The Sun.
London, England, 1835-07-28 00:00:00

rust therefore that some of our Ministerial contempo-
raries will henceforth make less racket about the growing
disproportion between Papists and Protestants, as
shown by each successive census. The phenomenon
may be real, but the cause assumed for it is glaringly
false. The difference is numerical only on the side
of the Papists. Taken as a body, their own gen-
tlemen and men of education have been as much out-
stripped by the prolific malady of the lower order,
as the sum total of Protestants has been. There
may be positively more Roman Catholic gentlemen
now than there were thirty years ago, just as there are
positively a greater number of Protestants in Ire-
land than at the same period, but the ratio of the la-
bouring and half-fed poor to their own gentry has been
not less fearfully accelerated than in relation to the
Protestant community. Unreflecting quadrupeds will
propagate with more unchecked rapidity than rational
creatures who look to consequences and to the fate
they bring upon others. Now, it is such a multitude
as we have been describing, impelled, directed, despo-
tically ruled by their priests, that are to be let in like
a deluge upon the municipalities of Ireland, and to
swamp the English Protestants in every corner of the
country. We have done our part—a thankless part.
We have warned our Protestant countrymen of their
danger. We have respectfully, perhaps vainly, sup-
plicated the attention of a British Parliament to this
the last stake for the sovereignty of Ireland, which
the motley faction, now domineering over both islands,
has left in the power of King, Lords, and Commons
to play. What the consequence of such a measure
may be, if carried into a law, it is not pleasant to pro-
phesy. How the Protestants of Ireland may deem
themselves justified in acting, is more a frightful than
a difficult question. To the last experiment of a
Popish Government for their country, the resistance
which they exhibited was neither unsuccessful nor
passive.—Times.

