The Sun.
London, England, 1835-04-07 00:00:00

ESDAY, APRIL 7, 1835.

tamed office under all his humiliation, so long only as
the House of Commons did not " mark its want of
confidence in the Government, or enforce any great
principle at direct variance with the declared sentiments
of the Government." The resolutions, therefore, of
Lord John Russell, and the majorities in their favour,
enable the Right Hon. Baronet to get rid of his de-
voted Cabinet in the way most satisfactory to himself.
On Thursday last Sir Robert Peel had wisely deter-
mined to surrender the seals of office ; and lie would
have consulted his own personal character and sense of
Ministerial duty to the King, if on Saturday he had
acted on his own better judgment. What end can be
answered by a pertinacious opposition to the majority
of the representatives of the people ? Aby vote, with
a 'chance majority in his favour, he well knows, what-
ever his whippers-in may think, would not reinstate
his Government, or avert the legislative Act on the
Irish Church, which he declares will never receive his
Ministerial concurrence. In the meanwhile the whole
clan of City Tories are sounding their worn-out tocsin
of " Addresses." Is it then come to this, that the
hack Addressers of the Metropolis are to usurp the
functions of Members of the House of Commons ?
Are the Sovereign and the Legislature to be dic-
tated to by a miserable minority of merchants and
traders of the City ? If so, indeed, the Constitu-
tion is destroyed, and our representative system will
become a bye-word of ridicule in free countries.
The Metropolitan Members, and the Representatives
of Middlesex, to a man, represent popular principles.
The political sentiments of the great majority of elec-
tors were signally manifested so late as December last,
in the contemptuous rejection of every Tory candidate
for their suffrage, notwithstanding the influence of the
Government and the great Corporations, lay and eccle-
siastic. What then is the real mirror of public opi-
nion—the opinions of the addressers, or the votes of
the Metropolitan electors ? Mr. William Ward and
Mr. Horsley Palmer have too often resorted to the
old artifice of bolstering up a falling Cabinet, by se-
cretly conceived addresses. " Help Cassius, or I
sink,' cries Caesar in the Tiber. This old stage trap
is an invariable mark of disguised fear, and always pro-
motes the fall of an Administration instead of giving to
it strength or vitality. The house of the Minister, or the
Royal Gazette, is the receptacle of these absurd docu-
ments. The party promoters of them come forward under
false characters. They dishonestly pass themselves off
as the public, though they studiously avoid the light.
It was once well remarked, that " they are to the pub-
lic
what the locusts are to the tree." An imposition
so palpable will not delude the Premier or the Legis-
lature. It was signally exposed and abortive on the
great national contest in 1832. Every town and
county then teemed with these hole-and-corner exhibi-
tions-; and what did they avail against the Commons
and the people ? Even the Hells were yesterday
saked out, and Crockford's Clubbists and Count
D'Orsay (an alien) signed the " City Address of Mer-
chants, Bankers," &c. What, however, these agitators
and secret political unions do by day, the Commons
undo at night ; and Sir Robert Peel, by this time, has
had a practical proof of his declared sentiments
on the Reform Bill—that Toryism could no
longer domineer over the country, or preserve the
abuses of our social institutions. Some wild To-
ries threaten a dissolution of the Parliament. The
Stuarts foundered on that species of destruc-
tive policy, and Sir Robert Peel is not the man to
ruin himself, and endanger the Constitution, by such
reckless advice to the Sovereign. He has appealed to
the people ;he has rung every alarm-bell within his
reach ; in despite of rotten Corporations, of corrupted
constituencies, of the influence of the Tories derived
from property in the counties, he has received his an-
swer in the Commons. In vain he has repudiated the
ultra-politics and party mania of his coadjutors in
office : the Commons judge him " by the company he
keeps." With a good grace, therefore, though late,
Sir Robert Peel will retire, on the ground which he
has so distinctly marked out to his mourning' Ad-
dressers—that the Commons have enforced a great
principle at direct variance with the declared senti-
ments of the Government. The Premier is a sacrifice
to the blindness and bigotry of his party. He has
now convinced them of his known presentiment—that
public opinion has destroyed the once paramount power
of nomination boroughs. The die is cast.—Morning
Chronicle.

