The Sun.
London, England, 1834-12-22 00:00:00

nephew, a gentleman at the bar, has gone to Scotland
to canvass the district—a trust that could not, we un-
derstand, be committed to abler hands. His success
is considered certain, and we heartily wish that the
• event may realise this anticipation, for we are persuaded
that Sir Peter Laurie, if elected, will make a most
assiduous, intelligent, and independent Member of
Parliament.—Morning Post.
It is greatly to be regretted that the period of a gene-
ral election, which is evidently one which calls for the
exercise of a coel and sober judgment, should be uni-
formly that when every engine of excitement is set to
work, to alienate the mind from any thing like a state
of calm deliberate wisdom. For this the Press is in
no small degree to blame, led on, as it generally is, by
the intemperate harangues which are delivered at the
various public meetings which the occasion necessarily
gives rise to. These meetings, too, for the most part,
possess a characteristic but little creditable to the chief
actors at them, who lay it down as a test of their love
of freedom and impartiality, carefully to hear only one
side, and to weigh down with every species of uproar
and contempt any effort to break through so wise and
salutary a canon. As mew advance in knowledge and
in the enjoyment of political rights, it is greatly to be
wished that the one should ilriri=o, their fitness for the
other ; and that the Reform Act:, instead of opening
the door more widely to the demagogue and empty pre-
tender, should have thrown a degree of light upon
them sufficient to warn each new constituency from
delusion. The approaching election, we regret to
perceive, is coming on with too much of the character
we allude to. It will be our object, as far as in us
lies, to calm this excitement and dispel this delusion.
We regret that the class of persons from whom better
things might be expected are among the first to deal
in language not only at variance with reason and judg-
ment, but marked by a degree of intemperance and in-
decency which would disgrace the lowest orator of the
lowest clubs. To the insane and inflammatory ravings
of an Ecclesiastical Judge, as first in this intemperate
career, we need not again refer ; but when we see such
staid and respectable persons as bankers and merchants
of London, essaying to rival each other in exhibitions
scarcely less disgusting and unseemly, we naturally ask
with what propriety lower and uneducated men can be
blamed for giving a loose to similar intemperance,
with such leaders setting them such examples ?
And what is the result which the blindness brought
about by this temporary fever produces, but to let
the wolf into the fold—but to hand over to the mere
unqualified pretender a trust which should only be
confided to those whose claims should previously have
undergone a calm but more searching scrutiny ? Need
we, in corroboration of this, refer any man of the com-
monest observation to the numerous instances which
occurred at the last general election, where persons by
means of this kind of clamour and delusion, actually
stole into a trust of which they were wholly unworthy
and unfit ? And is there a stronger reason for dis-
solving the present Parliament, which weighs in most
mens minds, than the necessity of getting rid of this
class of incompetent pretenders from a place their pre-
sence pollutes ? But experience will indeed be thrown
away, and knowledge will have been diffused in vain,
if pretenders of the same class have again the assur-
ance to present themselves at the hustings, and are
again accepted. Above all things do not let the elec.
tors deceive themselves by tests or pledges. He who
is most profuse in promises is not unfrequently the first
to break them. Nor can prefligate morals and habits
in private life, be other than unerring proofs of unfit-
ness for the trust now about to be reposed ; let the
noisy clamourer be tried by this test, and how many
are there who, rather than stand its searching investi-
gation, would sink into the insignificance from which
they ought never to have emerged ?—Morning Herald.
Expressions of feeling and opinion are hourly taking
place, and on both sides of the great question which
now agitates this country—viz. whether the welfare of
the people of England is most deeply involved in the
maintenance of certain political principles, or in aiding
the return of certain individuals to power. The two
meetings to which we have already alluded, one in
Westminster, the other in the city, were characterised
by a very different tone of sentiment. The two mem-
bers for 'Westminster, foremost among the recognised
friends of the people, and one of them especially, Sir
Francis Burdett, alike distinguished by his high posi-
tion among English gentlemen, and his long
,devotion
to the cause of reform and the interests of constitu-
tional liberty, have declared their readiness to watch
the measures of the new Administration, to resist
them where they should be reprehensible, and to
uphold them when they might advance the pro-
gress of good and wholesome government, bat as
a body when acting on Tory principles, to op-
pose them. There is in this language a sound vein
of independence, a zeal for the country, and a con-
tempt for party, which will, we anticipate, on the
approaching trial, work powerfully on behalf of the
present representatives for Westminster. The attempt
of that conceited goose's rump, the Charing-cross pa-
triot, to impose a third candidate—some journeyman
of his own—upon the choice of the electors, was met
by the good sense of all present by a burst of uncon-
trollable ridicule. The intelligence, and property, and
public spirit of Westminster may now, we think, be
trusted, as on most former occasions they have de-
served to be. On the City meeting we have already
stated, and with regret, that its proceedings were very
far indeed from being presided over by " absolute
wisdom." It was neither more nor less than an ad-
vertisement of the three members who had been chosen
by the Whig and Radical interest of London on the
last election, in favour of a renewal of their preten-
sions to that honour at the election now about to come
on. The speeches made ought to be looked upon as
a rehearsal for the hustings, and since in such ca...
mob tastes and passions are, in the natural course
of things, almost invariably appealed to, perhaps
the most charitable and good-natured construotion may
be nearest to the true one—to wit, that the gentlemen
meant not quite so much as they professed. But if
this be an equitable mode of appreciating the burly-
burly speeches of those well-meaning personages,
:-^re is no such excuse for the resolutions to which they
.1,,_
- - —.nt. The latt' were deliberate. The,

.er
gave their as... ,
• and what said the first of
were ready cut and ,
ing the abrupt dis-
them ? Why, that " the
' (and
missal of Lord Melbourne's AdMinisLi-.
then two or three other and equally just assump...2lls
are enumerated) " must be regarded as conclusive evi-
dence of the existence of a factious and revolutionary ,
design to subvert, either by direct or indirect means,
the now established laws and constitution of the land,
and is at once," &c. We need go no further. Now,
we ask, can faction go beyond this ? Can any other
instance of folly and self-contradiction equal it ? The
" advising the abrupt dismissal," and so forth, and
so forth, is the conclusive evidence of a conspiracy.
But who advised it ? Unless Lord Melbourne
himself besought the King to dismiss himself and
his colleagues, who else could have " advised" it ?
His Majesty had no other Ministry but Lord Mel-
bourne's at the time. There was none other respon-
sible for any public act of the Sovereign. In truth,
there was no other official servant within reach of his
Majesty on that occasion, and no fact in history ap-
pears better established than that the dismissal sprung
out of the conversations which took place between his
Majesty and Lord Melbourne,—that there was no
concert with any person whatsoever,—no advice ten-
dered or received from any quarter. It is, we believe,
altogether unquestionable that the Duke of Welling-
ton was taken as much by surprise when the news of
this breaking up of the Cabinet reached him, as was
any one of Lord Melbourne's colleagues when his
Lordship announced it to them on his return from the
King : nay, more, that if the Duke himself had been
under the Palace roof at that moment, he would have
been very apt to dissuade his Majesty from the
prompt, and in some respects invidious, measure of
dismissing the late Cabinet when he did, since there
must have existed in his Grace's mind that same
anticipation, which was so prevalent throughout society,
that before the end of the second month of this ensu-
ing session the Melbourne Cabinet would almost
inevitably fall to pieces from want of stamina in its
composition, and want of tenacity in its purpoees—an
event which being so brought about would have exo-
nerated both King and Conservatives from the cen-
sures even of the Whigs themselves, and would have
impressed all the ivory Ow* a for months later)