The Sun.
London, England, 1835-08-10 00:00:00

pas,!ien and tc thought If clamour be silenced, will
the low whisper' of
.!/e_ stifled through the same,
pressure ?If the lips be closed, the band be
irrecoverably paralyzed ? It is vain, it argues l'ttitM
stupidity to expect it. The effect of it will be to
iHreotti ir‘to a thousand—to
make twelve Julys in the year instead
rate impulses throughout the whole mind of France
which never can be satiated but with blood in torrents.
If dpintoii put tivwn, if r.accition be withered, if
national pride be outraged universally, and force be, as
it is announced to be, the sole remaining principle of
dcrttit!ir_i!!3 why then a state of civil polity is thrown
back into a state of sdifriguntlo3re ; and when the many
arc told that the strongest only has t. rigllt to govern,
will they not exclaim, " Then let us try who the
strongest ?" The sword is a game that more than one
can play at, and none are better aware of the truth
than Frenchmen, who have gam within =l5 years seven
or eight successive Governments, each essaying to rule
by force, and each destroyed ky it in turn.—Times.

Whether from alarm, causal by the movement of
the millions—from shame at the contempt and ridicule
winch their proceedings were exciting throughout the
empire—from their weariness of the task they had im-
posed on themselves—or from all causes combined—
the Lords have apparently, for the present, closed the
evidence of the Corporators, as may be seen by our
report. of Saturday's debate. Lord Brougham informed
the House that he had a petition from a most nume-
rous and respectable body of persons in Bristol, pray-
ing permission to be heard at the bar, and pledgin,'
themselves to disprove the allegations of the Counsel,
and the evidence which had been brought forward in
favour of the Corporation of that city ; but his Lord-
ship stated he would content himself with reading the
petition, as otherwise were the prayer granted, there
would be no end to petitions of a similar kind. The
tone of the Tory Lords was immediately changed, and
though in a previous part of the sitting a hope was
audibly expressed that " Melbourne would cut
the concern"—Lord Ellenborough—Earl Wicklow
—and the Duke of Wellington—assented to
the Bill being committed on Wednesday next.
There are numerous rumours afloat with regard to
amendments which are to be proposed, such as pre-
serving the franchise to all the existing Corporatore—
preventing Dissenters from interference with matters
concerning the Established Church—introducing or-
thodox tests, &c.—but nothing is positively determined
on. In fact, the fate of the Bill in the hereditary por-
tion of the Senate does not rest on its intrinsic merit,
but on the effect which external pressure may make on
the Peers. The following meetings about to be held
in favour of the Bill, must no doubt have a salutary
operation. The Electors. of London meet on Wed-
nesday ; Lambeth this day ; Liverpool this day also ;
St. Pancras Wednesday ; Tower Hamlets, 'South-
wark, and the parishes of Clerkenwell, Chelsea, St.
George-in-the-East, St. Andrew,. Holborn, St. Giles-
in-the-Fields, &c. &c., have also resolved to muster
against the corporate plunderers.—Morn. Advertiser.
The report of the proceadings on Saturday in the
House of Lords will show our readers how little
respect the present Ministers of the Crown and their
most active supporters have to the solemn obligation of
an oath, or to the legal liabilities which are involved
in that solemn sanction, when lent to any statement
which can be proved to be untrue. Of all the
features of the atrocious proceeding of the present Go-
vernment with respect to Corporations, perhaps the
most disgusting is the attempts, cowardly and in-
direct as they have been, to bolster up the Report of
the hired Commissioners in opposition to the evidence
of honest men, given* under a sanction .the most
solemn that religion- can supply, and the most
awful that law can require. Why have not
the Lords Melbourne and•' Brougham had the
manly candour to avow that, after the evidence
given at the bar of the House of Lords, the volumes
of slander published under the authority of the Corpo-
ration Cominissioners must pass for nothing ? Why
have they endeavoured" by little dirty manoeuvres during
the progress and at the conclusion of the examination,
to skreen the Commissioners who cannot be rescued ?
