The Sun.
London, England, 1844-08-14 00:00:00

~^UTh

LONDON, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 14, 1844.

In an address delivered last week to the grand jury
of the county of Suffolk, Baron ALDERSON made the
following remarks, which we quote for the purpose of
offering a few comments on them :—" In a neigh-
bouring county which I passed through on the cir-
cuit this time," observed his Lordship, " I had, what
I am afraid I shall not have here—a day of rest; and
I went out into the country and had the pleasure of
seeing a match of cricket, in which a Noble Earl, the
Lord-Lieutenant of his county, was playing with the
tradesmen, the labourers, and all around him; and I
believe he lost no respect from that course ; they
loved him better, but they did not respect him less.
I believe that if the nobility and gentry associated
more with the lower classes of society, the kingdom
of England would be in a far safer, and society in a
far sounder, condition. I wish I could put it into the
minds of all to think so, because I am persuaded it is
true." 'We cordially concur in the justice of the
above reflections, and are pleased to find that Baron
ALDERSON has not thought it beneath his official
dignity to draw public attention to the fact that a
nobleman high in rank was detected by him the
other day playing a game of cricket—that manly old
English pastime—with the humbler classes of his
neighbourhood. The circumstance, though an appa-
rently trivial, is in reality an important, one, ex-
hibiting, as it does, a kindly and healthy feeling on
the part of the Noble Earl in question, which if it
were generally followed up by the higher orders o
!society, would soon work a most beneficial revolution
in the sentiments of the peasantry, who, if they now
are—as is undoubtedly the fact—a prey to sullen, ill-
disguised discontent, are so, principally because they
find themselves neglected by those who once were,
and ought always to have continued to be, their
friends and protectors. The aristocracy and
gentry
of this country have much, very much in their power.
Wealth is theirs and station, together with the im
mense moral influence that these advantages, when
turned to a proper account, can always command;
but if they will not snake a right use of this influence,
but will persist in expending their wealth, not to,
benefit their dependents, but to annoy and impoverish
them, by filching from them from time to time parcels
of their common-lands, and shutting up the field
paths over which they have for years been taught to
consider they have a right of way ; if, moreover, they
will persist in making their station felt, solely by
adopting a system of haughty, jealous, exclusive-
ness and isolation ;—if, we say, our nobility and
gentry will persevere in this offensive course of pro.
ceeding, what can they expect but that those who
should look up to them with respect and deference,
will regard them with distrust and aversion, and
become daily more and more alienated from them?
The English peasantry were once a fine, noble, simple,
iadependent race; and still would be so—for with all
their faults the elements of good preponderate in
their character—were they but treated with proper

consideration and courtesy by their superiors ; but in
far too many cases their only portion is neglect; those
who should keep a kindly and watchful eye over their
interests, never trouble their heads about the matter;
and the consequence is that feelings of bitter discon-
tent, all the deeper from being stifled, are slowly but
surely engendered in the minds of the peasantry, and
in this situation, their reason perverted by their pas-
sions, they fall an easy prey to the inflammatory arts
of designing demagogues, who prevail on them to
espouse the wild principles of the Charter as being
the readiest means by which they may work out their
own redemption, and bring their negligent superiors
to something like a sense of justice and consideration.
It is the fashion now-a-days to attribute all the vices
of the lower orders to their poverty, and many touch-
ing, clap-trap speeches, are annually made in Parlia-
ment on this tempting theme ; but it is not so much
their poverty—for poor they have always been, and
poor in the very nature of things they must still con-
tinue to be—that is the cause of their present sullen-
ness and dissatisfaction, as the aristocratic hauteur
with which they are far too often treated by those
who should know better than to indulge in such ab-
surd airs of superiority, which are the unerring indi-
cations of a petty and narrow mind. Treat the poor and
the lowly with kindness and forbearance; take a direct
personal interest in their humble wants and wishes ;
sympathise in their mirth, and be a friend to them in
their sorrows ; exchange the haughty glance for the
winning smile of courtesy ;—in a word, convince
them by acts, as well as words, that you feel that
they, like yourself, belong to the great family of
human nature ;—pursue this course of conduct to-
wards the lower orders, and you will do more to re-
concile them to their position, elevate them in the
social scale, and imbue them with principles of order
and subordination, than if you were to remit
taxes by the score, and surrender to them uncondition-
ally the entire five points of the Charter. Poverty may
be borne, and borne too, without a murmur, for it is
the lot of the majority of every kingdom in the
world ; but it is difficult—a proud and generous mind
finds it impossible—to bear unrepiningly the con-
tempt, indifference, and supercilious exclusiveness of
those who are placed in authority over us from no
merit of their own, but merely by the accidents of
birth and luck !

