The Sun.
London, England, 1832-11-16 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS

Lord Henley seems fully aware of the neces-
sity, in this age of puffing, of doing justice to
his own merits. In his speech last night, he
informed the portion of the electors of Mid-
dlesex which he was addressing, that " the trust
of representing the people in these times should
be confided to tried, honest, virtuous, and reli-
gious men—men who will not originate dis-
order for their own ends." We are to under-
stand from this that his Lordship, in offering
himself a candidate for Middlesex, considers
himself a tried, honest, virtuous, and religious
man, and that he wishes it to be understood that
Mr. Hume is not s, tried, honest, virtuous and
religious man. £ Stand by thyself; come not near
to me, for lam holier than thou." His h. Lo drs ip
has been tried, but unfortunately, till the pass-
ing of the Reform Bill, he was always found on
the wrong side. When there is-no longer any
use in opposing Reform, and opposing religious
liberty, his Lordship would wish to be thought
a Reformer. This is being tried ; but is it not
being tried in the balance and found wanting ?
He declared himself now " a friend of civil and
religious liberty." Why, who does not now
profess to be a friend of civil and religious
liberty ? After the repeal of the Test and
Corporation Acts, even an Ex-Inquisitor would
have tact enough to avoid making enemies of so
powerful a body as the Dissenters, by declaring
himself, without any object, an enemy to civil
and religious liberty. His Lordship confessed
that " on the question of the repeal he had voted
in the minority ; but he- had since seen his
error." This reminds us of an anecdote of Wil-
liam Cowper, Bishop of Galloway, told by Dr.
M'Crie, in his Life of Andrew Melville :
" When Cowper was made Bishop of Galloway,
an old woman, who had been one of his parish-
ioners at Perth, and a favourite, could not be
persuaded that her Minister had deserted the
Presbyterian cause. Resolved to satisfy herself,
she paid him a visit in the Canongate, where he
had his residence as Dean of the Chapel Royal.
The retinue of servants through which she passed
staggered the good woman's confidence, and on
being ushered into the room where the Bishop
sat in state, she exclaimed, Oh, Sir ! what's
this ? And ye ha' really left the quid cause,
and turned Prelate !' Janet (said the Bishop),
I have got new light upon these things.' So
I see, Sir (replied Janet) ; for when ye was at
Perth ye had but a'e candle, and now ye've got
twa afore ye : that's a' your new light. "
Lord Henley's new light comes certainly
at the most convenient time to him. But his
Lordship endeavours to brave it. Let those
who have never changed any of their opinions in
five years throw the first stone at him. We
are far from wishing to encourage an obstinate
perseverance in error, merely to gain a reputa-
tion for consistency ; nor do we pretend to the
possession of any infallible means for distin-
guishing between sincere and affected convic-
tion. But still there are circumstances which
enable us to approximate to certainty in judging
of any man. Lord Henley is (as he says him-
self) a tried man ; but, as far as he has been tried,
he has been found acting against his present con-
viction. Now, this tried man is no chicken ;
and it is certainly curious that, in all his trials,
he never hit on the right course till a Whig
Ministry made it no longer possible to oppose
Reform and liberty of conscience. The film
seemed to have adhered obstinately to his eyes
till the very last moments of the Tory Ministry,
when it suddenly fell off, and he " saw his
error." This is being a tried man, and this is
what is called having a new light. Lord Henley
may be an honest man, and he would be a fool
if he did not call himself a religious wan ;
but, if he be honest, he is found in very bad
company. As Dr.Caius says, what has the honest
man to do in my closet ? He is honest, but he has
no objection to avail himselfof the calumny against
Mr. Hume*hat he is an Atheist—a calumny which
one of his own Committee very assiduously dis-
seminated. We are more inclined to believe
in his prudence than his honesty,, and we think
it argues some skill in management, that cap-
tivated the good graces of the Dignitaries
of the Church, and the Dissenters. The
Dignitaries have generally good noses—they
can smell a real Reformer a great way off ; and
the attraction between the Dignitaries and his
Lordship might, we should think, have put the
Dissenters on their guard. It turns out, that the
lure thrown out to the Dissenters, of readiness
to pledge himself to vote for the immediate abo-
lition of slavery, is a mistake. Last night, he
by no means expressed himself on this subject in
a decided manner. "If he should be satisfied
(he said) that bloodshed and ruin would ensue
from the immediatefreedom of the blacks,he should
have recourse to more cautious methods." This
proviso is, no doubt, thrown in for the sake of the
West Indians, as the abolition is for the Dissen-
ters. His Lordship, we see, is all things to all men.
