The Sun.
London, England, 1869-07-09 00:00:00

srnuT OF THE PUBLIC .TOITUNALO.

The Times is glad to find that the impending debate on
the Alabama claims in the House of Commons
has been indefinitely postponed. To bring up again
the late tedious, troublesome, and irritating contro•
versy at the present time could serve no good purpose.
The discussion would be most inopportune, both as
regards the period of the session and the temper

of the House. We may say also the temper of the
public on both sides of the Atlantic, for, unless we aro
,much mistaken, there is a general feeling of weariness
with the subject, and a belief that if it is ever to be
resumed with success a considerable period must be allowed
to intervene. There has been so much party feeling mixed
up with it in America, and so much national feeling lately
provoked on this side, that a new negotiation would
begin under the most disadvantageous conditions. When
Mr. Motley tYnhs that the feeling on his own
• side of the ocean is such that a treaty consistent
: with the be tour of England will satisfy the Ameri-
cans, he may address the Queen's Government, for
new negotiations. But it is right the world should know
that only sack a treaty woisld have a chance of acceptance.
There is nothing we desire more than to live :n peace and
goodwill with a ration that speaks our language, and is in
so many ways akin to ourselves. But there is now less
than ever :Any disposition to sacrifice the interests and
_dignity of the country for the satisfaction of unjust pre-
tensions ; and the public will not approve any such
eagerness to negotiate as may seem to forebode weakness
when the negotiation comes.
The Standard says that the history of the Life Peerages
Bill of Earl Russell, to which the House of Lords has
added the final chapter, is curious and instructive. It was
received upon its introduction with general , but mild
applause. Exception was taken to some of its details,
but the principle was pronounced a sound one by nearly
all the Peers who expressed any opinion upon the subject,
and the judgment of the press was even more favourable
'to the ex-Whig leader. We were almost alone in con-
demning tl e principle, and in asserting that no modifica-
tion the bill might receive in committee could makeit any-
thing but a most impolitic:measure, fraught with mischievous '
consequences. By the time the bill came on for a second read-
ing the gentle enthusiasm which it had kindled had well-
nigh died out. The principle was still hardly contested, but
the details were severely criticised, and the opinion
gained ground that at V e best le jeu ne ralait ras la
chandelle, and that the admission of life peers would
neither strengthen the House nor put it in harmony with
the nation. As Lord Malmesbury well said, to the vast
majority of men the great attraction and value of a peerage
is the fact that they can hand it down to their descendants,
and thus perpetuate as it were their names and the
Memory of such services as they have rendered the com-
monwealth. The bill was thrown out, and we congratu-
late their lordships upon having rejected a measure which
would have added nothing to their power or efficiency,
which was unsound in theory and not even recommended
by the existence of any evil or inconvenience which it was
desirable to find a remedy for, which nobody asked for,
and with which nobody would have been satisfied.

The Daily Arms declares that the time is coming.
perhaps it has already arrived, Shen it may be necessary
for the country to interpose in an authoritative manner
between the two Houses of Parliament. The way in which
the Lords have dealt with the Irish Church Bill threatens
to produce a legislative dead-lock. To pass it in its
present shape, which is substantially that in which it will
leave the Upper Chamber on Monday next, would be to
break the promises made by Liberal members on
the hustings, and to reverse the policy which
at the general election the nation solemnly
sanctioned. The Lords do not claim any authority ti
resist the will of the people. They prudently waive their
right as a co-ordinate branch of the Legislature, respon-
sible only to their own consciences. But in doing so,
they put forward pretensions even more untenable. They
affect to understand the mind of the country better that
the country itself does, and to be more truly represen•
tative of it than its chosen representatives. The people
at large have to declare whether they have confidence in
the Government and the House of Commons, or in the
Opposition and the House of Lords, and whether Mr.
Gladstone and Mr. Bright, or the Marquis of Salisbury
and the Earl of Malmesbury, are the true inter-
preters of its opinions upon the Irish Church Bill.
They have to decide something more than this particular
qfiestion. The heresy that the expression of the will of
the people is to be looked for somewhere else than in a
Parliament newly chosen for that very purpose must be
discountenanced. For once, public meetings may be
necessary to protest against government bypublicmeetings.
The nation has resolved not to allow the religious
inequality in Ireland which the amendments of the Lords
restore ; nor to permit the confusion worse confounded

which the plan of concurrent endowment would bring
about. The sooner and the more effectually it makes its
will known to the Lords, the better it will be, not only for
that august, but not always very discerning, assembly, but
for Ireland and the Empire.

Thar.ks to Lord Carington and Mr. Grenville 'Murray,
says the Herald; we have just had a peculiarly striking
examp!e of that Americanisation of cur institutions which
some politicians regard with such undisguised aversion,

and others with such unqualified aemiration.

