The Sun.
London, England, 1869-03-01 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, MONDAY EVENING, MARCH 1, h 69.

was increased to Sixty-six upon a subsequent divi-
sion. The Resolutions were adopted. A Bill was in-
troduced, was pasp.ed through its various stages in the
House of Commons, and a little before midsummer
went up to the Lords. There, after a remarkable de-
bate of three nights' duration, it was entirely swept
aside by Earl GREY'S amendment. Parliament,
in due course, was dissolved. There was an
appeal to the country. The rest we know—
the rest is visible enough in the fact of the exist-
ence of the present Government. And—in
justification of its existence as a Government—Mr.
GLADSTONE, as head of it, as First Lord of the Trea-
sury, and leader of the immense Liberal majority in
the House of Commons, has this very evening to
explain the manner in which he and his colleagues
propose to deal with the Irish Church with regard
tolits,dis-establishment, and with regard to its dis-en-
dowment.

THE verdict of the jury in the SAITRIN case has
taken a good many persons by surprise ; and we
imagine no one more so than the distinguished judge
who tried the case. his masterly summing up was
what is commonly called " dead" against the plaintiff
throughout, and while very complimentary to her
eloquent counsel, was not a little severe upon him
for the way in which he had " played fast and loose
with the evidence." It is generally more diffi-
cult for outsiders than for the jury to judge
of the merits of a case. Nevertheless it may
sometimes happen that eloquence will overpower
reason. We are by no means confident that this did
not happen in the present instance. Sir Jous

COLERIDGE is the most eloquent advocate living, and
he has had few equals since the time when the LORD
CHIEF JUSTICE forsook the bar for the bench. Such
a counsel, with such a client—a poor, weak, defence-
less girl, ex hypothesi the victim of a most malignant
persecution—was sure to produce a deep impression
upon those who heard him, and all the more because
he had a right tothe last word. But when we pass from
his pathetic appeals to the judicial strictures of
Sir ALEXANDER COCKBURN we get into an entirely
different atmosphere. The CHIEF JUSTICE paid his
tribute to the eloquence of the SOLICITOR-GENERAL,
but his lordship was not moved by it. He pointed
out that in almost every instance of alleged persecu-
tion counter evidence had been offered which
entirely, or at least materially, explained the charge
away. For instance, the statement made by
Miss SAURIN that she had to stand for two
hours in a state of semi-nudity in her
cell, with the door open for all the nuns to
see her, resolved itself in the evidence for the defence
into the fact that her dress required mending, and
that the work took half-an-hour ; the statement
that she had to eat mouldy bread was true, but she
was no worse off than the others, for all had to eat
it in consequence of a defect in the baking, and the
incident occurred only once ; the statement that she
had to do menial work was true, but so had all the
other Sisters, in accordance with the rule of the
Order ; the statement that she had to wear a dirty
duster on her head as a penance was true, but such
penances were not uncommon. Of the other charges
nearly the whole were untrue or grossly exaggerated,
if the evidence for the defence is to be believed. In
fact the case resolved itself, for the most part, into a
conflict of evidence : on the one side is that of Miss
SAURIN ; on the other, that of the many Sisters and
other persons called for the defendants. The LORD
CHIEF JUSTICE said that he never heard witnesses give
their evidence in a manner more calculated
to claim the respect of the judge than the
Sisters who had been called in this case.
He put it to the jury whether it was more likely
that the plaintiff, whose letter to her brother had
proved her given to exaggeration, had exaggerated
throughout, or that the defendants' witnesses, who
had devoted their lives to visiting the sick, instructing
the poor, and other acts of piety, were guilty of
perjury. The jury accepted the latter alternative,
and so did the crowd in Westminster Hall, who
cheered the verdict which the LORD CHIEF JUSTICE
received without expressing the concurrence usual
when judge and jury are agreed.

