The Sun.
London, England, 1833-01-18 00:00:00

T/:C~l

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

The Peers of Scotland, having held their
electoral college at Edinburgh, have returned to
the House of Lords the full compliment of their
16 representatives, hostile to Reform measures
and to his Majesty's Government. The Mini-
sterial nomination-list--as religiously acted upon
n old Tory days as the conge d'elire of a
Bishop—was not probably produced on this occa-
sion, and under such a Dean and Chapter as Lord
Lauderdale and his Conservative compeers would
very likely have been treated with contempt.
Thus are sixteen Deputies of the Scotch Peer-
age despatched to the Upper House to oppose
the almost unanimous voice of the Representa-
tives of the Scotch people in the Lower. Thus
do the majority of titled Scotchmen, who date
their honours from before the Union, take a
pride in declaring that they have learnt nothing
since 1707, or that they are opposed to the im-
proved political creed of their age and nation.
Thus has Holyrood-house become the last and
only asylum in Great Britain for exiled divine-
right Royalty, and Conservative nobility—for
fraudulent insolvency, and superannuated faction.
The patrician order, as an order, in Scotland
has given itself a suicidal blow, and accelerated
its own downfall, by such an absurd resistance
to the general feelings of the nation. Public
opinion will henceforward scarcely estimate its
existence as an element in the social condition
of that part of the island. The people are also
so strong in their own rights, and so rooted in
the conviction of their own superior attainments,
that they can afford to despise its opposition, or
to treat lightly its favours. The days have gone
by in which these patricians could count any
portion of their countrymen among their vassals,
in which they could dazzle them by their splen-
dour, or overpower them by their rank. The
first working of the Reform Act among our
brethren north of the Tweed has been remarkable
for the energy with which the people—the ple-
beians as they used to be called—of Scotland
have thrown down their idols—and passed from
a state of superstitious reverence for titles and
station to one of indifference or hostility. Yet
this is the time in which an insignificant clique
of some forty or fifty Peers choose to assemble
in the old palace of the Stuarts, and vote by a
list of sixteen of their number that the nation is
wrong, and that reform, so universally desired,
is a calamity ! Few of our readers need be
told that, though there are upwards of four-score
Scotch Peers who have votes for the return of
the sixteen representative Peers to the British
Parliament, yet that the number out of which
candidates can be selected is much more limited.
All the Noblemen whose titles to the Peerage
were created before the Union of Scotland with
England have a right to vote for the Parlia-
mentary deputation, though many, or perhaps
most of them, have subsequently, under different
titles, been admitted to the Peerage of Great
Britain, and consequently now sit in the House
without election. On the present occasion
we find that seventy voted either directly,
by proxy, or by sealed lists ; but it will
easily be seen from their titles, that most of
then), such as the Duke of Gordon, the Duke of
Hamilton, the Duke of Montrose, the Earl of
Lauderdale, and so on, are already senators. Pro-
bably, though the Conservatives had wished to
send all the friends of the Ministry, who are
not already British Peers, they could not have
made out the number of 16 ; but that is no ex-
cuse for insulting the sense of the nation by
excluding every one of them. In the last Par-
liament four of the Scotch Peers voted for the
Reform Bill ; to the present, Lord Lauderdale
has put his veto on their re-election. Another
fact deserves to be remarked—a fact easily de-
ducible from the manner in which the suffrages
are distributed—namely, that though the whole
list of 16 is returned by the Conservatives, yet
that the majority of votes for the successful
candidates, is not great over their Reform rivals.
Thus, the lowest on the list of the Conservatives
has only 40 votes, and the highest on the list of
the Reformers has 36. Indeed, with few ex-
ceptions, the noble constituents, so far as their
opposite lists extended, seemed to have formed
themselves into two parties, who adhered toge-
ther in their votes, so that a majority for one
Conservative became a majority for all. It is
not a little singular that the soul of this Conser-
vative confederacy—the leader in this electoral
crusade against Reform—or, to use an appro-
priate anti-climax, the bell-wether in this Tory
flock—should always himself have been excluded
by the former Tory faction from representing
his order in Parliament, and that he should have
been obliged io get into the House of Lords
for the first time by a British patent. It is
still more singular that, in those days, he was
not only too much of a Whig to receive
Tory support, but too much of a Radical
to be a Whig ;—that, in short, he was a
citizen and a sans-culotte. Nothing, it would
appear, would satisfy him but the whole swing
of the pendulum from one side to the other ;
but he may test assured that, though now more
successful against the Government than he was
with his former friends against his late oppo-
f;ents, this Holyrood-house victory will not
firing him many laurels, nor add extensively to
his infwence. He will be found, like most
cunning glen, to have overshot his mark, by af-
fording voluntarily that opportunity of defeating
his projects which could not have been properly
seized by force. It is quite possible, without a
new election, to reinforce the ranks of the Mi-
nistry by as many Peers as by his arts and in-
trigues he has erased from the list of their
supporters ! Times.

We present our readers with some further
extracts from that painful and distressing volume
—.' The Report of the Factories' Regulation
Inquiry"—the record of infant slavery, and more
than infant torture. During the forty days' in-
vestigation of the Committee, and from the lips
4 figarly a hundred witnesses who were exa-
mined, we have learnt the existence and extent
of a system of cruelty and degradation to which
a large portion of the young of the working
classes in our manufacturing districts are
sub-
jected, which almost makes us shudder at the
means by which our manufacturing superiority
has been acquired, and our immense manufac-
turing wealth accumulated. For the last forty
years we have had numerous examinations into
the atrocities and abominations of the colonial
slave trade, and into the hardships and horrors
of colonial slavery. The former has been abo-
lished in consequence of the damning nature
of the evidence by which it was assailed ; and
the latter, we trust, will soon disappear amid the
loud indignation of an enlightened and improving
.b6lliin'triiity. And shall the scene of slavery then
j---: ,tei transferred to the mother country ?—shall
p _ English infints be substituted, by the consent
1„-i-, of,fieel:' refOied, and Christian England, for
1";;:\ --<,- AfiiiaWnt s ? It is not unadvisedly that we
i
eKi;inaltifr-
,-Itii ling comparison ; nor is it for the
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