The Sun.
London, England, 1860-08-13 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, MONDAY EVENING, AUGUST • 13, 1860.

GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY.-
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RETURN TICKETS to OXFORD ISSUED at Padding-
ton on Wednesday, the 15th August, will be available for the
return journey on any day up to Saturday, the 18th August
inclusive. Trains run to Oxford as under :
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London Terminus, Paddington, 20th July, 1560.

MR. BRIGHT AND THE PENNY PRESS.

(From the Times.)

Mr. Bright is the Paul Pry of the Press. He
does not so much as ask your pardon for his im-
pertinence, or even put it into the form of a ques-
tion. His method is to make a monstrous assertion,
and then wait to see what comes of it. Any man
of business—which Mr. Bright is not—must know
that such a concern as ours would soon come to an
end if it were not conducted with the strictest re-
gard to all the sound and honest principles of trade.
No man of business, therefore, will either ask any
questions or imagine anything over and above what
he must know to be the case with all regular and
and solvent establishments. For our part, we are
the last to ask questions, for the simple reason that
if there is a mystery we know it will be revealed
before long in some one of her Majesty's Courts of
Law. Even in that event—for the event sometimes
occurs—our candid readers will do us the justice to
remember that there is in these columns no
unnecessary parade of the disasters of our contem-
poraries, or the singular histories with which they
are sometimes preceded. It is not that we have
no provocation to an irregular curiosity. 'With our
experience we may be naturally at a loss to under-
stand how a well written morning paper, with its
own sources of information, can I- e sold 10 for six-
pence and leave a profit to its proprietors. It is no
concern of ours, even though it encourages a fabu-
lous estimate of our own profits. The indignant
appeal of Mr. Henry Brookes to the Constitutional
Defence Committee, explaining why in honour he
can no longer belong to their Executive Committee,
throws a ray of light into the cheap press mystery
which must before long expand into day. Being
himself a member of that Executive, and warmly
interested in the preservation of our constitutional
liberties from the encroachments of the Lords and
the aristocratic leanings of the Premier, he expe-
riences a worse treachery among his own colleagues.
In his own committee-room he reports that " the
Proprietors, the Editors, Writers, Contributors, and
Partisans of the ,star," have usurped the functions
of the Committee, and then sold the cause, and all
the properties attached, including the louse of
Commons, and the maxim of " no taxation without
representation," for the French Treaty. In order
to obtain a trifling facility for the disposal of cotton
goods, the shrewd politicians just mentioned have
connived at a fatal blow to the British Constitution.
When future Macaulays ask how and when the
House of Commons lost the precious right of ad
justing the national burdens it will be found, says
this unquestionably competent witness, that it was
sold by Mr. Bright and the conductors of his jour-
nal for a reduction of the French duties upon piece
goods and other exports. Having monopolized the
conduct of our constitutional defence, they reso-
lutely suppressed all real action, vapoured a while,
and then betrayed the cause. So Mr. Henry
Brookes delivers his conscience, and cuts the con-
nexion of Messrs. Bright and do. Let our readers
judge. Have we not reasonable grounds of curio
sity as to the financial mysteries of the above
journal ? But we leave them to that Time which
brings all things to light.
After these revelations it is no matter of sur•
prise that Mr. Bright should imagine mysteries
where there are none, and should suppose a dark
conspiracy or a brilliant fraud where all is as plain
matter of business as the interior of an old city
bank. We really have nothing to tell Mr. Bright
about our concerns except that we find paper very
expensive and should be glad to get it cheaper.
Some time since we offered £l,OOO to any one who
could discover a cheaper material than rags to an-
swer the same purpose, to make as good paper, and
to satisfy the public. If the failure of all attempts
had not made it almost ridiculous we might double
the offer. But we will take another way of meet-
ing Mr. Bright's assertion, that we have a personal
interest in keeping up the price of paper. If he,
or any of his numerous enterprising friends, will
supply us with paper as good as that we now use,
and two shillings a cwt. cheaper, we are ready to
deal with and admit him to a share in this nefari-
ous conspiracy, against the interests of mankind.
He will then Know all about it as far as the paper
is concerned. It was natural, of course; that we
should feel some sympathy with those who had
long supplied us well, and with the trade they re-
presented, when we believed them to be placed in a
disadvantageous and unfair position. Mr. Bright
himself admits that they are now in this position.
No doubt, the gentlemen with whom he has to deal
have succeeded in convincing him of this fact ; and
no doubt their resentment at the way in which he
has managed their cause adds something to the fury
of his late outbreak. We plead guilty to the charge
of feeling for old friends who honestly believe them-
selves to be placed in a situation of great difficulty
and peril, even though we may think their fears
somewhat exaggerated. But we are ready to prove
to Mr. Bright, or any man of business he may
think more qualified to understand the case, that
our interest in the case of the paper makers is not
only perfectly unselfish, but even against our own
selfish interests. So slight a reduction as five
per cent. in the price of paper would be
£7,000 a-year in tho pockets of our proprietors.
We are in no wise interested in the profits of our
paper makers; and, though we should be sorry that
they or anybody with whom we deal, should suffer,
usn aor tkheetr wp eeet aann
da s
therefriends.
is
yTehteiyt Isvuopupl dl
ynuo
st
aatffethete
no more favour in the affair than there is between a
manufacturer at Manchester and a Manchester
warehouseman in the city of London. For all this
we take no credit. If we attempted to carry on
business otherwise we should soon come to a stand.
This is the whole truth, and all the answer we can
give to our Paul Pry.

