The Sun.
London, England, 1834-10-20 00:00:00

BRUSSELS AND GERMAN PAPERS.

BRUSSELS, OCT. 16.—Her Majesty the Queen of the
French and the Princesses of Orleans, with their suite, ar-
rived at the Palace of Laeken yesterday evening. His Ex-
cellency Lord Minto, Ambassador of the Court of Britain
at Berlin, arrived the evening before yesterday, in this city,
coming from Berlin, and on his way to London. He
alighted at the Hotel de Belle Vue, with his family and a
numerous suite, in five carriages.
The Polish Refugees who receive relief from the State,
are now distributed between Ghent, Ypres, Bruges, Liege,
and Namur.

BRUSSELS, Our. 17.—A journal has announced that
the Duke of Wellington has lately made an application to
eGovernment respecting the dotation which was settled
n him by the Government of the Netherlands. ' This
statement is entirely incorrect, as we can affirm that no
claim of this nature has been made on Belgium.
'The same journal mentions a salary said to have been
allowed to the Duke, as Chief Inspector of the
fortresses of Belgium. The Duke never did inspect these
fortresses otherwise than in his character of General-in-chief
of the army of occupation in France, and consequently he
never could have received on that account pay from the
kingdom of the Netherlands.—Moniteur Beige.
The Courrier Beige says, " The Courrier Francais is ill-
informed when it believes that the Duke of Wellington has
parted with the estate settled on him as Prince of Waterloo.
The truth is, that a long time ago (that is, seven years be-
fore the revolution of 1830), he sold all the timber growth
on about one-half of the land that was given him, and that
this half has since been converted into arable lands, and let
to several private persons. This operation, considering the
good quality and the situation of this, land, has certainly in-
creased the revenue of the estate, but this is the only
change that has been made."
The Queen of the French and the Princesses are ex-
pected at Brussels to-day to visit several establishments.
A Deputation of the Chamber of Commerce of Ypres
and Courtray had the honour to be admitted to an au-
dience of His Majesty the day before yesterday at the
Palace of Laeken, and to present to him a memorial on
the plans for the junction of the Haine with the North
sea. The Deputation afterwards waited on the Minister
of the Interior.
The Nouvelliste of Limburg lately said that some Dutch
soldiers had come into the Belgian territory, and broken
the windows of a house into which admission was re-
fused them. On this occasion Colonel Brialmont, Go-
vernor of Venloo, has written a letter to that journal, in
which he announces that a complaint having been made
to the Dutch military authorities by the captain com-
manding the Belgian troops on the frontier, the two
Dutch soldiers who committed these excesses had been
put under arrest, as well as the subaltern officer who on

LONDON,
MONDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 20, 1834.

The moments which immediately follow the passing
of any very extraordinary event, or the termination
of any memorable catastrophe, are ill adapted to the
prosecution of inquiries into the origin of the one, or
the means of profiting to the greatest possible extent
by the example of the other. The public mind is
taken by surprise under such circumstances ; and the
judgment, which would extract the wisest lessons for
the future from the misfortunes of the past, if allowed
time to deliberate, bows to the dictates of passion, and
gives currency to the strong ebullitions of feeling when
pressed for counsel in cases of unwontedly urgent
emergency. Hence it has always happened that the
world has at one time lamented as irreparable losses
what at others were found to be radical defects in the
social system ; and even where injury was sustained
to a very great extent, it has afterwards become a
question of difficult solution how a much greater
good could have been effected, had such an injury
never happened. The burning of St. Paul's Ca-
thedral was, at one time, considered the greatest
calamity that could possibly happen ; and yet
had such an event never taken place, very possibly Sir
CHRISTOPHER WREN would have never bequeathed to
the world the most magnificent religious edifice on the
whole earth ; and dreadful as was the great fire of
London, we are sure there are few who know the im-
provements which followed that fearful catastrophe,
who would rank it among the greatest calamities, taken in
the abstract, that ever happened in this country, though
such was the opinion of all contemporary writers. We
believe the same will yet be said of the destruction of
the Houses of Parliament ; which, except for their
venerable association with much that is great and good
in our past history, were remarkably inappropriate for
the purposes of legislation in the nineteenth century.

