The Sun.
London, England, 1832-01-07 00:00:00

foreign policy subservient to the purposes of
Russia, we confess we have little or no hope of
hearing that he has deviated from the inglorious
consistency of his principles with regard to
Greece. If the Russian vulture is to be per-'
mitted to make that beautiful country its prey,
why teas it severed from Turkey ? why was the
battle of Navarin fought ? Had the efforts of
our gallant fleet no higher object than to wrest
Greece from one barbarian and give it to
another ?—to wrest it from a barbarian who
was our old Ally, and give it to another bar-
barian, who is, and has long been our most
jealous rival ? Was not the sacrifice of Po-
land enough to attest our readiness to sacrifice
the interests of humanity, and our own interests,
to the ascendancy of Muscovite counsels? Shall
we also hand Greece over to the tyrant whose
hands are red with the blood of Poland, and
who meditates yet more sanguinary conquests
over liberty and civilization ?—illorning Herald.
It must be confessed that the morality of the
higher ranks of this country is as low as can well
be imagined. Till very lately the lowest labourer
in the country would have been ashamed to do
what is every day done without a blush by the
Aristocracy ; but within these thirty or forty
years, the abuses in the poor laws have had the
effect of lowering the morality of the poorest
labourers to the level of that of the nobility. In
Cobbett's Register of this day, an account is
given of Mr. C.'s second lecture at Manchester,
which contains the following passage :

" St. Paul exhorts, and, not by dry precept, but by ex-
ample, those to whom he addressed his epistles, to work
with their own hands, and to live sparingly at the same
time, that they might have to give to those who needed ;
but this is a species of charity, of which those who have
the fingering of our money do not seem to have a very
distinct idea. Upon this list of pensioners ; this long list
of objects of charity, we find Lords, Dukes, Marquises,
Earls, Viscounts, Duchesses, and Countesses, and so
forth, and whole families of children, beginning generally
with the mother, and going down to the baby in arms.
Amongst these wefind a whole family of the name of Hay, one
of the females of which was, at any rate, about twenty-two
years upon the pension list, and who, at the end of that time,
became the lady' of the present Sir John Cam Hobhouse.
Whether she have the pensio❑ yet is more than I can say.
Some of these pensions are granted for life—some of them
during the pleasure of the King, that is to say, his Mini-
sters ; some of them for a term of years ; there being in
all this concern a variety so great and so enchanting, as
to make it the work of a man's life to come at any thing
like a clear statement of the manner in which the money
is taken away from us. But, in order to have a fair view
of the extent to which the principles of justice are ad-
hered to, let us look at the manner in which the settled
laws of the country operate upon the middle and lower
classes, when any of their families, any of their children,
any of their parent, stand in need of parochial relief.
The celebrated Act of Elizabeth, which first made paro-
chial provision for the relief of the poor, and of the cause
of which Act I shall have to speak to-morrow evening,
when I come to speak of the property of the Church ;
that celebrated Act, while it imposed a compulsory as-
sessment for the relief of the poor and indigent, compelled
the father and mother, if of substance sufficient, to give,
out of their own substance, relief to their indigent chil-
dren, grandchildren, and even ereat-grandchildre❑ ; and
also compelled children, if of sufficient substance, to give,
under similar circumstances, relief to their fathers and
mothers, and, if necessary, their grandfathers and grand-
mothers. Nothing could be more just than this provision
of the law ; such is the law still ; a law bottomed upon
the maxim of St. Paul, that he who abandoned his own
kindred to want is worse than a heathen. But if this law
be just, why is it not applied to the families of the nobi-
lity, and the clergy, and the gentry, as well as to the
middle and working classes who toil for their bread ? A
few years ago, a man in the parish of Ticelmrst, in
the county of Sussex, applied to me for advice, under the
following circumstances :—The man was nearly or quite
fourscore years of age; he had been a hard-working
man all his life-time; had reared a great family without
any assistance from the parish ; had from his long and
sedulous savings become the proprietor of two tenements,
worth fifteen pounds a year, upon the rent of which, to-
gether with what he was still able to do, in the way of
work, he kept himself from the parish, and hoped so to
do till the end of his life. One of his sons had died, and
I left three children, who were all old enough to be able to
work for the farmers. They did work for them ; but as
the farmers paid part of their wages out of the poor-rates,
they deemed the poor children to be paupers, according to
the present debasing and infamous phraseology, the word
pauper never having been used in the Act of Queen Elizabeth.
The children being thus placed upon the poor book, the
parish officers applied to the Magistrates to make the
grandfather pay to the parish that part of the wages
which the children received out of the poor-rates. The
Magistrates made the order accordingly. The old man
answered that, if he did this, he must go to the workhouse
himself. The reply was, that he might sell the tenements,
and that if he would not do that, the parish officers should
do it for him. Precisely how the thing terminated Ido
not now recollect, but, I think it ended by a seizure of the
tenements on the part of the parish officers, and I dare
say that the dismal drama closed by the old man's expiring
in that poor-house, from which, by constant industry and
care he had kept himself and his family for so many years."

If any man in the middle class of life were to
allow his brothers or sisters, his father or mother,
to receive parish aid, he would be held in con-
tempt by all his acquaintance. Even the cir-
cuinstanse of his having himself a large family,
and a narrow income to support it, would not be
deemed a justification of his conduct. What
parish aid is to the middle and lower classes,
the Pension List is to the higher. Yet we find
the Marqui3 of Tweeddale, the brother of the
lady to whom Mr. Cobbett alludes, a Nobleman
in the possession of large estates in Berwickshire
and East Lothian (and an estate, also, we be-
lieve, in Argyleshire), had the meanness to
allow six or seven ladies (his sisters) to be sup-
ported at the public expense, each having re-
ceived a pension of 1001. per annum. The lady
to whom Mr. Cobbett alludes was the innocent
victim of the system. We blame not her ; but we
certainly think the brother, who succeeded to a
princely estate unencumered, ought to have
these pensions flung in his face whenever be
makes his appearance. There is not a hind on
his estate who would not sink into the earth ra-
ther than support the reproach of imitating his
conduct. This Marquis of Tweeddale is one
of the sixteen Peers of Scotland, and voted in the
majority against the Reform Bill. At the Ber-
wickshire Conservative meeting, where an Anti-
Reform Address was voted, the first resolution
was moved by Lord Dunglass, the soil of the
Earl of Home, Lord Lieutenant of the county.
This Earl of Home is also a pauper, enjoying
a charity-pension of 3001. a year. How these
beggars can show themselves at all in public is
what astonishes us. They have yet to learn the
very first principles of morality. The case of
the poor man in the parish of Ticehurst, men-
tioned by Mr. Cobbett, is far from a solitary one ;
and certainly it affords a very strong exemplifi-
cation of the evils wrought by the abuse of the
poor laws. We have more than once remarked,
that so long as able-bodied labourers can be
made paupers, by the abuse of fixing wages at
a rate below what a working man can be sub-
sisted on, and throwing part of his subsistence
on the rates, the labourers can have no security
for their property. Two or three farmers, by
laying their heads together, can at any time strip
the whole labourers of a parish of their cottages,
and all other property possessed by them. This
is a monstrous evil ; attd it certainly forms a
great deduction from the benefit of poor laws,
when we see that by means of them, the whole
labouring population of a country may be re-
duced to a condition differing only from slavery