The Sun.
London, England, 1861-01-04 00:00:00

it (otherwise than merely in name) as the member
for Stroud.

- The Stroud electors, by the resolution they
have now carried against Mr. HORSMAN, after
mature deliberation, have declared in so many
words, as we have seen, that that right hon. gentle-
man no longer represents them in Parliament. By
his absolute refusal now to yield to the extremely
urgent request for his resignation, Mr. HORSMAN
tells them, to all intents and purposes, in so many
words, that if he no longer represents them he is
determined to niis-represent them in Parliament !
His resolve not to resign as requested, really and
truly, amounts to that. And whenever any mem-
ber, no matter who that member may be, impor-
tant or unimportant, gifted or the reverse,
stands up before the House in that anomalous
and, as one might say, even ridiculous position—
his character is lowered before Parliament, his
opinions are depreciated in value, his support or
his opposition in debate come to be looked down
upon by all parties, or sections of parties, with
comparative indifference. We say this without
any reference to the merits of the misunderstand-
ing between a member of the House of Commons
and his constituents. For our own part, we write
thus of the particular squabble which has occurred
between Mr. HORSMAN and the Stroud electors with
the utmost possible impartiality. For we cannot
but remember in regard to this their contention,
that our views have been in a very great measure
coincident with those expressed by Mr. HORSMAN,
and in direct opposition to those maintained
in opposition to him by the majority of the electors
who sent him to Parliament as their representative.
Mr. HORSMAN'S contempt for the " poor Little Bill"
for Parliamentary Reform introduced by Lord
JOHN RUSSELL last year only to be withdrawn—
Mr. HORSMAN'S incredulity as to the excellence of
that vaunted Commercial Treaty with France,
whether viewed in the interest of Peace or in those
of Free Trade—Mr. HORSMAN'S opposition to the
abolition of the Paper Duties during a time of
deficit, as, to say the least of it, a proceeding in
every particular most ill advised and inopportune
—Mr. HORSMAN'S still more resolute opposition,
if that were possible, to the continuance, and, still
more, to the increase of the Income Tax, and that
too (of all years !) in 1860, and that, moreover, by
(of all Financiers !) the Right lion. W. E. GLAD-
STONE as Chancellor of the Exchequer—Mr.
HORSMAN'S conduct in all these particulars we re.
gard as perfectly rational, manly, honest, and
independent.

Observe—we regard it as such —we estimate thus
the course pursued bythis independent member,view-
ing that course ourselves calmly and dispassionately
as independent Journalists. Not thus is it, how-
ever, that Mr. HORSMAN'S conduct during the past
session has been viewed—by his own constituency.
THEY regard his conduct during last session indeed
very differently. They condemn it. We may deem
them mistaken in their judgment in so condemning
it, but there is the simple and positive fact that
they DO condemn it, as they have a perfect right
to condemn it, if they so please. And they condemn
it not vaguely or in one or two particulars, but abso-
lutely, unreservedly, and throughout. And now the
Stroud Electors have added to their resolute and re-
iterated condemnation the very pointed request that
Mr. HORSMAN will, under the circumstance, think
proper formally to tender his resignation. This
Mr. HORSMAN as pointedly declines to do. And it
is in the attitude of defiance he has thus assumed
towards his constituents throughout the whole of
these recent proceedings that we certainly deem
him to be so entirely in error. His going down at
all to Stroud, under the circumstance, we cannot
but feel disposed to regard as a piece of political
foolhardiness. But having thus gone down
and met his Stroud friends of yesterday, his
Stroud foes of to-day and avengers of to-morrow,
he ought certainly, in mere consistency, and with
a due regard to his own dignity—haying been
allowed (as he was right nobly) a fair hearing, and
having been thereupon, again, and yet again, met
by a sweeping vote of condemnation—Mr. HORSMAN
ought certainly, in mere consistency, and with
a due regard to his own dignity, to have
yielded, however unwillingly, to the demands of the
Stroud electors, and to have tendered his resigna-
tion. Many another constituency would be proud
to have him, in spite of all his crotchets and all his
impracticability. His stubborn retention of his
seat in defiance and in despite of his former sup.
porters, who are supporters of his now no longer,
can possibly gain him nothing either from Stroud,
before the Country, or in Parliament.