We regret that Mr. Hume should have said that
he did not know whether he should support
Ministers. If the course Ministers pursue be
deserving of support, they are entitled to his
support ; they are not entitled to it, of course,
on other terms. But a man should never allow
the treatment he has himself experienced from
any men to come into consideration when
determining in what manner he should act. If
Ministers be dealing doubly with him in the
case of Lord Henley, we have no hesitation
in saying that this would materially injure
them, not in Middlesex alone, but in many other
quarters, because hostility to Mr. Hume would
naturally lead the electors to distrust them. But
knowing this, we will not allow ourselves to be-
lieve that there has been any double dealing in
the case of Lord Henley and Mr. Hume. Mi-
nisters, as men of the world, must be too well
aware of the importance of preserving their repu-
tation for honesty on the eve of an election, to
turn against the Member, who, more than any
other, produced in the public mind the convic-
tion of the indispensable necessity of that Re-
form by conceding which they so well earned a
title to the gratitude of the nation. It is of im-
portance that on this subject there should be
no mistake. We confess, however, that if Mr.
Byng, after jockeying Mr. Hume, by transferring
his interest to Lord Henley, is called to the
Upper House, it will have a very odd appear-
ance.—Morning Chronicle.
The speech of Leopold of Belgium to the
Chambers, which we published yesterday, conveys
as little definite meaning under a laboured pomp
of words as any Royal speech which we have
seen for a long time ; nor does it breathe any
thing of that chivalrous spirit which his flatterers
had led the world to believe Leopold would dis-
play in vindication of Belgic rights, and which
is calculated to animate a people to the most
heroic exertions in the crisis of national danger.
On the contrary, the speech of the King of the
Belgians is dull and spiritless in the extreme ; it
studiously avoids all reference to those topics

The travels of Pozzo di Borgo through Ger-
many seem to hare been watched by German
politicians (who were not in the secret of his
erratic tour) with something of that curiosity
and alarm with which the ancients regarded the
appearance and wanderings of a comet. He
came direct from the Emperor of all the Russias,
and he visited the Courts of Berlin and Vienna,
together with some of the smaller Courts of the
Confederation, while his presence was under-
stood to be so necessary in Paris. Therefore it
was inferred that he was sent on some great
errand, which he alone could execute, and which
it would have been unsafe to have committed to
a diplomatic despatch or to a Government
courier. Having settled this preliminary point,
our German politicians and publicists were next
absorbed in conjectures respecting the object of
his tour, and the forces which kept him in his
eccentric orbit, conceiving that the presence of
such a planetary stranger in their political system
portended some general convulsion. According
to one sagacious theorist, who pointed his tele-
scope towards this diplomatic prodigy, Pozzo di
Borgo was come to propose a partition of
Turkey, on the model of the partition of Poland,
and to offer Austria a share in the spoils of her
Ottoman neighbour and ally. By another he
was considered as the preacher of a new coalition
against France, as the hermit Peter of a new cru-
sade sgainst constitutional freedom, and in favour
of absolute monarchy. A third read in the diplo-
matic horoscope a new division of Germany be-
tween Prussia and Austria, and a total extinc-
tion of the smaller monarchies, together with