The Sun.
London, England, 1850-03-16 00:00:00

Brick-dust Budget. In it they have consummated
their labours as the Renegades of Statesmanship. By
the Brick-dust Budget they hare demonstrated with
the precision of a mathematical truth the accuracy of
the belief that

"A Whig in Office is a Slave in Place."

Henceforth it will be remembered, as proven in the
Brick-dust Budget of 1850, that the opinions of the
Whig faction are subject to alternations according to
the locality of their position in Parliament, rendering
them—Ultra-Budicals on the,Benches of the Opposi-
tion, and Ultra-Conservatives on the Benches of the
Treasury.
To epitomise the character of this Brick-
dust Budget, this financial bantling of the
Whig Cabinet, dandled with so much shameless corn•
placency before the House of Commons last evening
by the CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER, it is only
necessary to observe that it consists of three con-
spicuous acts of baseness, constituting a monstrous
and almost unparalleled violation of the laws of
legislative morality. Briefly then : through the
lips of Sir CHARLES WOOD the Free Trade,
Liberal Government has obsequiously kissed the
hem of the garment of the Agricultural Opposition.
In no other way can we designate with a sufficiently
contemptuous emphasis the truckling of the RUSSELL
Ministry to their more noble, because more bold and
plain-spoken, antagonists. After the financial state-
ment of last evening, the partizans of the Honourable
Gentleman; the Knight Representative of Bucking-
hamshire, have ample reason to congratulate him as
leader of the Country Party on the fulfilment of some
of his dearest aspirations by the pitiful compliance of
the Government. Even the Honourable Member for
West Surrey is driven into the necessity of pronouncing
a kind of grateful panegyric on the Cabinet—a pane-
gyric on the Whig Cabinet from the mouth of an
arrant Conservative ! " 0 day and night, but this is
wondrous strange !" Yet the marvel ceases on an
examination of the financial statement of the CHAN-
CELLOR of the EXCHEQUER. After blowing a whole
orchestra of trumpets in the way of vaunting the
great measure of proposed amelioration, the Minis-
terial mountain, with the throes of a political earth-
quake, gives forth its boon to the country—a
wretched little sop to the agriculturists—the
remission of the Duty on Bricks ! For the purpose,
it is intimated, of facilitating agricultural drainage,
and with a view to enable farmers more readily to
erect cottages and other bucolic specimens of domestic
architecture—her MAJESTY'S advisers—are prepared
—after due consideration—to—remit the Duty on
Bricks ! What a grand thing it would have been if
Sir CHARLES Wool), in making that announcement,
could have assumed for the moment that majestic
and consequential " roll in the voice," which
is among the many agreeable characteristics
of our old friend, Mr. WILKINS MICAWEER ! As a
priceless benefaction to the agriculturists, and to the
community at large, the Government will consent to
remit the Duty on Bricks ! Not a word about the
remission or even the reduction of the window-tax—
not an inkling of any intention to remove the imposts
upon the light of GOD'S day and the air of GOD'S
heaven ! But bricks are to be taxless. Build away
then, ye agriculturists, your windowless and
unventilated tenements thanking PROVIDENCE and
the Whigs that bricks are cheaper than
fresh air, grateful that advantages are conferred upon
the brickkiln which are not permitted to penetrate
the workshop of the glazier. True, again, the
Cabinet through its Chancellor of the Exchequer re-
pudiates all intention to remit the grievous imposts
upon knowledge. But then remember the ineffable
boon assured to us by the Brick-dust Budget. Our
rulers appear to entertain somewhat similar views in
regard to education as those expressed the other
evening by the gallant and eccentric Member for
Lincoln—" Where," they appear to say with
him, " where is the use of reading ? Who
cares about books ? " So, the duty on bricks being
remitted, the tax on paper and advertisements will be
retained. Is not this, we ask, an awful travestie of
the Holy Volume? "They asked you for bread, and
you gave them a stone." So has it been with
the people hungering after that food of
intellect, that bread of life, knowledge. So might
we say to the Government—" They asked you for
bread (the bread of life), and you gave them a
brick !" But the problem, cruelly inexplicable as it
may appear, is capable of a solution the remission
of the tax on Bricks is a sop to:quiet one enemy, one
formidable power, and the maintenance of the duty
on Paper is a sop to quiet another. In this manner
the timorous and cringing Government of the
Whigs, endeavouring to stay off danger by
yielding first in this direction and next in
that, even though it be at the risk of
selling one by one the glorious dogmas of their poli-
tical belief, are buying the permission to remain in
office even with the dereliction of their duties, the
abandonment of their ambition, and the rejection of
all their venerable and long-cherished principles.
Yet the Whig Government withal must
needs pretend to claim the possession of a con-
science. While bribing the agriculturists, and truck-
ling to Conservatism, and deceiving the people, they
must needs have the audacity to assume in their
Brick-dust Budget a sort of a conscientious
sentiment. We must presume from this that
the CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER has
been somehow infected by those mysterious halves of
five and ten pound notes sent to him in the shape of
conscience money from time to time by
all the letters of the alphabet. However
this may be, certain it is that the Whig
Cabinet pretends to have a conscience. It talks—as
we intimated yesterday that it would—about appro••
priating some portion of the surplus revenues of
the empire to the liquidation of the National
Debt of 800,000,0001.! Fortunately that stern
and inexorable feeling which is prevalent
throughout the.country, and to which feeling we gave
voice yesterday, has induced the Government to
hesitate in the appropriation of more than 750,0001.
out of the 2,000,000/. surplus to this object of liquida-
tion. Yet even so far as this our fears have been realised;
750,000/. being set aside for the diminution of the ca-
pital of 800,000,0001., while light, and air, and know-
ledge are still laden down with taxation.

