The Sun.
London, England, 1860-06-30 00:00:00

that leader who, having twice changed defeat into
success, was entitled to the earnest, continuous, and
not quarterly gratitude of his followers." All
which is surely very innocent pleasantry. People
who can talk like this can hardly mean mis-
chief, or what SHAKSPERE calls " Miching
Malecho." With a demonstration having about it
so little malignity, neither Ministers nor
their supporters can quarrel—not even the arch-
supporter of them all, the chief butt of all these
pleasantries, the hon. member for Birmingham.
The only harangue of any importance throughout
the whole of these proceedings was the very able
one delivered by Sir JOHN PAKINGTON, the one in
which that eminent administrator paid a generous
tribute to the chiefs of his party, " their talented
and patriotic leader, Lord DERBY, and that great
and distinguished man, Mr. DISRAELI." Few, if
any, we are satisfied, will turn captiously either
from the genial jokes or the graceful compliments
imparting a momentary zest last evening to the
demonstration of the Conservative Opposition.

The great Reformer "is abroad." Should the
weather and prices continue long what they have
been, even Manchester men may think that a Re-

orm Bill should have had precedence of a commer

cial treaty under which, for the present, almost
everything has become dearer while employment
is not better. Indeed it must, in all probability,

become worse and worse, for the money spent on
food, of course, cannot be spent on that whichkeeps I
Manchester spinning-jennies and looms in motion.
The price of meat, especially, is such as to touch
very seriously the means of th*-3 several lower strata
of the tenpenny income-tax pagers, and we doubt
not, many of them, unbounded as is their faith in
the wisdom of our Manchester fileads, feel painfully
squeezed themselves in the vice, in which the Go-
vernment has placed them, of heavier taxation on
one side, and higher prices on the other. They are
beginning to fancy it might have been a little
better if we had kept our revenue and left foreign
wines where they were.

But whatever income-taxpayers think of the as-
pect of things, the classes which do not pay in-
come-tax are becoming very uneasy. At Sheffield,
Nottingham, Paddington—we hear of meetings of
working men to discuss the causes of high prices,
and the possible remedies. While at Swindon we
read in a local paper of a meeting of 300 agricultural
labourers, who seem to have been drawn together by
the common calamity of hiving to maintain them-
selves, and that at present prices, on 9s. a week, or
ls. 6d. a day. They had assembled without any
definite purpose, and it appeared towards the close
of the meeting that these unavaricious cottagers
would actually think themselves rich enough on
12s. a week ! Pity it seems, indeed, that such
moderate desires are little likely to be gratified,
and that the poor Tastics will have to starve on.
The accounts of no one of the meetings is so
touching as this. One poor man had his wife and
seven children to keep on the ls. 6d. a day—only
think of education for such poverty ! Another had
ls. 6d. to pay first for rent, and " after other things
are paid for," the money isn't enough to keep us—
a proposition it does not need a Cambridge
mathematician to demonstrate. AMINIDAB SMITH—
the man must have had Methodist parents—"was a
cripple, sixty-five years of age,with a wife and eight
children, one could earn the house rent, and the 9s.
had to maintain ten of them." WILLIAM SMITH
had but two children, yet he found himself getting
further back every week, and wanted to know when
he was to pay it; what then could the poor AMINI-
DAB do? CHARLES MOULDER complained that if
a man got ss. into debt, he was thought to he a big
rogue, yet after twenty years' experience he could
; not help it. Years ago he got three loaves of bread
for a shilling—he then got Bs, a-week, but was
better off than he should now be with 12s.
And yet these Englishnzen did not talk of the
workhouse—they loved their independent though
hungry homes—they put down an abusive speaker,
a returned convict, who spoke of setting one half
the farmers to hang the others, and quietly dis-
banded, with the intention of meeting again next
week, after having agreed to ask the farmers for
the moderate advance abovementioned, of 3s. a week.
Poor men,—they know nothing of the doctrines of
MALTHUS and ADAM SMITH. They do not know
that Science versus Genesis, says they ought not to
marry and to increase and multiply—know no-
thing about the great truth that the article la-
bourer, like the article cotton, can only fetch what
it is worth in the market ; according to the third
great commandment —" but, thou shalt love thy
neighbour's labour at starvation wages, if he will
take them." All these high and holy truths of
the Gospel, according to the 19th century, they,
poor heathens, have never been taught. We
doubt not the farmers and landlords who will be
asked by the poor men to pay them wages which
will keep body and soul together, were ready
enough in 1846 to scout ADAM SMITH, and to insist
on protective prices for wheat ; we shall be a little
curious to learn whether they will be ready to
own, now wheat is much higher than what they
demanded it should be, that their labourer's life
and health need protection as much as rents and
farming profits. Of one thing we are certain—
that if any of these famishing men threw his
stick at a hare, and by special good luck knocked
it over, a brace of clergymen and a country squire
or two would send him to find a supper in the
nearest gaol, and read him a very pious lecture,
too, on the sin of poaching.
The townsmen at their meetings take quite
another course, one the poor farm-labourers could
net take—they propose to buy no more meat till
the butchers sell it cheaper. It is quite certain that
the 9s. a week men are guiltless enough of raising
the price of meat. We fear they have only too
little to do with the price of dry bread. There is,
however, a clear connection between the price of
meat, and the number of persons who eat it; only,
in this case, those who renounce meat would need
more bread and raise the price of that to all; just
as once the " Good Old King," and his more bene-
volent nobles, actually raised the price of the in-
ferior kinds of flour, under the falsely benevolent
notion of relieving the poor by not using fine
wheat flour themselves. Still, nothing could be
more reasonable than the resolve to dispense with
mere luxuries. Better for their health and vigour,
on which their earnings depend, to give up tobacco,
beer, and above all gin, at least till the crisis were
over, than enfeeble themselves for work by abstain-
ing from meat. We suppose, however, there is
little danger of their doing it.
It is rather remarkable that at the meetings, they
should begin to talk of a vote for every min, and at
the same time to blurt out treason against politi-
cal economy, by attacking the provision dealers,
and the large dealers in grain. Reasonably enough
will hundreds of forcibly converted Protectionists
now say that they should not, ignorant as they
are, have a vote all. To which the men might
surely reply—ought you, then, to have had a vote,
much more to have been legislators, when you
talked as we now do ? It would go rather hard
with our legislators themselves, in both the Lords
and the Commons, if they could not attain their
honours without first passing an examination
in political economy. The truth is the men's