Railroads are undoubtedly among the most ori-
ginal and characteristic features of the material eco-
nomy of our times. Their uses and relations are so
multiplied, so intimately mixed up with the business
and interests of all classes of the community—they
form so indispensable and prominent an element in
the scheme of modern European society—they are so
obviously the high roads of moral as well as physical
intercommunication between the remotest localities of
empires—and, in this country, the vastness of their
design, the magnificence of their execution, and
the perfect system of their administration are
so far superior to those of any other
State, that there are no public works in the
management and welfare of which the solicitude of
the English people is so universally manifested. The
proverbial passion of ,our active races for travel is
gratified by railway locomotion, though within the
circumscribed limits of their own islands, with a
facility which appears to be absolutely magical, and
with a velocity of transition that more than realises
the demands of e►en our unreasonable appetite for
speed. No wonder that the progress and manage-
ment of undertakings so closely identified with the
constitutional temperament of the people have been
watched by that people with an incessant
and scrutinising jealousy. All kind of hard
things (it must be confessed) have been
suspicted—and not a few have been openly
said—about the overwhelming monopoly, and reck-
less selfishness, and unprincipled extension of profits,
which, alone, railway companies it was supposed
would consult, in comparative indifference to the great
interests of the community, and utter disregard of
the wants, the wishes, and the limited means of the
poorer classes, who might, whether for business, or
health, or relaxation, be solicitous of journeying by
the only conveyances, with few exceptions, now avail-
able for such a purpose.

It is not necessary for us to inquire whether the
disposition manifested, and the conduct and proceed-
ings adopted, by particular railway companies in the
first years of their operations, justified to any—or to
what—extent, these fears and anticipations. It would
be, moreover, ungracious in us to ask, in what de-
gree the active part recently taken by Parliament,
in combining a series of carefully considered
enactments for the general regulation of rail-
roads and their affairs, may have quickened the
tendency of Boards of Directors to give a liberal
and humane consideration, to the exigencies of that
numerous body, to which we allude, who with the
most inadequate means for paying highly for railway
accommodation, have the most need for its facilities
of occasional transport from the metropolis,
and other swarming marts of long-continued
and all but incessantly-plied toil, in their
brief and scanty intervals of leisure. Much
more to our purpose and our taste, it is to express
the feeling of unfeigned satisfaction with which we
regard the liberal and ever generous spirit in which,
month after month, the great Railway Companies
come forward to announce the arrangements they
have made for procuring the most valuable, healthful,
and instructive of all recreations to the sons and
daughters of industrial labour, at a cost cheaper than
we had really supposed it could ever be afforded.
The second and third-class passengers, the latter
more especially, are the objects of these excellent
arrangements. The London and Birmingham,
Great Western, London and Dover, London
and Brighton, and Eastern Counties Railway
Companies, we most particularly notice as en-
titled to the best thanks of the public for the
efforts they have made in this direction. They have
reduced the charge per head on the several pleasure
or holiday excursions, which they have opened to the
enjoyment of hundreds—of thousands, rather—who,
but for such manifestations of a kindly spirit in these
bodies, might never have come within sight of the
chance of such enjoyments, to a point which cannot
reimburse their expenditure, unless the numbers who
avail themselves of their offers be immoderatelygreat ;
but which, in that case, must yield a corresponding
profit to which their spirited liberality establishes in
these companies, the most legitimate of claims. Who
that remembers a Sunday in Manchester, but twelve
years ago, with the gin-shops swarming, as
we have seen them, with whole families
of artisans, well behaved, indeed, and attired
in their best, but compelled, as it were, to make out
their day of rest in such unfitting quarters, from the
utter lopelessness of penetrating into the country—
were ILey ever so disposed—by dragging their ex-
hausted limbs, say through the dreary length of the
brick-and-mortar suburb of Oldham, for example, a
weary four or five miles, unreclaimed by an open
space half as big as Kennington-common ;—who
that has seen, on Sundays, the suburbs inhabited by
the poorest weavers of Glasgow, or the operatives of
Huddersfield, but must rejoice at the light and easy
terms on which the Act of the Legislature has now
secured, to such as are desirous to avail themselves
of it, the privilege of being conveyed, for a few happy
and refreshing hours, once in every week, through
the purer air, and cheerful inspiration of large tracts
of open country—over moors and through vallies and
round the bases of breezy hills, or near the banks of
fresh and sparkling rivers—far away from the polluted
atmosphere, and oppressive monotony of the town in
which they have to earn their hard subsistence ?
After excitement and gratification like those of the
the "railway trip," we may be sure they return with
kindlier feelings to all the world—increased self-
respect, and augmented alacrity. The prospect of re-
newing at short intervals their glimpses of " the world"
beyond the dingy streets of mills and factories, in
which they have been so long over-wearied denizens,
will lighten the toils of the week, strengthen the re-
lations and good understanding between the manu-
facturer and the operative, the master and the ser-
vant, and gradually extinguish that painful sense of
virtual exclusion from the enjoyments common to all
classes above them which has too long, and most un-
wisely, been permitted both by the Government and
the capitalist, to pre-occupy and poison the mind
of the labouring artisans. The Legislature has done
nobly in providing that there shall be on all the great
lines of railway, where passenger-trains of any class
are run on Sundays, third-class trains—and in
spirit, energy, and liberality, we must say the Rail-
way Directors have gone ahead even of the Legis-