Why have they acted as if they had lost all sense of
the distinction between legal evidence for which respec-
table men have made themselve responsible, and the
idle tattle of country towns for which nobody is
responsible ? The reason is plain enough. The
Commission was a profligate job, and Lord Melbourne,
who was Secretary of State for the Home Department
at the period when it was issued, cannot acknowledge
its real character—the Commission was an illegal
job, and Lord Brougham, who was Lord Chancellor
at the period when it was issued, and who is more
strictly responsible for its legality than any other
man, cannot bring himself to acknowledge frankly
that he was ignorant or careless of the law. The
House of Lords, as it appears to us, have now a duty
to perform anterior to that of entering upon any public
discussion of the Corporation Bill. They have closed
the examination of witnesses upon the express ground
that what they have heard is sufficient. Sufficient for
what ? Not, perhaps, to induce them to throw out the
Municipal Corporations Bill altogether; not, perhaps,
sufficient to compel them to despair of making out of
that Bill a useful and beneficial measure ; but suf-
ficient at least (for otherwise it is entirely insuf-
ficient) for the purpose of convincing their Lordships
that the report of the Corporation Commissioners now
upon their table, and which was certainly placed there
in order that it should influence more or less the de-
cision of their Lordships, is utterly discredited and
overthrown ; that it is worth positively nothing : that
their Lordships cannot justly or conscientiously enact
anything with that report before them which they
would not equally have enacted liad no such report
and no such Commission ever been in existence. The
first duty of their Lordships, then, appears to us to be
to clear away all ambiguity from their future course ; to
let the world know upon what principles and with re-
ference to what description of evidence they mean to
proceed ; to mark their moral disapprobation of syste-
matic jobbing and systematic falsehood ; to record upon
their journals, in short, the opinion which they cannot
but have formed, that the Report of the Corporation
Commissioners is in no respect, and in no portion
of its contents, worthy of the least belief ; that it
ought to be regarded as a non-existent thing,
or a thing which, if remembered at all, ought
to .be remembered as a document the language
of which is to be construed in a sense the
most opposite to its apparent meaning—in which
censure is to be read as praise, and praise as censure.
Such a declaration on the part of the House of
Lords would he a fitting conclusion to the evidence it
has heard, and an appropriate homage to the cause of
truth, justice, and honour. A declaration to the effect
we have just stated is the more necessary, as some one
or two of their Lordships—Lord Melbourne and Lord
Brougham, for example—affect to believe that petitions
which they have to present, and which they say con-
tradict some parts of the evidence given at the bar,
ought to be regarded as an equipoise to that evidence.
Lord Brougham and Lord Melbourne know how peti-
tions are got up ; they know that their contents are
prepared much in the same manner as the testimony
out of which the Corporation Commissioners have
manufactured their ponderous and costly volumes of
Report. Is it candid, just, or honourable on the part
of these Noble Lords to speak as they do of the
petitions which they have to present, and which con-
tradict the evidence given upon oath attheir Lordships'
bar—evidence unopposed, evidence of which the
House prohibit the further accumulation, with the full
concurrence of Lord Melbourne and Lord Brougham,
on the express and simple ground that their Lordships
as a body are already satisfied by what it has proved ?
What man, we will again ask, that attaches any value
to the obligation of an oath, what man that pays any
regard to legal or moral sanctions of any kind—what
man that is not prepared to disorganize the country, and
demoralize its population in the gross—could for one
moment, or for any purpose whatever, compare the'au-
thority of petitions (knowing, above all, so well as
Lord Melbourne and Lord Brougham cannot fail to
know, how petitions to Parliament are manufac-
tured) with the sworn testimony of respectable
witnesses, solemnly given at the bar of the House
of Lords ? The outrage upon public decency and
public morals to which we have alluded it behoves the
House of Lords to repel, and, if that also were pos-
sible, to resent. But their Lordships cart at least repe