By a rather singular coincidence, at the very
moment when the larger and more intelligent half
of the United States have achieved their first vic-
tory in the conflict with slavery, slaveholders have
gained a sad victory on British soil in Canada. We
may hope, indeed, that the triumph is but a tem-
porary one, since, being a question of law, it has
yet to be argued through two appeals, if necessary
—the last being to our Judicial Committee of Privy
Council. Sad, indeed, would it be if, when the
better Free States of America have, by Personal
Liberty Laws, nullifying as far as they can the ope-
ration of their Fugitive Slave Law, Canada, the
England of America, should be found to have retro-
graded on the subject of delivering the escaped
slave into the hand of his master. It was the great
Bostonian, Dr. CIIANNING, if we remember rightly,
who declared that he envied our position, when,
on some one asking Lord MORPETII (now the Eafi
of CARLISLE) whether nothing would induce Z:4l-eat
Britain to surrender a fugitive ;rave, the
noble lord replied—" No, rather ',et all Canada
go first." We hope the highest court of
appeal in Canada itself 'will, by reversing
the decision of the court below, prove that it belongs
to the nation of Lord MORPETII, We say so, be-
cause we think in a question of extradition, the
broadest international principles must be applied,
and the benefit of any perplexity be given to the
fugitive.

IThe facts of the case are these. So long back as
September., 1853; a slave named ANDERSON escaped
from Missouri to Canada. In escaping he had killed
who, officiously, required
aim to proa planter namedd
u
c
e
hisDIGGES,
"pass"—and, finding he had
none, endeavoured to seize him, ,hm back t
byi the help b
p oef four
f
negroes of his own, and to send
cut to pieces by the being who called himself his
owner, and to the slavery from which he
tfled.e most Poor
ANDERSON was suffering under one of the
villanous of the characteristics of American slavery;
he had been sold thirty miles away from his wife
and child, and was probably, at that moment
planning to carry them all off with him to I
Canada. DIGGEs, with the instinctive and
11
infernal malice of a slaveholder towards negroes, I
must needs show his sympathy with men whom 4 '
in this country we should esteem the worst of
felons, and quite gratuitously fight for slavery 1
against freedom—he, with a club, ANDERSON,
with a knife. DIGGES received wounds which he
certainly richly deserved, and died of them three
weeks afterwards. ANDERSON contrived to escape
to Canada, and has lived there, industriously and
respectably, seven years. The Missouri authorities
at length claimed, under the ASHBURTON Treaty,
his extradition, as a man charged 'pith murder...

The case was argued before the Canadian Court of
Queen's Bench, and the Chief Justice, with one
other judge, were in favour of extradition; the
third judge, in a judgment which the whole of
England will assent to, first on some technical and
legal grounds, but mainly and chiefly on the broad
view of the case, was decidedly against it.
The words of the Treaty relevant to the case
are—" That the surrender shall be made upon such
evidence as, according to the laws of that part of
her Majesty's dominions would justify the appre-
hension and committal for trial of the per-
son so accused, if the crime of which he
shall be so accused had been there committed,"
and these words appear to us to be entirely in
favour of the accused. We should have thought,
indeed, that they were chosen by Lord ASHBUR-
TON to prevent escaped negroes from being dealt
with according to the laws of the State whence
they had escaped, and to ensure that they should

not be delivered up by Canada on trumped up

charges, the real object being to recapture men who
had used no other means to obtain their freedom

than the necessity of the occasion required. Now,
certainly in Canada, or in any other part of the
British empire, any British subject who, by force,
endeavoured to prevent any man's escaping from
the felonious oppression of slavery must take the
consequences of his act. If he were killed the
homicide would be held to be perfectly justifiable.
The law under which ANDERSON could be charged
with murder is not, we believe, even the national
law of the United States, with which, and not with
Missouri, our treaty is made. By Missouri law he
is guilty of a crime, for which, should he be sent
back, he would probably be put to death with
tortures too horrible to think of. Flayed alive
perhaps there, here he can but be regarded es one
of nature's nobles; one of the many illustrations
of the " stuff which thousands of Africans are made
off ;" that he could fight for dear liberty with five
men, his only weapon a knife, and beat them all.
How would all civilisation gaze with admiration
on the exploits of a thousand or two such men
with a coloured GARIBALDI to lead them, against
infinitely worse tyrants than the Bourbon of
Gaeta.

It is, however, a case of dry law, we shall be
told—it is nothing to us whether a man, who was
for seven years a peaceable and industrious sub-
ject of the British Crown, shall, if we surrender
him, be roasted alive over a slow fire ; nothing to
us that he killed a man only because that man,
out of malice prepense against all freedom-loving
negroes, sought to kidnap him ; nothing to us, that
he, according to English law and English feeling,
legally and rightly killed the villain who was endea-
vouring to rob him of the most precious of human
treasures, life itself hardly excepted, all these things
are nothing to us ! The Treaty says murderers must
be delivered up, and ANDERSON was a murderer !
Even, however, should the nine Judges of the Court
of Appeal in Canada, or a majority of them, think
that these things are nothing to us—we may be
confident that our Judicial Committee of Privy
Council will not think so. We could almost wish
the case to come so far, that American Judges might
hear the withering invectives of our aged DEMOS-
THEN ES against such law. But there is a considera-
tion we have not seen mentioned. To us, the lan-
guage of the Treaty seems plain, Fut were it not so,
we should still say that it was morally impossible
that Lord ASHBURTON could have intended that
such fugitives should be delivered up. As an Eng-
lishman his feelings would not have allowed it; as
a public man he would have known that this coun-
try would have execrated such a Treaty and its
author; indeed, that the Crown dared not
have signed it. We deny, therefore, ab
initio, the possibility of any language ex-