There is another consideration which might have
been expected to lead to a different verdict. Even
presuming that -.NESS SAURIN'S evidence was more
trustworthy than that of the numerous other con-
curring witnesses, the prosecution was bound to
prove that the alleged persecutions were intended to
drive her out of the convent. The discipline of a
convent is severe, its laws are more minute even than
the regulations of a regiment. Offences against
those laws are judged, not according to their
inherent heinousness, but according to the degree
in which they infringe the conventual regime. An
offence trivial in itself may become serious if it is
especially forbidden. The prohibition may seem to
us trivial, vexatious; but Miss SAUBIN knew of its
existence when she entered the convent and
voluntarily promised obedience to it. Miss
SAURIN need not have gone there, need not
have put herself under the dominion of laws that
were irksome to her. She did so to please herself,
and she was bound to accept the consequences. But
it is contended that the laws were enforced upon her
with unusual severity, in order to compel her to leave
the convent. The first part of the statement is pro-
bably true, for the defendants evidently thought
that Miss SAURIN especially needed their enforce-
ment. Even if they were wrong in that supposition,
even if they suspected her unjustly, punished her
unduly, that is no proof of conspiracy. It ought
to have been shewn that there was a deliberate
intention on the part of the defendants to wrest their
regulations with the object of getting rid of their
obnoxious associate. It was not enough to shew that
they were mistaken, it was incumbent to shew that
they were malignant. The jury thought that this
was shewn, the judge clearly thought that it was
not, and we should find it hard to agree with the
first.

There are some sources of satisfaction in this
tedious trial, even though we do not think the verdict
one of them. In the first place, it is !satis-
factory to find that a case of this kind
can be tried in a British court of law with a minimum
amount of religious prejudice. We are not sure that
this would have been possible twenty years ago ; but
the nation has grown more tolerant, and, therefore,
more just. In the next place, it will be satisfactory
to all but bigoted anti-Papists to find that an institu-
tion of the kind, whose affairs have been so minutely
investigated, will bear that investigation without the
smallest scandal. Of course much that is unflat-
tering will be said with regard to convents,
and it will be assumed from this one case
that all nunneries are the scenes of petty
bickerings and tyrannies. It will be forgotten that
we have had courts-martial revealing bickerings and
tyrannies quite as petty among men as these among
women. The ROBERTSON and JERVIS courts-martial,
with their details of backboards and pickles, may
fairlybe set against the Hull convent case to shew thatif
there
is
ss
nott
e rpeenrfoetcitnthe harmonymess
-room.
.t refectory, so
likewise is

IT is hardly necessary to express any approval of
the Bill for the Repression of Crime which the Earl
of KIMBERLEY brought before the House of Lords on
Friday. The measure deals with a very pressing
evil, and it embodies all the principal changes
of the law which the voice of public opinion
has already sanctioned. It met with strong sup-
port in the Upper House, and there was an
all but unanimous feeling that whether the Govern-
ment proposals be adequate or not, the reform is one
which ought not to suffer any longer delay.
Neither party appeared disposed to tolerate that
favourite instrument of procrastination, a Select
Committee. The question is to receive the
immediate attention of Parliament, and considering
that the general principles of the measure are
approved of by the Conservative leader, there
can be little doubt that it will soon become law.
Its stipulations will doubtless be regarded with
wholesome discomfort by the class which it immc-

diately affects, but to the community at large
they can hardly fail to prove of unquali-
fied benefit. The surveillance over profes-
sional criminals is provided fur in the manner
we have recommended. All criminals who have
suffered two convictions for felony, and have been
imprisoned, though not sentenced to penal servitude,
are to remain under the eye of the police for
seven years after the expiration of their sentence.
Such a criminal shall at all times during
this period be liable to give an account
of his way of life before a magistrate.
If it be clear that he is not obtaining his liveli-
hood by honest means, a sentence of imprisonment
not exceeding twelve months may be inflicted.
The criminal under surveillance will render himself
liable to a similar penalty if found under suspicious
circumstances in a dwelling-house, or in any place
under circumstances which justify the presumption
that crime is intended. These provisions, enforced
with clue care against too much power being left in
the hands of the police, will at once abolish the
present immunity of professional dishonesty. The
large class which lives by plundering the public, and
which regards a prison merely as a necessary alterna-
tive to a life of idleness and vice, must for the future
exist only on the most precarious conditions.
Throwing the burden of proof upon the criminal,
laying down the rule that he who has twice incurred
the punishment of the law must give assurance that
there is no probability of his committing a third
offence, is the great principle of the new mea-
sure. It is alone sufficient to accomplish
much of the reform that is so greatly
needed. But the bill goes farther. On a
third conviction for felony within five years, the
judge must inflict a sentence of not less than seven
years' penal servitude. The criminal who has been
convicted a third time will remain under sur-
veillance for life. Ticket-of-leave men may be
required to furnish proof of following a honest
calling, and, failing to do so, be sent to serve the
full term of their former sentence. Receivers of
stolen goods must in certain cases prove that they
had no knowledge of the real nature of the transac-
tion. Vagrants will be more summarily dealt with,
and assaults upon the police more severely punished.
These details will aid in carrying out the wider stipu-
lations of the bill, which, as a whole, cannot fail to
bring about a salutary change. Henceforth the
principle of our criminal law is to be changed.
Instead of affording the criminal every facility, under
the cover of delusive ideas regarding the liberty of
the subject, the law will regard the professional
thief as its permanent enemy, and will not cease its
control until his evil courses are "abandoned.

