The Sun.
London, England, 1833-09-25 00:00:00

support the ring call thefaney—(Here the crown
behind the box drew back, as if by instinct). I
advise them to drop the trade, which I believe
to be connected with the most nefarious system
of plunder. Let them look at your present
condition, and learn to benefit by it ; for you
are clearly guilty of a robbery, and certainly will
be punished for it. This pugilistic school is a
bad school ; if you don't happen to be thieves
when you get into the ring, it soon makes
thieves of you." This we take to be the proper
mode and language to adopt with such charac-
ters. It is justly emphatic, and is calculated to
do great good to society. We wish that all our
sitting Magistrates, paid and unpaid, would
take the hint from Sir Peter Laurie on such
occasions, and we should soon see a great im-
provement in the habits, manners, and morals
of the lower orders. But sonic Magistrates
have an odd way of repressing delinquency.
Several of these gentlemen appear to feel more
compassion for the gambler or thief (and the
terms are synonymous), than they do for the
injured victim of rapine and violence. It is on
such occasions that the Morning Herald, as in
duty bound, not only withholds its praise, but
expresses its indignation at such mistaken
notions ; but it is with the highest pleasure we
record acts and sentiments that do honour to the
Magistracy, and tend to uphold the laws and
regulations of civilised society.—Morn. Herald.
The Royal Commission issued for " Inquir-
ing into the State of the Municipal Corpora-
tions of Scotland," and the heads of inquiry, or
set of instructions, drawn up by the commis-
, sioners, " in relation to the state and condition
of the several cities, burghs, and towns," alluded
to in the commission, show that the investiga-
tion into corporate management and the expo.
sure of corporate abuses, are to be conducted
with the same vigour north of the Tweed as in
this more important division of the United
Kingdom. The Scotch public seem to repose
perfect confidence in the honesty, energy, and
knowledge, of the gentlemen nominated on the
commission ; and the comparatively short time
allotted them for the completion of their task
must urge them, for the sake of their reputation,
to activity and diligence in its prosecution. The
abuses into which they will have to inquire are,
in many respects, more flagrant than those of the
English boroughs ; but the commissioners will
have the advantage of finding the system of mis-
management more uniform, and the benefit of
being directed in their labours by the reports of
three or four committees of the House of Com-
mons, who have traversed the path before them
in 1793, in 1819, 1820, and 1821. The
broad glare of day which has been let in, or is
about to be let in, on the whole of the close
corporation system in both divisions of the island,
seems to have occasioned the greatest consterna-
tion, and to have excited the most violent rage
among the jobbing corporators and their Con-
servative partisans. They are conscious that
more inquiry and exposure must be their ruin,
and therefore, unlike the Grecian hero, they
pray and struggle, that, if slain, they " may not
be slain in the light"—a mode of death which
must add posthumous disgrace to the dissolution
of their corporate existence. To such persons
the infliction of the Reform Bill was nothing to
the terrors of these municipal commissions, as
the enactment 'of thelornaer merely deprived them
of a little political influence, while the labours of
the latter will annihilate their corrupt gains, and
strip them of their local importance. They are,
therefore, panic-stricken at this sudden irruption
into their secret domain, and start at the seal of
the Royal Commission, as Homer represents
his subterranean divinity when the rays of the
sun were let down upon his dark abode. The
mode of defence, or of warfare, which they
have adopted in such circumstances is in ad-
mirable keeping with the nature of their cause.
As the thief calls the aid of his gang against the
thief-catcher, they hare set all their Conservative
organs in motion, both metropolitan and pro-
vincial, to decry the commission—to abuse the
commissioners, as the agents of revolutionary
robbery—and to represent an inquiry into the
abuses of corporate trust as an attack on the
rights of private property. The cry of revolution
and spoliation has been raised in England, and
will probably be echoed from each of the sixty-
four ro,al burghs north of the Tweed. In the
confusion of intellect produced by their just
alarms, their wounded selfishness, and their
impotent resentment, the Conservatives forget
three things, which, if remembered, might tend,
if not to calm their passions, at least to prevent
their boisterous expression for the present. In
the first place, they forget, and ought to recollect,
that the able and respectable persons to whom
the Royal commission in England is addressed,
and whom they so foully slander, are only an-
swerable for the active and discreet manner in
which they perform an imperative duty, and that,
though the original conception of the measure
(however meritorious we regard it) is not
theirs, they would be grossly culpable if,
having undertaken it, they did not evince the
zeal, the learning, the courageous firmness, and
the searching sagacity for which they were se-
lected to execute their difficult task. In the
second place, they ought to know or to recollect
that the commissioners do not pretend to be
legislators—that they can neither grant charters
nor take them away—that they are only employed
to collect information and to suggest improve-
mints for the use of the Government—that
where municipal magistrates or councillors are
honest and firmly founded in their rights, they
have no reason to apprehend the fullest disclo-
sure of their public conduct—that inquiry is
not decision, nor the recommendations of a
report the law of the land ; and that when the
subject comes to be discussed on a Bill to cor-
rect abuses, the Conservatives will have ample
opportunities of displaying their eloquence in
favour of hateful privileges or against advisable
innovations. Anti in the third place, such
sticklers for antiquity and precedent as our Con-
servatives pretend to be, should be informed, or
should bear in mind, that the power of issuing
commissions like the present, is expressly re-
served to the Crown by statute, and has on
several occasions been exercised in less pressing
circumstances than the present. In some excel-
lent observations " on corporations," addressed
by Mr. Stephenson, formerly Member for W estn
bury, to Mr. Abercromby, as Chairma
of the late Corporation Committee, we find
the 10th section of the Ist of Edward IV. cited,
in which it is expressly reserved to the King
"to direct commissions under the Great Seal,
to have full power and authority, as well to
survey all and singular lay corporations, guilds,
fraternities, companies, aid fellowships of mys
teries or crafts, incorporate, and every one of
them, as all other the said fraternities, brother-
hoods, and guilds, within the limits of their
commission to them directed, and all the evi-
dences, compositions, books of account, and
other zvritin,s of every of their, to the intent