lature. Witness the last announcement of the
Brighton Railway Company.
At what angle of elevation the Bishop of LoiinoN
up-turns his episcopal eyes at monster trains of forty
carriages of all classes, running down "at early
dawn" to Dover or Brighton on a Sunday
—a delicious, holy, sunny Sabbath, in its truest'
and most sacred sense ; a Sabbath of calm
and innocent enjoyment, and, therefore, of
inward thankfulness and praise to the vast majority
of those who participate in its pleasures—with what
emotion the mitred master of the palace at Fulham
reflects, on his river terrace, or amidst the luxurious
repose of his saloons in St. James's-square, on the
abomination of 1,000 people—of the middling and
lower classes—(for this meekest of Christian prelates
never objected to the Sunday travelling of the rich,
in their own carriages, nor even to the vicarious of-
fences of railway carriages in locomotion on that
day, provided always they were " first-class" passen-
gers who were to be carried, his Lordship's repu-
diated amendment having been levelled at third-class
trains)—we know not; but we do care. We are
anxious that he should practically learn "the luxury
of doing good," by contemplating, on a Sunday, the
happy faces assembled at a railway station. We
strongly advise him to book a place in the next
" railway excursion" at reduced fares, taking care to
secure himself a "return" ticket by a train that shall
bring him up in good time on that day se'nnight, for
the service at the Chapel Royal, or any other equally
courtly duty.

We have given elsewhere a short article from the
Times, relative to the announcement of the Chan-
cellor of the Exchequer, that it was not the intention
of the Government in future to furnish a return of the
stamps issued to each individual newspaper, but
merely the aggregate of those used by all. Our
Contemporary justly admits the fairness of this re-
turn to the old custom, and, we may add, in a hand-
some manner, willingly gives up any advantage that
may be derived to the proprietors of the journal by
a publication of the returns. As regards ourselves
it is a matter of indifference whether they are pub-
lished or not; but it is not'so with newly-established
papers, or with those which, from some temporary
circumstances, or unforeseen accidents, may have
fallen off in their circulation. To the proprietors of
such papers, the quarterly returns caused great in-
jury—the country papers, in particular, suffered
severely from the practice ; and we are, therefore,
glad that Mr. GOULBURN has admitted the evils of
the system, and resolved to abate them.

Madrid journals of the sth have been received, but
they contain no news. The Court was not expected
to return from Barcelona till the 22d instant.

The Three per Cents. were done at 271 at 60 days
and the Five per Cents. at 20.

On Sunday the French Government received the
following telegraphic dispatches :

"TANGIERS, Aua. 2.

" The EmrEnoß, who is coming from Rabat, is ex-
pected at Alkazar, within a march of a day ands
half from Tangiers. It is said that Mr. HAT is
with him."

" TANGIERS, AUG. 3.

" The Governor of Larrache has received from the
EMPEROR full powers to negotiate. The Prince DE
JOINVILLE has delegated, on his side, M. DE Iron.
All hostilities are suspended, and a pacific solution is

anticipated."
In addition to this intelligence we learn that on
the Bth inst., a telegraphic dispatch from Paris reached
Toulon, ordering the immediate departure of three
ships of the line, the Ocean, Inflexible, and Neptune.
These vessels were to put to sea next morning, and
sail without delay to Tangiers. The object in
ordering ,this reinforcement to the squadron under
the Prince DH JOINVILLE, is probably to give'more-
effect to the negotiations and bring the affair to a
speedy conclusion.
Most of the Paris journals make fresh comments
on the discussions in Parliament relative to Otaheite
and, we are glad to find, in a more peaceable tone'
The Siecle, though it cannot conceal its hostile feel- ,
ing to England, thus adverts to the awful conse-

„,,, ,;;;;*, ..f".s.t, • • • •
....,,ts,;lt.,,wa. N .... • . 41,11
, y'• .
.4- zi• • mos : •-.‘ o,d.z.cznrok--
-... lA` . 01R a rl\ ,4,0.: '•• • ... Of 0” 1,.. ~.„ , • ,