(From the Morrang Test.)
Out of the very depths of his antipathies with
the living Mr. Bright courts alliances with the
dead. Yet every one knows how bitterly the less
liberal dead, could they but be now living, would
have been assailed by Mr. Bright on Friday night
in place of the statesmen of 1860. Chatham and
Canning turn out to be Mr. Bright's " men of
spirit," and by these lights of past generations he
views and scrutinises the shortcomings of the pre-
sent Prime Minister, whose policy of wise concilia-
tion in the matter of the paper duties is of course
branded as cowardice by the demagogue, when his
ardent fancy conceived that it had discovered an
opportunity for subverting the institutions of the
country. A word of commendation from Mr.
Bright, even for the dead who are not in his way, is
like a green leaf springing up in a desert to remind
the traveller of that kindliness of nature which
even the most barren soil cannot wholly eradicate.
But the objects of Mr. Bright's antithetical pane-
gyric serve to impart a dispiriting conviction of the
hollowness of all good opinion on the part of the
member for Birmingham, that is not self-opinion.
Chatham, who threw up office because he could not
follow unchecked his ambition, in his own words,
bt"
the
eco
kite ruouopehohdn
at
rhoei whin
ohpaori loneuasHt
goo
rnuasteoi
tfouf
pd:eßa
foooue
r.r bh oicsn
spirit"
rlgiot:o”kt
bhe
yde
resolute opponent of Parliamentary Reform, even
before the obliquities of the old House of
Commons had been swept away, receives
the same character from
otnthnghes e d
three
hrnoaresexievttyodci age,safttoie of a m
nr cttthhgee e
tnhceocrr
con-
templation
genera-
sure not much inferior to universal suffrage.
mtleVenihnpa
otl
afta,i,osupmioerfidtl,he, yirsetpoarin,eyds
einnmti
tions, Chatham, Canning, and Bright ! When,
however, Mr. Bright goes on to tell us that there
are two kinds of treason, of which one may cover the
author of it "with lasting renown," we fear that
the ghosts of his departed auxiliaries would be apt
to disdain the alliance into which they are coerced.

When Mr. Bright exhausts the languishing ener-
gies of an expiring session with a tedious declama-
tion against everything in general andthe House of
Lords in particular, he seems to forget, first, that
his harangue does not so much as pretend to have
an object, and, secondly, that he is begging the
whole question at issue. If the Ordnance Commit-
tee, instead of reporting on the Whitworth gun,
were to sit upon Mr. Bright's speech, they would

probably condemn •it for " wildness of ricochet."
The rejection by the House of Lords of the bill for
the repeal of the paper duties, which had just passed
the House of Commons, was no doubt an invasion
of the general practice of the Constitution. But
there exists no consentient authority to prove that
it was an invasion of its technical terms. The House
of Lords, as we know, cannot alter a money bill any
more than they can initiate the taxation of the
people. But it is certainly not clear that they can-
not reject a money bill for the remission, any more
than for the imposition, of taxation : and if their
power were restricted to the registering of the
financial edicts of the House of Commons, Mr.
Bright would have some ground for characterising
their existence as an anomaly, and taxation might
as well have taken the shape of measures passed by
permanent resolution of the House of Commons.
The invasion of the spirit of the Constitution we
take to rest in the fact that the House of Lords did
virtually, though not in terms, alter a money bill.
Mr. Gladstone's budget consisted of two parts—the
one imposing taxes, and the other remitting them.
It was generally understood that the addition of a
penny to the income tax was devised in considera-
tion of the abolition of the paper duty. These two
measures were therefore virtually one in the con-
templation of the House of Commons; and, if they
had been both thrown into one bill, it is acknow-
ledged by the Lords themselves, that they must
either have accepted or rejected that bill in its en-
tirety. But, acting on Zheir piinciple that they
could reject but not amend, they adopted the one
and rsjected the other. We certainly do not par-
ticipate in Mr. Bright's self-indulgent apprehen-
sions that the course taken by the Lords will give
the signal for the aristocratic crusade against the
privileges of the Commons with which he delights
to terrify his own imagination. Freely acknow-
ledging that the spirit of the Constitution has been
invaded, the remedy against the recurrence of the
evil will obviously be with the House of Commons.
When they shall in future impose fresh taxation in
consideration of equivalent remissions simulta-
neously resolved on, they have only to make the
same measures part and parcel of the same bill.
There can be no passing of the one in the House of
Lords without the other.