Of the members of the House of Commons, nearly one
half were without any accommodation whatever within
the walls, and we ourselves have seen crowds of members
shut out on divisions on most important questions, owing
to the impossibility of being able to enter a house
crowded to. suffocation. During the debates on the
Catholic Relief Bill, the Reform Bill, the Anti-
slavery Bill, and O'CONNELL'S motions respecting
the repeal of the Union, and the Irish tithe ques-
tion, several Members of the House of Commons
were prevented from voting, by reason of the thronged,
or rather packed state of the House. This inconve-
nience, which must have frequently affected the votes
of Parliament, could not be avoided in a house des-
tined to receive six hundred and fifty-eight persons,
when, in point of fact, it only afforded accommoda-
tion for the reception of four hundred. Although the
House of Lords was something better off in regard to
room for the accommodation of the Members, still
every person who visited it, must have been struck
with the want of any appropriate place for the recep-
tion of distinguished visitors. Even the Mem-
bers of the House of Commons had net a seat ap.
propriated for their use, and during the long, and often
prosy debates, it was not unusual to see the Repre-
seatatives of the British nation, squatted in anything
but dignified positions round the steps of the throne ;
looking more like a gathering of privileged schoolboys
than like an assemblage of Statesmen.
Although the persons who hitherto complained of
inadequate accommodation in the now destroyed Houses
of Parliament, more particularly the House of Com-
mons, dwelt principally on the unhealthiness of crowd-
ing so many persons in chambers too confined, and ill
ventilated ; yet we may here observe—we trust with-
out offence to any party—that the personal injuries
sustained by the Members were not the worst effects
produced by the smallness of St. Stephen's Chapel.
The country was the great sufferer, many of whose
representatives were shut out from discharging the
duties for which they were appointed, simply because
there was no place for them to occupy in the Councils
of the Nation. The heat and loathsome effluvia 'of
the House frequently overcame men of weak and deli-
cate constitutions, who in all other respects were the
best fitted to take part in the discussions then going
forward, and important resolutions were often lost., and
motions of questionable utility carried, because the
persons could not be present who best understood the
nature of both. In point of fact St. Stephen's Chapel
was only suited for a legislative chamber for the old
boroughmongers, where the members might be said to
take their seats for life, and so in time become proof
to. the effects of an atmosphere not unsuitable to the
deeds performed in it. It was quite large enough in
the olden times, when to compel attendance in Par-
liament required the full exercise of the royal power,
and even subsequently when men purchased their seats
there, and attended just so often as suited the con-
venience of the Minister. But the Reform Bill de-
stroyed this system, and, with the downfall of the
system, created a necessity for an enlarged House of
Commons capable of receiving, and worthy of contain-
ing, the representatives of a great and free people.
And now that we have recovered from the shock of
the late awful conflagration, it is time that we should
call public attention to the plan that ought to be
:adopted, to more Levait 41,0 already
tained. The old Houses of Parliament are now in
"ruins—" Peace be with them," and let their memory
only be preserved. In the erection of new ediflees let
there be no attempt at resuscitation. Let us never
again be offended with the sight of incongruous and
useless masses, without even the consideration of an-
tiquity to redeem their imperfections. We are past
the season when such houses could be desirable. Eng-
land is not the country she was in the reign of the
Tudors ; her habits, her customs, her principles, her
tastes, her amusements, are all changed, and it is high
time that her public structures should be made to cor-
respond with her altered condition. In the erection of
the new Houses let the greatness of the nation be con-
sulted, and let them be made to correspond with it. The
House of Commons ought to afford accommodation
for a thousand members at the very least, with appro-
priate benches for Members of the Royal family, and
of the House of Lords, for the reception of foreign
ambassadors, and strangers of distinction, as well as
for the public press, and the public generally. Let
the new Houses of the Legislature be built without
a thought of the absurd and lying presumptions which
every person laus;hed at, while every person was pre-
sumed to respect them. The legislature can no longer
talk of its privacy from public inspection, nor will the
nation longer countenance the falsehood of no stranger
being present at debates to which hundreds had the
SPEAKER'S order of admission. In France the right
of the public to be present at the debates, in :the Cham-
bers of Peers and Deputies, forms an article of the
charter of 1830, and now that the debates of the British
Parliament are published daily with the tacit consent of
both Houses, it is both useless in point of form, and im-
moral in practice to talk of the secrecy of such as-
semblies. It will be therefore absolutely requisite in
building the new chambers to appoint places which
shall be exclusively appropriated to the accommodation
of Reporters, and to the reception of the public gene-
rally. As to the sticklers for economy we beg to
tell them, that the cheapest way to build a house is to
build it in such a manner as will destroy a necessity of
altering or enlarging it. The most expensive erections
are always those intended to be temporary : the money
sunk in them is lost, and the ground is but encumbered
by them. We can never have the old Houses of Par-
liament, and therefore it ought now to become our
study to erect better,
There is one thing, however, which we wish to call
attention to before dismissing this subject for the pre-
sent, and that is, the appropriation of apartments
within the precincts of the new Houses to the offices of
the Establishments. Now to this we are decidedly
opposed, as well on account of the danger to the
buildings from fire, as to the residence of private fami-
lies within edifices which most especially are the property
of the public. We have other reasons too, of a more
delicate nature, which we will not urge on this occasion.
Public men are hardly free agents when continually
surrounded by juvenile claimants for appointments ;
and it is " too bad" that the country should always
suffer because it was too generous in the first instance.
We understand that the new houses will be erected
as near the site of the old, as the alteratittls which
must be effected in their site will admit. No situation
could be better chosen, provided the whole of those
houses near to the ruins of the House of Lords, and
all the old buildings down to the river be
cleared away. Again, we say. as we must build
Chambers for the Legislature—as Mr, HUNIE'S
motion has been carried beyond the extent contem-
plated by the 11.9119t,g41*
Gentleman,..-let us, in the