The Sun.
London, England, 1833-11-16 00:00:00

sioners ; and the former, who have given evi-
dence, express a natural regret that such enter-
tainments can never more be enjoyed. There
appears a kind of regular profusion or garnish of
baseness about these entertainments, which we do
not remember to have seen paralleled anywhere
else. In other cases we hear of occasional feast-
ing at the expense of the patron of the borough ;
we hear of pipes or hampers of wine, and of
haunches of venison or presents of game, being
sent to make the corporators merry at an elec-
tion, or at the anniversary of some electoral vic-
tory. We hear, in fact, of what Sir Joseph Yorke,
in his sailor style, called a " blow out," given
once or twice a year, but we have never seen
guzzling corruption organized like that of the
Cambridge Corporation. hay, the corporate
knights of this Rutland round table were even
proud of their slavery, and called themselves
" The Rutland Club," wearing probably the
collar, and sitting under the arms of their Lord.
" The ox," it is said in Scripture, " knoweth his
owner, and the ass his master's crib." But
even those animals, though avowedly the pro-
perty of man, are not branded with the name of
their proprietor on their foreheads ; they are not
degraded to the level of the corporate guests at
the Eagle in Cambridge ; they are allowed to
eat their food, and to ruminate in quietness
without wearing their master's badge ; they are
not, in short, called " a Rutland Club." But
political corruption and subserviency were not
the worst vices about the Corporation of Cam-
bridge. Their gross peculation and embezzle-
ment of the town property are still more glaring
and criminal. It would occupy columns of our
paper to detail and to explain the disgraceful
facts which go to support this assertion. The
property of the borough has been leased or ra-
ther alienated, in a great part, to the corporators
themselves, or their relatives and friends, at lu-
dicrously inadequate prices. The summary
produced by the Town Clerk of leases
granted for various terms was the following :-
62 for 999 years ! 69 for 40 years, 3 for 99
years, 2 for 21 years, 1 for 500 years. They
were generally granted for merely nominal sums
to burgesses and their connexions. It was pro-
perly remarked by one of the Commissioners,
that such long leases amounted to virtual sales of
the property. "If this property," he added,
" had not thus been improperly disposed of, the
corporation would have had funds sufficient for
every public purpose ! The town clerk and
deputy town clerk replied, if the property of the
corporation had been properly disposed of, or
remained in their hands at the present time, it
would have been one of the richest out of Lon-
don." Large sums of money have been re-
ceived, of which no account whatever could be
given. Charitable funds to a considerable
amount, intrusted to the management of the
corporation, have been misapplied to the private
uses of that body, and never devoted to the ob-
jects for which they were destined. This is par-
ticularly the case with two charities—White's
and Crane's, of which, till within these last two
or three years, the corporators pretended com-
plete ignorance, while they were all the time
applying their proceeds to their own purposes.
But two facts strike us as more extraordinary
even than this corrupt disposal of borough and
charitable property ; namely-Ist, that the right
should be claimed and asserted by some of the
corporators of dealing with such property as if
it belonged to themselves in their private capacity,
and as if they were perfectly irresponsible for its
management, though they had sold it all and
pocketed the proceeds; and, 2dly, that they
should have had the effrontery to pay the costs
llof the prosecution of two of their members fur
an assault out of the borough funds. The ad-
ministration of justice intrusted to the officers
of the Corporation presented nothing more sa-
tisfactory than their management of the
borough property. One of them was in
the habit of making about IW/. by de-
manding and pocketing illegal fees, and Mr.
Gunning's (a barrister) account of the mode
of transacting business in the Court of Pleas
would make it a burlesque on judicial tribunals.
" I do not," said he, " practise in that Court,
Ist, because the Judge, who is the Mayor, is
deficient in legal knowledge, not having been a
lawyer ; and 2dly, because it is influenced so
much by corporation feelings that I could not
expect an impartial decision." But we have
neither time, room nor patience at present to
enter into any further detail of these disgraceful
abuses, and can only congratulate the country
on the appointment of a commission which has
brought them to light, and which must insure
their correction.— Times.
If we have condemned the system of calumny
acted on towards the Earl of Durham by the
Conservative journals, we are not, on that ac-
count, blind to the defects of the present law of
libel. It is impossible to use too strong terms
in condemning a law, which may at any time be
invoked by guilt to the destruction of the inno-
cent ; which is unjust in principle, because it
deals out equal ruin to intentional malice and
acts to which malice cannot even by possibili y
be imputed. It is of the very essence of news-
papers, for instance, that they collect and pub-
lish information from distant quarters, as well
as what takes place in their own neighbourhoods.
With respect to the intelligence originally com-
municated by themselves, it is in their power,
and it is their duty, to see that it is derived from
authentic sources. With respect to intelligence
derived from distant places, they are precluded
from verifying it ; and they must either cease to
publish such intelligence, or they must take it or,
the faith of the jouanals in which it originally
appeared. But the English libel law holds every
one who copies a statement from another Jour-
nal equally responsible with that journal. There
is not a daily paper published in London which
does not contain hundreds of statements, de-
rived from Continental, American, and Provin-
cial Journals, which, for anything that the
publisher can possibly know, may be libels.
It not unfrequently happens that the paper
in which a statement first appears is acquitted,
and the innocent copier is punished. Some
years ago the Birmingham Journal co-
pied a paragraph from a Worcester paper,
the latter escaped, while the Birmingham
Journal paid, in costs and damages, a heavy
sum—more than equal, we believe, to the mar-
ketable value of the paper at that time. For the
same paragraph, our contemporary, the Times,
was prosecuted, and the result was, a verdict for
a small sum of damages: no doubt but that stun
answered the ends of the attorney who brought
the prosecution, as it enabled him to receive a
large sum of costs. We remember having, in
common with all our contemporaries, copied a
paragraph respecting some swindlers who were
carrying on their operations in different towns of
the north of England. As all swindlers are in
league with attorneys, these gentry were soon
informed by their London adviser, that by com-
mencing actions againat the London papers who