The Sun.
London, England, 1832-04-13 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF TilF, PUILIC JOURNALS.

The Duke of Buckingham's speech on Wed-
,neday evening was worthy of his projected Re.
form Bill. The animus of both was character.
istic of the Duke of Bucking ha It shewen
a deadly enmity to all Reform, as well in what
his Grace proposed as in what he reprobated.
The excellence of the measure rekoornmended by
the Noble Duke consists, according to his view
of things, in the minuteness and insignificance
of the Reforms which it would tolerate. Yet
he confesses that nothing should induce him to
suggest or promise any Bill whatever, but the
necessity of pacifying public feeling throughout
the country; as if the mockery—the mummery
—of a Reform, which in vagoe phrase he has
shadowed out, Nrould be received as any thing
short of direct insult by the people. The Duke
of Buckingham is not the only politician of this
day, who seems to have extracted from English
history more of poison than wholesome diet.
The period of Charles I. speaks different lan-
guages to various cars. The hot and 'shallow
partisan draws one lesson from it—the reflecting
statesman another. Whilst Lord Grey would
caution the advocate of old abuses to concede in
time, and with a good grace, that the harmony
between Government and people may remain
unshaken by a sense of injury not atoned for
until redress has been extorted by terror,
such profound politicians as the Duke of
Buckingham, and such gentle pastors of the
church as Dr. Phillpotts, can find nothing in the
tragic page of the 17th century but examples of
the wisdom of ruling a brave people by the
acourge,—of reigning for a dozen sears without
any House of Commons of levying money by
Royal warrant instead onoy act of Parliament,
—of screening and encouraging tyrannical mi-
nisters in the most lawless oppressions)—of pro-
i-noting slippery and selfish adventurers into tur•
bulent and obtrusive prelates. Such are the
ductions drawn from the fate of Charles by men
who, had they lived in the age of that unhappy
monarch, would too surely have ranked with his
most inauspicious eounaellers, and figured
among the most active causes of his errors,
crimes, and downfall. It is monstrous in these
abettors of civil wrongs to pretend that the cala-
mities which befell Charles 1. had any general
origin but the King's pertinacity, for nearly fif-
teen years, in refusing to move forward with an
advancing world, and in imposing upon the ge-
nerations of the 17th century those political in-
stitutions which even their fathers of forty years
recedingihad F outgrown. If the lords temporal
and the bishops of that day were degraded by
an act of unprecedented power in the House
of Commons, they were first disgraced in public
opinion as instruments of tyranny and enemies of
the people. Then a touch sufficed to throw
them down. When, therefore, so much is said
about the dangers and violences of those disas-
trous times, let noble Lords and pious Prelates
learn, and inwardly digest, the matter of history,
and neither deceive themselves nor try to deceive
others (by far the more difficult task of the two)
respecting its real signification. Grant) not
grudgingly nor sulkily, but promptly and grace-
f illy, that which, if you are shrewd, you must he
conscious of your incapacity to keep,—that
which, if you are wise, you must know that to
retain would be an injustice. That, my Lords,
is no humiliation, and no rashness,—it is dignity,
security, public virtue, and good sense. But if
the Duke of Buckingham was not too fortunate
in his allusions to English history, so neither was
the Right Rev. Dr. Phillpotts in the cons.ruc-
tion he put upon that of trance. We thought
that the Right Rev. Prelate knew better than to
confound names with substances. To prove
that a revolution may be effected through the
forms of the constitution, he tells us that the vast
chancres which had occurred in France from 1787
to 1792, and which it is admitted on all sides did
actually amount to a revolution, were carried into
effect by the regular authorities, and under the
constitutional powers of the Government. That
statement is not really true, though it may have
the semblance of truth. The real and substan-
tial Government of France had been for ages
an absolute monarchy, the ancient institutions,
as Bishop Phillpotts calls them, had become as
obsolete and imaginary. The States-General,
for instance, through which the vast changes
before 1792 were brought about, had possessed
no more validity or reality in prance, as an as-
sembly invested with any tangible control over
the French Government, or any other than a
mere historical existence, than the convocation of
the clergy (as it once flourished) has now in
England, or than the Cortes of Arragon have at
this moment in Spain. The States-General were
nominally summoned by Louis XVI., but they
were in truth called up from the tomb by the na-
tion. 1 hey were a new and democratic power,
assembled under a traditional name ; the actual
Government, namely, the despotism; was substan-
tially overturned by the act which called legislative
assemblies of Frenchmen into being: that one step
was in itsey-thrarevolution. In this, therefore,
although no more than an episodical attack upon
Lord Grey, it is as well to remind my Lord
Bishop Phillpotts, that, however confident 'and
plausible, and exulting, he was most egregiously
mistaken. It was but prudent in the Learned
Prelate to abstain from any further references to
the French revolution, an event of which, as of
the long course of calamities which marked the
fate of Charles 1., the moral is—" Persist not
in withholding justice from a nation, lest it
wring from you more than justice." As for
the Bishop of Exeter's rebuke to Lord Har-
rowby, for turning round white truth and reason
stood immovable, it came with an ill grace from
that reverend personage, who ought to have re-
membered that on the Catholic question truth
was no less stationary than with regard to Re-
form. Nevertheless, there were those who, at
that period, did not stand still upon the pedestal
of truth. Dr. Phillpotts for instance, unless
we are mistaken, spun completely round, and
never ceased from turning till he settled into a
Bishop.— Times.

An important meeting of the proprietors of
Bank of England stock took place yesterday.
It was summoned by the Directors, without the
usual form of requisition by any part of the pro-
prietary, on account of the peculiarity of the
crisis in the relation of the Bank Charter. On
the lith instant, a Committee is to be appointed
by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, on banking
concerns generally ; and as it is thought very
naturally that the report of the Committee will
direct the determination of Government with
respect to the renewal of the Bank Charter, it
behoved the Directors to consider immediately...
what steps were to be taken. A draught-Of apeti-
tion to the House of Commons had.been-accord.
inglv prepared, and was
.now read. It was
neither approved nor disapproved, but was
ordered to be printed ; and, on account of
the urgency of the occasion, the Directors
were vested with the discretionary power of
presenting it to the House when and how they
pleased. That petition, we observe, states simply i