MR. GLADSTONE AND THE IRISH CHURCH.

(From " The Gladstone Government, by a Templar.")

Recollecting what have been the principal phases of his
political character, remembering that be has been succes-
sively a Conservative, a Liberal Conservative, a Liberal,
and eventually, what he is now, an Advanced Liberal, it
has been objected to Mr. Gladstone that be has, by reason
of those very changes, been flagrantly inconsistent. The
accusation, however, is in itself nothing less than an ab-
surdity. At any rate, thinking as we do ourselves, it is to
us nothing less than an absurdity ; for, in point of fact,
from our way of looking at it, at least, the phases named
are not so much changes as they are developments.
As well quarrel with a full-grown man for being no
longer a stripling, or a school-boy, or, still more, for not
being yet an infant, as impute to Mr. Gladstone the hein-
ous guilt of having advanced from being the young Tory
Member for the Duke of Newcastle's pocket borough of
Newark to be the Liberal Member for the constituency of
Greenwich, and head of a Cabinet having within it, among
other colleagues, a thorough-going reformer, such as the
Member for Birmingham. He has advanced, indeed, by
regular and appreciable gradations. And the regularity
of his progression—odd though, at the first blush, it may
seem for any one to say so—can hardly be more strikingly
illustrated than by reference, here, more particularly, to
the development of his views in regard to the Irish Church
Establishment.

The maintenance of that Church, be began by advocat-
ing. He is now about to undertake immediately the
sweeping of it aside altogether as an institution of the
State, first of all by disestablishment and afterwards by
disendowment. Between those two positions there is an
apparent, and in ono sense, of course, a very real dis-
crepancy.

But, it is easy enough to understand how it is, now, that
these seemingly irreconcilable opposites have come to be
linked harmoniously together. And, in order to de-
monstrate this very clearly, it is only necessary to string
together in, as it seems to us, somewhat more cogent
sequence, a few facts and dates culled from no more re-
condite source than Mr. Gladstone's own Chapter of
Autobiography.
According to Lord Macaulay's masterly summary of the
whole theory set forth in Mr. Gladstone's book ou Church
and State, it rested—these being the very words of the
great reviewer—' on this great fundamental proposition,
that the propagation of religious truth is one of the prin-
cipal ends of government, as government!' Macaulay
himself ; adding that, if Mr. Gladstone has not proved
that proposition—again we are employing the very words
of the reviewer—"his system vanishes at once."

Now, within these last few months, as before intimated,
Mr. Gladstone has himself, through his Chapter of Auto-
biography, told us all very plainly that no sooner was his
book out than ho saw clearly, within his own recognition,

that it was an anachronism. That, scarcely was the work
published, when lie perceived that the position he had
assumed in it was untenable. Two years before tha.,
namely, on the Ist of Jane, 1836, When speaking in the
House of Commons on the appropriation clause, he had
stated in so many words his conviction that a Church
Establishment maintained for the sake of its members was
"not in equity tenable for a moment"
Realising immediately after the publication of his book
that his grand polito-ethical hypothesis as to the propaga-
tion of religious truth being one among the principal ends
of government, was nothing better in itself than an Uto-
pian or Arcadian day-dream, a project altogether imprac-
ticable, a visionary scheme as intangible and impalpable as
he thereupon, as a rational man,
a "Chateau en Espagne,"
availing himself of every possible opportunity enabling
him in any way to mark his withdrawal from that fantas-
tic and isolated position in which he had placed bimself by
the sheer force of his own arguments.

We have recalled to mind his already startling retirement
in 1845, because of the Maynooth question, from the Govern-
ment of Sir Robert Peel. Immediately after his resigna-
tion, ho declared publicly in the House of Commons, on
4th of February, that he was not prepared to draw a
distinction between the Roman Catholics and other denomi-
nations of Christians with reference to the religious opinions
held by each of them respectively. Since that date he
declares now, in his autobiographic pamphlet, that he
has never uttered one word in public or in private that
could pledge him in principle to the maintenanee of the
Irish Church.