The Tories having been again beaten last night by
a majority of twenty-five, as we mentioned yesterday
morning, are reduced to their last gasp, or rather, we
should say, beyond the possibility of gasping. Sir
Robert Peel fights for office with as much pertinacity
as if his life depended upon office ; but Lord John
Russell is staunch, and will not quit him. Sir Robert
affects to disregard all the defeats he has met with in
the Commons, and looks to the Lords (the Lord help
him) for support in the hour of difficulty. It will not
do ; the public have said vengeance, and vengeance
must be their's. Lord John Russell, on behalf of the
people, and with their cordial approbation and support,
has intimated to Sir Robert that no bill connected with
the Irish Church can pass into a law, unless there is a
clause embodied in it sanctioning the appropriation of
whatever funds there may be, over and above paying
the Irish Clergy for doing nothing, to any purpose
which the State may require. This is a virtual bring-
ing of the question to issue, and if, after it has been
decided, Sir Robert still clings to office, there is no
knowing into what perils he may plunge the country.
But we hope for better things, not from him certainly,
but from those to whom he has always been opposed—
the people's Opposition.—Morning Advertiser.

If the late debate in Parliament has not been
grounded in faction, we know not where to find a
motive either for the motion, or for the long conti-
nuance of the discussion. -We may, perhaps, be pe-
culiar in our notions, but we feel a strong persuasion
that the Roman Catholic religi on has generally given
way to a general enlightenment of the people ; and
that had the Protestant Church of Ireland made a
proper use of the long era of elselusion and of ascen-
dancy which it has enjoyed, its i nembers, if not forming
an actual majority of the population, would, at any
rate, by this time have been mu ch more commanding
in point of numbers, than the most sanguine enumera-
tion now exhibits them as being_ It is now full five-
and-twenty years ago that Mr. Croker, no mean au-
thority upon any subject, thus es:pressed himself upon
this subject :—" To the Esta blished Clergy (of
Ireland), ' . says Mr. Croker, " what shall I
urge ? The times, momentous to all, are critical
to them ; their flocks turbulent, their revenues invaded,
their very hierarchy assailed : -these are not days for
sloth. One-third of them are not resident absentees
from their duties—mortmainers upon the land. The
Establishment which laymen ire invoked to defend,
Churchmen should support by their presence, dignify
by their piety, and extend by their example." We
readily admit that much of the keen but deserved cen-
sure thus thrown upon the Clergy of Ireland by one of
their warmest friends has since been removed ; and
that a sense of duty and of danger has taken the place
of the sloth and indolence which he alludes to. But we
deny that a shadow of pretence has, during this long
discussion, been advanced, eitl• ter to prove that there
is, or is likely to be, any actual surplus of Protestant
Church revenues, after the de tluctions they are now
permanently undergoing; or th EA, if there were, the
purpose for which it was destined by Lord John Rus-
sell's motion could be a just one. Those who have most
closely examined the subject of tith es, have been of opi-
nion that they were originally assigned for three purposes
--the maintenance of the priesthood, th.e support of the
edifice of the Church, and the- relief of the poor ; and
if such a distribution of them in England has been
abandoned, it has been, not that it was not well
founded, but that the spoliatic in of tithes at the Re-
formation, and the placing so large a portion of them
in lay hands, left the clerical , remainder of them ina-
dequate for the maintenance of the Clergy alone, and
the other two objects necessarily to be maintained from
other sources. But the principle remains the same ;
and if, therefore, either in 'England or in Ireland, a
surplus of ecclesiastical revenue' should ever be found,
the two objects to which it has never yet been applied
have the strongest claim upon::: it. In Ireland the
Church stands little chance of b .eing fok- the future too
wealthy, or likely, indeed, to yi€ ;ld the smallest surplus
when at one swoop the landlords, with pious zeal, are
to take thirty per cent., or n early one-third, to their
own share, as a bribe for sec Airing to the Clergy the