Simultaneously with the exposure of so much po-
litical turpitude on the part of the Government, the
cause, the bloated and plethoric cause of
the moneyocracy is advanced by our Whig states-
men. While trampling down the noblest aspira-
tions of the people, these consistent Liberals are
raising the Golden Calf on a loftier pedestal.
Representatives of the Banking Interest under
their auspices are introduced in batches into
the House of Lords—the most recent accessions
to the peerage being as everybody well knows Lords
OVERSTONEI and LONDESBOROUGII. Thus under the
Whig Administration the money-makers are clothed
in the ermine and the coronet, while the vast masses
of the people are abandoned to their wretched
cellars and garrets, shut out from the daylight,
deprived of wholesome ventilation, and doomed to re-
main in the moral darkness and mental squalor of
their ignorance. Hence we would say to these
Whig statesmen—now, while the patents of nobility
bestowed on Lord LONDESBOROUGH and Lord OVER-
STONE are still crisp and fresh from the hand of
the heraldic stationer—we would say to the Members
of this Gold-honouring Government, in the words of a
great poet—
"Ye friends to truth, ye statesmen who survey
The rich man's joys increase, the poor's decay,

'Tis yours to judge how wit.) the limits tt3nd
Between a splendid and a happy land.'
With the warning implied in those noble couplets of
OLIVER GOLDSMITH we would here associate the
indignation with which the people of England will
inevitably receive the intelligence of the Brick-dust
Budget brought forward in the Commons last evening
by the Financial Minister of the Whig Government.

The intended abolition of the Lord-Lieutenancy of
Ireland has, as might have been anticipated, created
some degrce of excitement at the other side of St.
George's Channel. Some of the Dublin journals are,
of course, indignant at the contemplated change, but
the provincial press exhibit an almost unparalleled
unanimity in favour of the new Ministerial policy.
The corruption and intrigue, the jobbing and abuses,
; all classes
to which the existence of the mock Court gave rise
were,and
parties unhappily,
agreed buted too
in condemning notorious
ing
the ex-
isting abuses, abuses, however, which were
inseparable from the system. It would,
therefore, have been monstrous_that a few Dublin