These "ea post facto" assertions of his own, however,
as his more cynical opponents may be disposed to desig-
nate them, have incidentally been accompanied, it should
be said, by two or three rather curious corroborations.
Sir John Coleridge, the pres3nt Solicitor-General, for ex-
ample, when addressing his constituents at Exeter in
August, 1868, took occasion to say that, when he himself was
leaving Oxford in 1847 he had the great honour of being
secretary to Mr. Gladstone's first election committee for
the University, and that ha very well remembered how
solicitous many of the constituents were to elicit from Mr.
Gladstone some declaration pledging him to stand by the
maintenance of the Irish Church as an Establishment.
Sir John Coleridge adding to this, from his own vivid re-
collection of those facts in 1847, " lie (Mr. Gladstone)
distinctly refused to pledge himself to anything of the
kind."

Another witness, also addressing himself to his consti-
tuency in August, 1868, namely, Sir Roundel' Palmer, in
the course of a speech delivered by him to the electors of
Richmond, related to his audience, out of his own distinct
remembrance of what occurred in 1863, that then, when
no one was bringing forward this question about the
Irish Church, or appeared likely to do so —" Mr. Glad-
stone had told him privately that he had made up his
mind on the subject, and that he should not be able to
keep himself from giving public expression to his feelings."
Between these two retrospective testimonies, however,
testimonies as to facts so entirely independent of each
other—Sir John Coleridge's evidence in regard to 1847,
in his speech at Exeter, and Sir Roundel' Palmer's evi-
dence in regard to 1863 in his speech at Richmond—there
are adduceable, from the pages of "Hansard," declarations
made by Mr. Gladstone himself, clearly enough indicating
ho r completely he had retreated, years ego, from the un-
tenabldposition assumed by him as the author of the book
on Church and State.

In 1851, during the discussion on the Ecclesiastical
Titles Bill, he solemnly warned the house not to attempt
to chan3e ‘• the profound and resistless tendencies of the
age towards religious liberty ;" adding emphatically,
" every effort you may make in that direction will recoil
upon you in disaster and disgrace." He felt then, he now
tells us, that the application of a true religious equality to
Ireland was—what ?—" biding its time."
In 186 E, when speaking upon Mr. Dillwyn's motion in
regard to the Irish Church, although he remarked that the
time was not arrived in which the subject matter of that
motion could be energetically dealt with, be declared it to
be, in his opinion—what ?—“the question of the future."
So clearly
_was it eaaligested by hint, even thee, that

he had thereby virtually announced the pulling down of
the Irish Church as an action nearly inevitable in the
future, that the Irish Chief Justice (then Mr.) Whiteside
hesitated not to rise from his place on the front bench of
the Opposition and to denounce the speech which had just
then been delivered by Mr. Gladstone, saying, among
other things in regard to it, " But I do complain of a
Minister who, himself the author of a book in defence of
Church and State, when one branch of the Christian
Church is attacked and in danger, delivers a speech, every
word of which is hostile to its existence when the right
time comes for attacking it."

Inconsistency on Mr. Gladstone's part, after all this,
would be his advocacy not of the destruction but of the
maintenance intact of the Irish Church as an institution
supported and guaranteed by the Queen's Government.
Precisely as it would be the most flagrant inconsistency
on his part if he were to favour now the cause of Toryism
and that of Protection. As he says himself autobiogra-
phically in regard to his actual position as a leader of the
people, "I who may have helped to mislead them by an
over-hasty generalisation (he is referring to his Church
and State treatise), would now submit what seems
to me calculated to reassure the mind"—that is
by vindicating in a very signal manner those prin-
ciples of religious liberty to the furtherance of
which the generous heart of England has, through all tin
legislation of recent years, been perseveringly devoted,
save only in one deplorable instance, the powerless record
of which the nation has of laie shown itself not unpre-
pared to have, sooner or latJr, erased from the statute-
book.

In the memory of his own mistaken treatise, Afr. Glad-
stone's proposed measure is; therefore, nothing less than
an act of expiation : while, in recollection of the whole
coursa he himself has pursued in this matter since that
youthful work was first published, and in remembrance of
the whole drift of our modern legislation, here in Eng-
land, upon matters connected with religion, it is a vindi-
cation, we would insist, at one and the same time, of the
nation's and of his own consistency.

z ,
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..0.7111Y

HER MAJESTY.
WINDSOR CASTLE, Feb. 28.
The Queen, accompanied by Princess Louise,
drove out yesterday afternoon.
Prince Leopold took a short drive this morning.
Her Majesty, accompanied by Princess Louise,
Prince Leopold, Princess Beatrice, and the ladies
and gentlemen of their suite, attended Divine
service this morning in the private chapel.