But what may fairly remind us of the days of
Chatham and of Canning are the public spirit and
the just indignation with which Lord Palmerston
repudiated those accusations of mean compromise
and cowardice with which Mr. Bright wound up
for the session—as we may fairly hope for the sake
of public business and his own character—his nor-
mal aspersions on the First Minister. We trust.
that we have not quite arrived at the period, so
felicitously described by Burke in treating of the
French Revolution, when the men reputed to be of
the greatest capacity were those who proposed the
most sweeping measures. But it would hardly
seem that Mr. Bright has any other conception of
a great measure than as a sweeping measure, or any
of her notion of "public spirit" than the surrender
of one's judgment and equanimity to declamation
as impotent as it is passionate. Mr. Bright is be-
ginning to assume towards Lord Palmerston very
much the relation which Mr. Disraeli in his smaller
days chose to assume towards Sir R. Peel ; and we
should have thought that the experience of the pre-
sent Conservative leader would have restrained the
member for Birmingham from pursuing the perilous
experiment of " knocking his head, against a brick
wail." " I leave with confidence," says Lora Pal-
merston, "the question between the hon. gentleman
and myself, in regard to this matter, to the deli-
berate judgment of the present time and of future
ages, and I am not at all afraid as to which of us
two will be deemed to be deserving of the epithets
which he has bestowed on me." It is a frequent
incident of the leading minds in a great country to
have their views misapprehended from their very
breadth, and to see their due concessions to necessity
treated as corruption and cowardice by the ignorant
and the violent, who never live to learn. In past
times Mr. Bright did some service to his country ;
and we really grieve that he should suffer his acri-
mony and ill-will to blind and reduce him to the
level of Mr. David Urquhart and Mr. Chisholm
Anstey.

(From the Morning Herald.)
Some years hence, when the Commissioners of
Lunacy are going their rounds, they may find in a
private asylum a patient whose "case" will admit of
being described in the following way :—" J. 8., occa-
sionaly very violent ; is the victim 8f several delu-
sions, and believes that the House of Lords pass all
their measures to ruin him, that they edit a paper
called the Morning Star, paying their expenses out
of his private income, and keeping him forcibly in
confinement. He thinks he will soon be released by
an invading Ft ench army, and he has deputed an old
friend, together with an Irish nobleman who for a
short time was an inmate of the asylum with him,
to negotiate with the French Government for this
object. He is incurable ; and the only person who has
any influence over him is a clever gentleman from
Oxford, who talks him into a good. humour in less
than no time." The fulfilment of this prophetic an-
nouncement is quite within the limits of possibility.
People always go mad by rule. There may be an
hereditary predisposition more or less easily stirred
into activity by one or more causes; prolonged grief,
a sudden shock, pecuniary losses—each is a fertile
originator of insanity ; but nothing is more certain
in its consequences than the habit of indulging in fits
of mental violence, coupled with the persevering cul-
tivation of some eccentric conviction. Mr. Bright, for
instance, is really not so far removed from this
melancholy condition as he thinks. His mind has
lost a large portion of its balance ; he hugs his in-
juries and disappointments; he believes in the ex-
istence of things of which there is not a particle of
evidence appreciable by ordinary senses, and uses
the most violent threats. What more do we want
to fulfil the theoretical condition of insanity ? We
are not anxious to be personal, and will, therefore,
take a liberal and courteous view of his case, and
call him only politically insane, since he is probably
not dangerous to his family but only to the state.
But there is a Virginian maxim, about checking
evil in the bud, which we heard a good deal of in
our youth, and which we recommend. tto the notice
of Mr. Bright.