=es'-

remainder. However favourable, then, we may be
to the ells cation of the -people—an object which
—as Protestants—we should warmly advocate in the
abstract—every one not bent on the overthrow of
the Church, on the one hand, or that of the Ministry
on the other, must be convinced that, through the pro-
posed means, such an object was wholly unattainable,
and, as such, utterly unworthy of the eloquence which
has been bestowed upon it. In fact, as far as argu-
ment has been used, it has been necessarily all on one
side. We should say, educate the people of Ireland
by all means—we should also say, first give them
bread—give the poor,the aged, and decrepit that claim
upon the land which the law of nature has assigned
them in both countries, and which in England they are
entitled to by the law of the land. One or both of
these objects are fairly attachable to the owners of the
soil of Ireland, who have now, in addition to dispro-
portionate rents, 30 per cent. of the Church income
added to their revenues. But to talk of the Church,
with its reduced resources, doing the one or the other,
and being singled out solely for the purpose, is a
mockery and delusion too palpable to impose upon any
but the most inflamed or jaundiced imagination.—
Morning Herald.

Repeatedly we have adverted to our own expressed
opinions of last year on the questionconsidered as
one of egeneral nature—whether an ascertained sur-
plus of Irish ecclesiastical revenue over the actual
wants of the Established Church should not be con-
sidered applicable by Parliament to other homogeneous
purposes. Our judgment, then, as now, was and is
for the affirmative of that proposition. But our judg-
ment, or that of the House of Commons, was not then
exercised upon the entire question with regard to which
the House of Commons has recently decided—viz.,
whether the enforcement of such a principle should be
left to the avowed enemies of British connection, and
of the Protestant Church and State. The deceptions
character of the resolution proposed by Lord John
Russell arose from the necessary complication of prin-
ciples with facts, from the inevitable incorporation of
the vote with its practical consequences. Now, for
the first time, has it been pressed upon Parliament to
make a set of men, who not only are, but who boast
of being, disaffected to the supremaey of the Bri-
tish Crown and the United Parliament over Ire-
land, the functionaries for administering the affairs
of the realm under that authority. Never be-
fore did any faction dare, under whatever pretexts, to
confide the interests, temporal and spiritual, of the
Protestant established Church to a convocation of
Popish conspirators against her property and her
existence. That is the real question upon which the
House of Commons has lately voted, in a manner
which it was never before called upon to vote, because,
as we have said, the Imperial Government of last sum-
mer, though Whig and Liberal in a high degree, stood
mainly independent of the clique of Irish Repealers.
Would that be now the case? Let Lord John Rus-
sell search his conscience, and give us, if he can, a
direct and faithful answer. Why, then, there is in the
eyes of Englishmen no reason to find fault with those
who, by resisting the motion of the Noble Lord,
conceived that they were helping to avert the
accession of his evil-compounded party to office,
that misfortune being aggravated by the pre-
vious recognition of a rule of policy, which in the
hands and under the guidance of a certain section of
the new Government, could work no otherwise than
for the destruction of the Protestant state. This view
of the matter ought to be made familiar to the mind of
every Protestant subject of the British monarchy. It
can never be impressed with too much earnestness on
the attention of our English countrymen, that the ac-
knowledged, ostentatious, and indisputable purpose of
the Popish faction in Ireland, as declared by all their
speeches and writings, with O'Connell's at their head,
is to deprive the Protestant Established Church in
that country of the entire pecuniary support which it
now derives from law, as being an injustice to the Irish
Catholics, because they are not of the Protestant reli-
gion, and drew no specific benefit from the establish-
ment. Nor is it any answer, according to their view
of the question, to tell them that the property of
the Irish Church is not a wrong against any Catholic
individual, inasmuch as every proprietor of that per-
suasion originally took his acres, subject to the espe-
cial condition that the Church should be, as it had
been from time immemorial, a joint proprietor with him
to the extent of one-tenth of the gross produce. The