isting in th© ASHBITRTON Treaty by which

it could be meant, that a man who had
killed another, not in revenge, but because the
slain man had interfered with his most righteous
efforts to be free, could be delivered up on a charge
of murder.

Several of our contemporaries, we are glad to see,
have argued the case as Englishmen must do ;
some of them with good illustrations. Thus the
Morning Post writes :
" As slavery does not exist in Canada, it is impossible to

imagine a precisely parallel case. But other illustrations
are not wanting. Robbery is an offence within the treaty.
According to the law of the Southern States no slave can
possess property. A negro runs away from South Carolina
or Missouri in clothes which belong to his master. He
reaches Canada; but according to Chief Justice ROBINSON
he has committed the crime of felony, and must therefore
be surrendered. The American tribunals and Government
have acted upon a more sensible theory. Desertions from
the British army constantly occur in Canada, and the
fugitives, when across the boundary, knew that they aro
safe. On one occasion the British authorities demanded
the restoration of certain deserters, not on the ground
of any military offence,, but on the ground that
they had committed felony by taking with them uniform
and accoutrements which were Government property.
The United States Government declined to interfere. They
said that the imputed felony was only an incident of deser-
tion, and that it could not be considered as coming within
the meaning of the term felony' used in the treaty. Upon
exactly the same principle the Chief Justice and Mr.
Justice BURNS, we submit, ought to have held that
ANDERSON, in killing, without malice prepense, the man
who attempted by force to restrain his freedom, simply did
an act which, if it had been committed in England or
Canada, would be considered justifiable homicide. In fact,
if we wished to apply to Sir J. B. ROBINSON'S argument
the reclucf:io ad absurdum, we should say that, as every
negi:',) in the Southern States is a mere chattel—as much a
piece of goods as a bank-note or a purse of money—an
escaped slave may be surrendered for stealing himself.
There are some twenty thousand of these people in Canada.
Are they all to be relegated to the whip and the tortures of
the planter because a majority of the Canadian judges
think that the word murder' in the treaty is to be inter-
preted according to the laws of Missouri, and not in ac-
cordance with the enlightened and humane principles of
English freedom? ANDERSON, however, is not to be
surrendered."

The latter half also of Mr. Justice M`LEAN'S
judgment is a noble vindication of English law and
sentiment, and we hope it will be soon found that,
let the South do what it will, Canada shall never,
by any Fugitive Slave Treaty, be converted, like
the Free States of America, into the slaveholders'
hunting ground.

The Duchess of Inverness gave a grand enter-
tainment last night to their Royal Highnesses the Duchess
of Cambridge and the Princess Mary, at her grace's apart-
ments in Kensington Palace. There was a select party in-
vited to meet their royal highnesses.

The Duke of Rutland and Lord John Manners,
M.P., have returned to Belvoir Castle from visiting the
Earl and Countess of Scarborough at Sandbeck Park, near
Ticknell, Yorkshire.

The Duke and Duchess of Manchester, who have
been staying on a visit to the Earl of Sandwich, atHinchin-
brookc, returned yesterday to Kimbolton Castle.

The Earl and Countess of Dalkeith are expected
shortly at the Duke of Buccleuch's mansion in Belgrave-
square, from Dalkeith Palace, in anticipation of her lady-
ship's accouchernent.
Lord and Lady Delamere arrived in town yester-
day from Lord Dacre's seat, the Hoo, in Hertfordshire, and
leave to-day for Vale Royal, Cheshire.
Sir Robert Peel, Bart., M.P., and TA ay Emily
Peel, accompanied by Lady Jano Hay, arrived in White-
hall-gardens yesterday from Nice.
casTtlheeatHc
Sir Edmund W. Head, Bart., Governor-General
Hon, Francis
erraPntei riks ,
andN () t i
firs.s.
of Canada, and Lady Head and the Misses Head, have re-
turned to Parranee's hotel from visiting the Duke of New •
in town from visiting
Baring have arrived
Wa
kefield Lodge, and will leave 1
to-day fir Paris,