The two great measures of the Melbourne-O'Co

nell Administration--the Irish Church and Municipal
Reform Bills—having received the sanction of the
House of Commons, both as to the good and evil
which they contain, the country awaits with anxiety
the decision of the House of Lords. For our own
part, though zealously advocating for years past the
reform of the Church Establishment and of Corpora-
tions, we have felt it an imperative duty to oppose
those parts of both Bills which invade the rights of
property, and give the colour of law to odious doc-
trines of confiscation and robbery. Reform, in its
true sense, commits no wrong, and works no injustice ;
can that be said of the Bill which goes to strip the
freemen of England of the rights that the Reform Act
had so lately guaranteed, and to despoil them of pro-
perty to which they have as just and indefeasible a
right as the Duke of Bedford, or the Marquis of
Lansdowne, or any other Whig or Tory Nobleman to
his patrimonial estates ? Can that be said of the Bill
which takes from the Protestant Church of Ireland
the revenues belonging to two-fifths of its parishes,
to apply it to other than ecclesiastical purposes,
while a large proportion of the working clergy of that
establishment are destitute of the means of a decent
subsistence ? Surely these two Bills, by adopting the
principle of confiscation, overstep the limits between
improvement and destruction—between reform and re-
volution. Notwithstanding that we have more than
once been honoured with some share of that scurrilous
attention which the tolerant Mr. O'Connell so liberally
bestows upon all who will not be the tools or slaves of
the insolent demagogue, yet we confess there is a qua-
lity of his which excites our admiration : it is the intense
and untiring zeal with which he promotes the interests
of the Church to which he belongs, and the implacable
hostility that he manifests towards the Protestant Esta-
blishment, and towards every thing and every person con-
nected with its existence. If similar determination and
perseverance characterized those who are, or ought to be,
the champions ofthe Protestant cause, and the opponents
of the encroaching ambition of the Papal system, the
Ministerial tools of Mr. O'Connell would never have
dared to propose to Parliament such a measure of rapine
and spoliation, touching the Protestant Establishment in
Ireland, as that which the degenerate descendant of
the martyred Lord Russell—the victim of papal
treachery—brought into the House of Commons. In
zeal for the interests of his Church—in the indefatiga-
ble activity which is calculated to render that zeal ef-
fective, Protestant legislators may well take a lesson of
conduct from Mr. O'Connell. His 'political morality,
we trust, Protestants will always hold in abhorrence ;
but his political energy and tenacity of purpose are
qualities for which lie deserves to be admired—quali-
ties that, if they make a bad cause powerful, ought to
make a good one irresistible. But though the growing
ascendancy of the Church of Rome in these realms, at
the present day, owes much to the personal vigour with
which the pence-collecting demagogue fights its
battles, it is far more indebted to weakness, pusil-
lanimity, or treachery of the Protestant Statesmen
of England. We will not now revert to the ca-
lamitous mistakes of Statesmen who have be-
come wise too late, who find that Popery is not
to be conciliated by concession—that every surrender
on the part of Protestants but increases the arrogance
of its demands--that, amid all the changes which civi-
lisation has wrought in the systems and sentiments of
Europe, its intolerant spirit remains unchanged—and
that it still cherishes, as Dens's book proves, the pecu-
liar morality that makes it a duty of faith to be faith-
less to engagements with Protestants, and the first of
Christian virtues to sting, the hand of a heretical bene-
factor. We say we will not revert to the calamitous
mistakes into which some of our Statesmen have fallen
from acting upon the erroneous supposition that the
Papal system,
.either in its theological or political as-
pect, is changed or changeable. °But we hope those
mistakes will be the last; and that the return which
Peel and Wellington have received from O'Connell
and his followers for opening to them the doors of
Parliament, will impress upon the minds of the Pro-
testants of England this great truth, that although
their religion forbids them to persecute Popery, they
cannot cherish it but to their own destruction.—Morn-
inn. Herald.
In the House of Lords, last night, the Duke of
Newcastle puzzled Lord Brougham exceedingly upon
the subject of the Municipal Corporations Bill, on
the discussion of which their Lordships enter this day.
The honest and straight-forward Duke of Newcastle
does not understand why the House of Lords should
proceed to legislate upon the report of a Commission
of Inquiry, the legality of which is doubted, a Com-
mission which, if it be not legal, involved and esta-
blished the worst principles of the most arbitrary Go-
vernment. The shuffling Ex-Chancellor could not
but feel the force of this observation of the Noble
Duke, and insisted, accordingly, that the Commis-
sion of Inquiry was perfectly legal, although he could
not but confess, that nobody was bound to make
any reply to, or to take any notice whatever of its in-
quiries. This shift is equally discreditable to the
legal knowledge and the manly integrity of the
Ex-Chancellor ; for a Commission of Inquiry which
is issued by the King of England, and to the
inquiries of which none of the subjects of the
King of England are bound to pay any attention what-
ever, cannot, it is obvious, be a legal Commission of
Inquiry. The cowardice of the Corporations of Eng-
land has, we confess with shame and regret, supplied
Lord Brougham with the pretext upon which he now
rests. Why was there no Mayor or Alderman in all
England who had spirit and sense enough to lodge for
a night or two in the borough or city gaol the intru-
sive Commissioners, who presumed, without legal war-
rant, to set up within his jurisdiction a sham Court of
judicial inquiry ? This step we repeatedly advised,
while the mountebank Commissioners were making
their insolent progress through England, and we ven-
ture now to say that the Mayor who had done this
excellent thing would have triumphed in Westminster
Hall. Westminster Hall is yet good, and pure, and
ConstitAtianal, and English,—although there have
-
been some appointments to the Bench of which we
have not been. able entirely to approve. Why is
not Westminater-pau even yet appealed to, as it
ought to be, by high-spirited Englishmen, con-
scious of right ?' We hear of petitions from cor-
porations who feel that the Commissioners of Corpo-
ration inquiry have traduced and libelled them, praying
that they may be heard by their Counsel at the bar of
the House of Lords. We venture to tell the Corpora-
tions who think they have been libelled in the report of