On a

review of the whole affair, we cannot ray that any one
of the actors in it comes out exactly as his friends
would desire, or as believers in the typical English
gentleman would wish. A scurrilous article in a weekly
newspaper, causing a midnight fracas in a Pall Mall
club-house, and winding up with a free fight in a
police-court, in the presence of magistrate, counsel,
policemen, and spectators, is a sequence of events as
remarkable as it is discreditable to most parties
concerned. The scandal may be borne by different per-
sons in different proportions, but for the credit of Eng-
lishmen as a law-obeying nation we trust it will be long
before we have again to chronicle such another scene as
m ade one of the principal metropolitan police-courts on
Wednesday last a miniature edition of Donnybrook fair
time, or Hyde Park during a great Reform demonstra-
tion. But the example thus set is by far the most un-
satisfactory feature in a peculiarly unsatisfactory story.
Granted that those who sought to capture the deed box
in the interest of the Queen's Messenger were the origina-
tors of the disturbance, it was surely possible for those
who disapproved of their violence to have frustrated
their object by cutting off their retreat through
the door, without engaging in a lawless struggle
in the very presence of the magistrate. We can
make allowances for surprise, and, it may be, for indigna-
tion, but noblesse oblige, and those who went to support
Lord Carington should have remembered that from men
in their position society is entitled to expect something
better than an exaggerated reproduction of the tactics of
roughs and rowdies. If a party of Whitechapel raga-
muffins had indulged themselves at the Thames police-
court, in contending after their manner with dock
labourers or foreign sailors, the scandal would have been
quite bad enough. But it is infinitely worse when the
parties to so unseemly a scuffle have not only decent
coats on their backs but " gentle blood " in their veins.
The Post, in commenting on the main features of Mr.
Mundella's bill, says that it often seems to be, and at the
moment often is, to the advantage of the trades unions
that the cost of production should not be diminished. The
case of house building, and, still more, of cottage building,
affords a strong illustration of the poaMble position. It is
a matter of even national importance just now that
cottage building should be cheapened as mach as possible,
and the lessening of the cost is prevented by the action of
the trades unions, whose arbitrary dictum -forbid:, brick
layers to use machine-made bricks, and who have especially
marked with' their anathema the large hollow bricks
which have been brought into use with such marked
success in Paris, and even upon one or two noblemen's
estates in this country, Against all action of this descrip-
tion, and against interference with modes of working and
production, the industry of the country, whether repre-
sented by capitalists or workmen, must he thoroughly pro-
tected, and any new legislation which touches the subject
at all cannot be confined to the grievances and disad-
vantages of the unions alone. It must cover the entire
organisation of the productive powers of the kingdom.
It has been sai,t that the ratio of increase,
as between ourselves and foreign producers, has
been materially altered to the disadvantage of' this
country ; that other nations, and Belgium remarkably,
have got their foot into markets of which we have hitherto
been the monopolists ; and that the infinence of strikes,
upheld by unions and union funds, have so frequently
arrested the circulation and action of capital as to produce
much impoverishment and national loss. Equitable legis-
lation and a timely understanding consequent upon it
may yet save the working men from the consequences of
the further development of this system, and it is to be
hoped that the Government will carry out their under-
taking with as little delay as possible.
The Star observes that each season offers its peculiar
temptation to the fool, and one of the most mischievous
temptations which hot weather offers to the fool who
happens to travel by rail is at least as strong this year as
ever. While people are crying out against directors
because the foot-boards of the carriages are too far from
the ground, or too far from the floor of the carriage, or
because the platforms are too high, or too low, or too
narrow, you :ivy see an every line in the country a mach
more fats and certain source of the
passengers themselves are a great deal more to blame than
anyho,ly else. Every other time you enter a railway
relreshinent the chances are a hundred b) one
that you End the gmtrd "of a tra7ii (lr;nking, and
always at the expense of some passenger with
more money and 1:0-pit:Oil5• th:,it wit. Blame the
guard, ii we will ; Litt the fatuous traveller who does his
best to steal away the brains of the man who carries the
Jives of a trainful of people in his hand deerves blame
fully as great. A philosophic observer travelling. up to
town a few evenings ago noticed that one guard had no
less than six glasses of beer, paid for by others, drunk by
himself, in a journey of two hours and a half. Observers
of a less philosophic turn of mind may be excused for a
feeling of pretty warm indignation against this hospitable
imbecility. And, after all, if travellers will insist on
playing the fool, it would be just as well for the railway
authorities to issue special warnings to servants in respon-
sible posts. We should know what to think of a company
who should place a nine•gallon cask of strongest ale en
the engine, and another in the guard's van of every train.
Yet this is just what tie up,sewaable geNrosity ok
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