The Sun.
London, England, 1858-09-21 00:00:00

aside. The niggers were not only declared free,
subject to temporary detention under local laws,
while remaining in the State, but they were to be
transmitted to Liberia, to become free citizens of
that flourishing colony. Heavy expenses will be
incurred in this truly noble work. 1. ut these ex-
penses have been unhesitatingly undertaken, and
we may now, notwithstanding the continuance of
the domestic institution, recognise the Government
of the United States as cordial co-operators in the
great, the glorious undertaking of extirpating here-
ditary servile bondage from the civilised world !
With such assistance we cannot fail in accomplish-
ing our object, and rendering slaveryobsolete—
a thing of past generations.

We have not, like Mr. BRIGHT, been favouredwith
a copy of the resolutions of the "Glasgow Council of
Trades' Delegates," but must gather their purport
from his published answer. The main point in them
appears to have been that they wanted Govern.
ment to enable them to emigrate. It would be
unworthy of any journalist not to sympathise with
the aspirations of working men for bettering their
condition; and especially, after a period of suffer-
ing consequent on the failures in Scotland and
elsewhere, last autumn, we muct all feel much for
the thousands who realised the effect of it, not in
their bankers' balances merely, but in the quantity
of food itself, 'or of clothing which they could pur-
chase. Still, like Mr. BRIGHT, we must not
attempt to encourage impracticable projects, and to
aid working men in anything as hopeless as the
famous land scheme of poor FEARGUS O'CoNNoR, ;
and such, we must think, is the character of any
plan which could be devised for Government
emigration. Not only would it mistake the essential
laws of Free Trade—which, however, we should
be the last tp press in any case in which Govern-
ment should fairly become the almoner of the public
—but it would, we fear, become the means of wide-
spread suffering and distress among those whom it
sought to benefit.

As Mr. BRIGHT observes, the difficulty would.
seem to be insuperable of denying the equal claims
of all who might, apply for aid to their common
Government ; but, even supposing this got over,
how could any Government distinguish the persons
likely to succeed as immigrants from those wholly
unfitted to encounter the trials of such a kind
of life, and yet eager in their distress to try it ?
What misery would be the result of deporting to
Australia or to Canada thousands of working-men
and their families, whose habits of life wholly unfit
them for open air agricultural labour, and who,
besides, know nothing of the management of flocks
of sheep, and arc perhaps even more incompetent
to hold the plough or to drive a team, if such work
were offered them. Even of the Irish there has
been a considerable return emigration from the
United States ; from the accounts we receive of them
there, they seem in great numbers chiefly to supply
the place of neg,roes in the free States. Their
habits are agricultural, and yet they do not appear
to find it easy to become little farmers without
some capital. The Glasgow men would probably
not like to turn hodmen and unskilled labourers
in New York, while in Canada or Michigan they
would fail for want of muscle and of knowledge of
farm work. If Government carried them in a spare
seventy-foxy, not a very desirable employment of
such vessels, across the water, they would in great
numbers be reduced to the lowest distress during
the first few months, especially near the winter
months, and perhaps for the first year after their
landing ; and would probably be thinking it the
duty of the Government to take them on its back
again and to carry them home.

The truth is, few are fitted for emigrant life, but
those who have the self-denial and courage to pro-
vide themselves with the means to emigrate. The
helpless man at home is a helpless man abroad ; the
man who spends all his wages here will never rise
above a drudge in any colony. It is mortifying
to think of the hundreds of Scotchmen and of
Englishmen who have, in the times of brisk trade
which preceded last autumn, been earning wages
from which, by a little ordinary self-denial and
prudence, they might have saved enough to have
taken them to almost any of our colonies, to Ame-
rica, at least. We speak what we know when we
say that hundreds, dependent first on the pawn-
broker, then on the parish, might and ought to
have had, when difficulty came, a respectable sum
of money in the Savings' Bank. It has vanished,
the greater part of it, in strong drink, and, in the
case of the females, in bedecking their persons in a
style far beyond their stations. It is no kindness
to working men and women to conceal from them
the plain facts of the case; and we fear these are
among the plainest. We well know that there are
hundreds of truly worthy exceptions, whose dis-
tress and whose better feelings we would not in-
sult ; but they will, with us, be the most ready to
agree that such a large number of their now
needy comrades needed not to be in their present
difficulties ; that though in a humbler line of things
they have been brought into them by the-
same process as that by which the man who,
in a higher station of life, has indulged himself in
unwarrantable luxuries, appears in the Gazette.
These are not the men, unless they reform, who
will succeed abroad, especially if they are now en-
cumbered with wives and families. The Govern-
ment does now provide everything that can
be desired for the protection of the emigrant.
He need not be the victim of imposition ;
beyond that what can a Government do which
will not do more harm than good, which Will
not be a premium on thriftless emigration, and
eventually starve thousands in a colony who must
be cared for at least here, and who will take their
turn in the next run of brisk trade, when .our ac-
cumulating gold begins to clamour for employ-
ment ?

As to Mr. Baroirr's political philosophy, and its
bearings on the case, we cannot think there is much
in it. We believe there is not a peasant, in conti-
nental Europe at least, perhaps none elsewhere,
more lightly taxed in regard to the necessaries of
life than the English peasant. Almost everything
which he must eat, drink, or wear is taxed; he does
not pay 30 per cent. on his clothing, or 50 on his iron
tools, as he would do in so many other places ; and
advocates as we are of an extended suffrage, we
question whether it could advantageously free him
from a single tax. What would he gain by lower-
ing the duties on ardent spirits and on tobacco'
and even any larger reduction of those on teas,
than those to which we are coming, would be an
altogether insensible relief. As to the pressure of
war on the labouring man, or his sufferings on
behalf of the balance of power, we suspect it would
puzzle Mr. BRIGIrr fairly to trace effect to cause.
We have not space enough just now to discuss with
him that part of the subject : we only remind
him that a few commercial failures, wholly uncon-
nected with the war, have told far more disas-
trously on the fortunes of the operative than the
which, as Mr. BRIGHT confesses, he
European bur-
glary •
of
struggle
willingly
in
CZIR. joined, to put down the

An Oxford correspondent writes :—" It is cur-
rently rumoured that her Majesty will visit this university
and city at the opening of the museum, at the Grand Com-
memoration, June neat"