_.
From one point of view
day night has a redeeming
the angry speech of Fri
the oily and adaptive el
ng quality; it has less oi
true demagogic spirit ement, and has more of the
about it than most of the
harangues with
Which \r. Bright indulges the
house. A few more of these speeches and he would
be almost respected again,
that for once consisten and it is just possible
might have a charm for
the House of Commons.
n tcy
made to suit his o Definitions of treason,
opponents, menaces the House of
Lords, and . calling traitors because they differ
from him, form a mucluiemore genial employment
for Mr. Bright's tong
" that beneficent reign in than soft eulogies upon
which we have the happi-
ness to live ;" and
it
seems curious that Mr. Bright
should ever think it worth his while to be civil
when civility from him has
unwilling outlay of a
the double disadvantage
of forcing him to make an
commodity which brings no
return. Nevertheless,
his last speech would have
autumn platform, where it done better for the
would have been very
telling, and could not have been replied to. He
would have had no one to
ey,
the audience, that he and not amid the cheers of
is the traitor. As it is, ihe Prime Minister
he
can only say the same
things over again, allude to the
of four or five centuries incelebrated pariod
which the constitution
in
was respected, tell of the juries sustained by par-
ticular interests, and the impertinent intrusions of
the Excise officers, together with the other stirring
details of this great paper difficulty. He has, in
fact, treated the country to a full-dress rehearsal,
and they won't care about the real performance •,
orders," the house will be full of " rd with the usual
noise and indiscriminate applause which people
who pay nothing are so ready to give.
Can anything be found that will have the slightest
influence upon this violent member of the British
him
Senate ? Let us approachsoftly and take him
into the midst of the domestic circle. Let us suppose
a child of his acquaintance has set his little bursting
heart upon something; that by steadily thinking
he would like it very inuclqie has come to regard
it as a right. Papa (who may-be weak and indulgent
at home) says yes, while mamma, who understands
the child better, and knows what is goad for him,
says no. Papa eventually adopts the maternal
view, and says young hopeful
must wait till he is
older. Of course the moral conditions of his little
problem require that the boy should stamp, cry,
he i
and threaten, say thatquite sure that his
father and mother will be div,s
.rced, as he has heard
other wicked people are, an
were
asked,
d that all the boys in
the spare, if they would stand up for
authority his rights and send parental to the deuce.
Would this be a domestic picture after Mr. Bright's
own heart? Yet we are driven to believe that he
would have young England trained in some such
school as this. Fortunately, there are men who
think that there is a certain dignity in submission,
whilst the spectacle of strong men shrieking help-
lessly for the moon, and other unattainable objects,
is simply ludicrous.
We have likened this paper "
episode to a theatrical
performance, and in repeating the illustration, we

must express our satisfaction that the burlesque has
ended in a fine display of blue and red fire. The
spectators go home better pleased than if it had been
a comedy. tamely ending in the ordinary way, with
the universal happiness of every one concerned.
We shall have it all over again, in some shape or
other, next session ; but there is plenty of time to
think about so stirring a revival. Lord Palmer-
ston, as manager, claims the public support, and
says he has done his best to please every one. He
has done very well, as all admit, and the public
will always support him when he speaks as he
did on Friday tight. It pleasant to see Mr.
Bright quarrelling with the Ministry, because
there is no better evidence that the Ministry are
doing what they ought to do and what the country
likes. After all, it is a mere difference of opinion.
Mr. Bright, against Lord Palmerston and all the
world, thinks that an appeal to the ehctors of Great
Britain would have been in his favour ; but in the
absence of such an appeal all the world and Lord
Palmerston will remain on one side, and Mr. Bright
on the other. Here, again, we come to the question
of a delusion—a delusion being really nothing but
a certain mental impression of a fact which is not
participated in by any one else. The impression
which the member for Birmingham entertains
about the wishes of the English people upon this
matter is not distinguishable in point of absurdity
from that entertained by our patient J. B. concern-
ing the House of Lords and their persecution of
him. It only requires a certain indulgence in these
ideas, combined with a violent habit of resentment,
to place them quite out or any one's control. The
other supposition about the Times people frequent-
ing the lobbies of the house to catch members by
the button-hole and ask them to protect that news-
paper and the English paper-makers, is a notion
which would make us very apprehensive of the
mental condition of any friend of ours who enter-
tained it. A man must be, very far gone in rabid
prejudice and helplessly drugged with his own no-
tions to believe in or utter such fustian as this. The
'Junes newspaper has much more of the wisdom of
the serpent than the harmlessness of the dove in its
composition; while Mr. Bright, in the absence in
his own person of either meekness or wisdom,
seems to think the world can only be influenced by
a purposeless obstinacy.