The Sun.
London, England, 1833-11-22 00:00:00

flection like Lord Bacon, was not aware that
the circumstances described by him were not
essential, but accidental, and he does not seem
to have been aware that the Greek colonies
were conducted precisely on Lord Bacon's
principle. Boswell informs us, in his most
agreeable account of the " Tour to the Heb-
rides," that " Emigration was at this time a
common topic of discussion. Dr. Johnson re-
gretted it as hurtful to human happiness ; , for
(said he) it spreads mankind, which weakens
the defence of a nation, and lessens the comfort
of living. Men thinly scattered make a shift,
but a bad shift, without many things--5 smith
is ten miles off; they'll do without a nail or a
staple. A tailor in far from them ; they'll
botch their own clothes. It is being con-
centrated which produces high convenience.'
The misery which has been caused to un-
fortunate settlers by the various Colonial
Governments of this country, is hardly to
be described, In Canada, for instance, one very
intelligent Governor (Simcoe) very properly
conceiving that without communication settlers
could not turn their industry to account, caused
lines of road through Upper Canada to be sur-
veyed, and he then offered grants along the line
of a certain number of acres to individuals who
should make the road through them gratis.
Many a poor settler embraced the offer ; when
lo I another Governor, on the Scotch maxim of
" new lairds new laws," not only abandoned the
plans of his predecessor, but gave to his crea-
tures grants of large tracts on the lines marked
out, by which means many a poor devil found
himself hundreds of miles from towns, in the
woods, and cut off from all communication with
civilized society. Against misfortunes of this
kind there is no guarding, except by some such
plan as that of the South Australian Company,
which precludes all arbitrary interference of local
governors and their creatures.—Morn. Chron.
Mr. O'Connell has just added another to the
numerous correspondences in which he had
already been engaged. A letter of the learned
gentleman to the Radicals of Hull, published in
some contemporary journals, is in no small
degree characteristic of the tastes and practices
which distinguish him. Mr. Hill, it appears,
one of the Members for that borough, had, in
vindicating his general Parliamentary conduct
throughout the last session, referred to the votes
he gave on the Irish Coercion Bill; avowing,
if the statement of a Mr. Jackson be correct,
his approbation of the general principle of the
Bill, but objecting to the creation of military
tribunals. There must, we take for granted,
be some misprint either in this representation
of Mr. Hill's language, or in that of Mr.
O'Connell's commentary, inasmuch as the
learned gentleman is made to open with the
following sentence :—" It is totally false that
Mr. Hill opposed the principle of the Bill."
Why, who said he ever did ? He himself pro-
fesses to have approved it. The rejoinder of the
learned gentlemen, therefore, seems to have been
a sort of gratuitous lie giving. With regard to
that same Coercion Bill, it may not be amiss to
observe the rancorous and revengeful terms in
which Mr. O'Connell has never ceased to speak
of its authors, terms nothing short of deadly,
personal vindictiveness. Now, what was the
declared object of the Coercion Bill, with some
of the detailed provisions of which, as originally
proposed to Parliament, we proved ourselves to
be as little enamoured as Mr. Hill, or the
Learned Member for Dublin ? The object of
the Bill was, in one word, first, to enable the
King's Government to protect the public peace,
disturbed or threatened by incessant meetings
for the undisguised purpose of agitating the
whole community, and coercing the Government
by a system of hourly intimidation ; second, to
save the persons and properties of thousands of
unoffending subjects, whose habitations were
entered forcibly by night and day, and them-
selves and their families exposed to every out-
rage that the fury of unrelenting barbarians
could suggest to them—often to death itself,
and in its most cruel forms. The Bill passed,
its preventive powers were enforced in one
county only of the entire kingdom—viz., the
county of Kilkenny ; and unless the con-
curring testimony of all the letters and all
the respectable journals which we have seen be
false, the end of the coercive law has been
effectually answered by the general pacification
of the south of Ireland, with this additional,
and to all humane minds most consolatory cir-
cumstance—that in no second county was any
one provision of the Act enforced, and not even
in Kilkenny were aught but its preventive means
resorted to,—no person whatsoever (if we err,
we are open to correction) having suffered even
the slightest of its penalties. Mr. O'Connell,
therefore, knows best why he will " never forget
nor forgive" the Ministers who introduced that
law, or the Parliament by which it was enacted,
—he knows best why the tranquillization of
Ireland should never move the never-sleeping
devil within him, and should be declaimed
against as a monstrous and irredeemable crime.
If there be any British subject whose schemes
the pacifying tendency of the Coercion Bill has
thwarted, whose selfish and rapacious ambition
it has rebuked, whose dictatorship over the action
both of Government and people it has brought to
an untimely and ignominious death, whose system
of universal disturbance and terror it has para-
lyzed, we can imagine that such a man would na-
turally invoke all the powers of darkness to heap
destruction on the advocates of such a measure,
and we leave it to the discrimination and dex-
terity of lawyers to explain wherein would consist
the substantial difference between him whom
the law of England regards as a traitor, and the
man whose possible existence we have sup-
posed. However, the pith of the epistle before
us, and of the allegations, whether truly or falsely
ascribed to Mr. Hill, is, that among those Irish
Members who in public and in the House of
Commons were most violently opponents of the
Bill, there was one who went secretly to Minis-
ters, and urged them to pass it without bating
any part of its provisions. Mr. O'Connell
asserts the falsehood of such a charge on the
ground that no Irish Member who professed to
oppose the Bill, " could have been guilty of
such vile duplicity" as that alleged against
" some" individual of the Irish ultra-radical
body. It then becomes a question, on one side
of fact, and on the other of moral possibility ; nor
do we see much to blame in a suggestion said to
have proceeded from Mr. O'Connell, that all
the Irish Members who opposed the Bill, should
publicly purge themselves by a solemn declara-
tion from an offence against truth and manhood
so foul as that which Mr. O'Connell, on their
behalf, repudiates, and of which we will ac-
knowledge that the individual (if any) who com-
mitted it must be a sneaking and despicable
fellow. However, the case is different when it
comes to a demand on Mr. Hill for the disclo-
sure of specific names. No man can shut his
eyes to the certainty,.that if, through Mr. Hill