down their bitter curses on our heads, and
were not once but frequently regarded by them as a
fierce enemy, against whom open war ought to be de-
clared, because we could not coax, nor sooth, nor
flatter, nor corruptly defend them, nor vamp up their
absurdities, nor palliate their subserviencies, nor screen
their weaknesses, npr suffer them to go wrong with im-
punity. All this was done by someooly nottheirf a
wretched
s
hirelings of the daily press, who are only
to principles because they never had any ; while in the
unflinching maintenance of the principles with which
we set out, and of the policy which we first
recommended, no false delicacy, much less individual
partiality, OW yet deterred us from rebuking or ex-
posing " men,' when we conic' thereby advance the
" measures" which our view of the public i,lrpjfaTe qe-
manded, and such has been the pivot of our conduct

since the dismissal of the Whigs. We are still true
to the " measures" with which we started, and still
consider as a subordinate theme the- hands through
which we procure them. The Melbourne Cabinet is
no more, and to reinstate that precise Administration
would be a thing as impossible as to restore the Plan-
tagenets to the throne. We have never spoken one
word in depreciation of that body of gentlemen ;
but why our adherence to them, and not to Re-
form principles, should be made the test of our
political integrity, is for others to explain, not for us.
Our alarm is at this moment excited more by the
menaces of a real, rapid, and desperate movement to-
wards revolution, than by any dream of an impossible
reaction against the redress of grievances or the reform
of abuses. Our duty now is more than ever to fight
the people's battle—when they know not how to fight
it themselves. We will save them from the conse-
quences of the profligate recklessness or desperate ini-
quity of those who are endeavouring to mislead them.
Often as we have served the people at immense per-
sonal risk of property and liberty, we will now render
them the greatest of all services--we will save them
from themselves. We will, God willing, save the
country from the curse of a destructive and sanguinary
anarchy, into which an impious faction is labouring
night and day to plunge it. Our language and actions
are governed by this conscientious impression of duty ;
and to whatever acrimony or malice in certain quarters
we may have been for some short time exposed, there
is not a day which does not now afford us satisfactory
testimonies of the soundness of our original judgment,
by the number as well as the quality of those declara-
tions of confidence which the very last week—nay, the
last twenty-four hours have produced.—Times.