rejoinder to such a statement is, that the tithe was pre-
viously held by the Romish Church, and therefore
that the Protestant is an Usurper. Here then we have
laid open to us at once the nature of the wrong, by
formal complaint, and that of the meditated remedy, by
an inference which there is no mistaking. " Confis-
-cation" of the funds, enjoyed in the 16th century by
the Popish hierarchy to Protestant uses, is the grie-
vance. The redress, therefore, can be no other than a
restoration of the same funds, plus the tithe (whether
actual or commuted) ever since held by lay impropria-
tors to Popish uses. We treat with utter scorn the
hypocritical pretence of O'Connell that he does not
contemplate an establishment of the Popish Church in
Ireland. It is an outrage upon history, experience,
and common sense, to imagine that Popery can
ever tolerate the " voluntary principle" where it
has the means of substituting an authorized es-
tablishment of its own Ministers. A coercive
exclusion of _all independent creeds is the known
foundation of the edifice of Popery, temporal
and spiritual. Nor is its existence as an autho-
rized institution in the State compatible with the
safety of any form of Government but that of military
or arbitrary monarchy, against which it is unable to
contend. Its natural enemy is a free Constitution,
which, wherever it dares to make the attempt, it hunts
down as its necessary victim. The priest is already by
far too much the law-giver of the South and West of
Ireland. What will he be when the powers of the
State are formally committed to his hands ? Yet to
this point is the country now pushed by the vote of 'the
House of Commons, and by its threatened conse-
quences. The people of England must interpose by
petition and remonstrance, or our Protestant Constitu-
tion is at an end. The Dissenters of both countries
must make common cause with their Protestant
brethren of the Established Church, or they will suffer
the like fate with the Irish Dissenters in the rebellion
towards the close of the 18th century, who began by
confederating with the Papists, and ended by being
sacrificed to their bigotted and treacherous rancour.
But the people are apparently about to take part in the
fray, and, terrified for the future, are beginning to
declare their sentiments. Our paper of yesterday and
to-day contains a number of addresses to his Majesty
and Sir Robert Peel, thanking the Sovereign for hav-
ing had recourse to Conservative councils, and encou-
raging the latter to persevere in his resistanee to tur-
bulent and selfish faction. Oxford, Liverpool, the
East Riding of York, the borough of Marylebone,
and the city of London, are amongst the places from
which the above addresses proceeded. There
,is, in-
deed, another subject for petition, at once too solemn
and too frightful to be trifled with, which can hardly
be understood by any but those who are acquainted with
the practice of the Romish priesthood, and which is set
forth in hideous minuteness by our correspondent, " a
Father of a Family." If the people of England want
to discover the species of inquisitions to which the vo-
taries of the Roman Catholic Church are subjected,
and to follow out their effects in the enormous power
obtained by that priesthood over all the actions, pri-
vate, public, and mixed, of those who are bound to
confess to them, we refer to the interrogatories enu-
merated in our con espondent's letter. Yet it is sub-
stantially such a power, that the Opposition in Parlia-
ment would enable to crush and ruin the Protestant
Church of Ireland, and to set up as the dominating
and uncontrolled authority over our trampled fellow
Protestants. There is no time to be lost in avert-
ing this irretrievable calamity. If the -present Mi-
nistry be driven out of office, all the rest will happen
in regular succession. The whole patronage of the
Irish Government must be placed at O'Connell's feet
—the whole policy of the Irish Government must be
under his suggestion. The Whig Government here
will have neither numbers nor moral ascendancy to
support it. O'Connell and his 50 votes will hold the
fate of the British Cabinet, whether its chief be Lord
Grey, Lord Melbourne, Mr. Hume, Mr. Ward, Sir
S. Whalley, or Lord John Russell, at his own pre-
carious mercy ; and too late it will be deplored that a

miserable faction of place-hunters have been suffered
by_the people of this great country to usurp the power;
of the State, that they may destroy the principles of
our Protestant monarchical ConstitutTon, and sever the
whole framework of the empire. If the right of pe-
tition be vigorously acted on, the monarchy may )et
be saved.— Times.