The Sun.
London, England, 1844-06-24 00:00:00

THE STATE TRIALS.

The following letter has been addressed by Mr.
Sheil to Mr. Wyse, whose motion respecting the
State Trials had been delayed by the keeping back
of the returns for which he moved :

TO THOMAS NYSE, ESQ., M.P.
My DEAR WYSE,—You have postponed the motion
with respect to the constitution of the jury by which
O'Connell has been convicted.

The reasons by which you have been induced to
adopt this step appeared to me fully to justify it; in-
deed, you had no choice ; but as I apprehend that in
Ireland an inevitable delay may be mistaken for a
most detrimental procrastination, and as almost
equivalent to an abandonment of your purpose, and
as I know that you are determined to proceed, I think
that you are bound to take the earliest opportunity of
signifying your unalterable resolution to bring the facts
connected with the trial before the House and the coun-
try. It is a matter of surprise in Ireland that those facts
have not been made the subject of minute discussion,
and that an inquiry was not demanded immediately
after the sentence was carried into effect. That the
deliverer of his country should have have been de-
prived of his personal freedom, and that up to this
moment that great incident in the history of Ireland
should have been hardly noticed in the House of
Commons, appears at first view to be inexplicable.
The exclusion of every Catholic from the jury,
the tampering with the panel, the reiterated declara-
tion of Judge Perrin, that the jury was improperly
constituted, ought to have been, and must most
assuredly be, made the subject of debate in Parliament.
This great question is most properly in your hands.
The high estimate in which your abilities are held,
the personal respect which is entertained for you by
men of all parties, will give no ordinary weight to
your statement in the House of Commons. We are
all rejoiced that you have taken up the cause ; but
you should state to the Irish people, whose eyes are
turned on you, your immovable determination, as
soon as you can by possibility, to demand a Com-
mittee from the Minister whose conduct in these
proceedings has been so strongly impeached. I ven-
ture also to suggest to you, that you are well
warranted in writing to the absent Irish Members,
and entreating them to attend in their places in Par-
liament when your motion shall come on.
One of my motives in writing to you, and in thus
publicly addressing you, is to express my own per-
suasion that you will not leave 0 Connell to destiny
without a remonstrance against the mode in which
the prosecution was carried on, and the conviction was
procured. The effect of any impression that we had
abandoned the man to whom we owe everything
would be most discreditable to ourselves, and most
injurious to the whole country. If Irishmen do not
seek redress for a flagitious injustice in the House of
Commons, were are they to look for it ?
Lord John Russell, the leader of the Whig party,
to whose solemn and deliberate declarations on
such a subject the utmost importance must be
attached, has stated, in the most emphatic manner,
his conviction that O'Connell has not been fairly
tried. This is a great fact, and Lord John Russell
and his political associaies will, beyond all doubt, co-
operate with us in calling on the aovernment to af-
ford us an opportunity of proving the charge pre-
ferred against them.—There were a few, but they
were very few, who thought that your motion in the
Commons was connected in some way with the ques-
tion to be decided on the writ of error in the Lords.
They now feel that in this impression they were sig-
nally in error. The question before the Lords is one
of law, the question which you propose to raise in the
Commons is one of fact. In the Lords the question
will be, not whether the jury was corruptly consti-
tuted, but supposing it to have been so, whether the
verdict should be set aside.—The question in the
Commons on your motion will be, whether the Pro-
testant jury, by whom the great Catholic was tried
and convicted, was fraudently formed. The defendants
challenged the array, and the following is an extract
from the challenge, in which the fact (which the
Crown counsel did not venture to try) is thus put in
issue:—" And the said Daniel O'Connell further says,
that a certain paper writing, purporting to be a ge-
neral list, purporting to be made out from said several
lists, so corrected, signed, and allowed as aforesaid,
was illegally and fraudulently, and for the purpose
and with the intent to prejudice the said Daniel
O'Connell in the cause, made out by some person or
persons unknown ; and the said Daniel O'Connell
says that the said list, purporting to be such general
list, does not contain the names of all the persons whose
qualification has been allowed, upon the correcting,
allowing, and signing of said lists as aforesaid, by the
said Recorder, but omitted the names of divers, to wit, GO
persons, whose qualification respectively to be on said
list had been so allowed as aforesaid by the said Recorder,
which said several persons whose names were so
omitted are as follows; that is to say—(Here follow
sixty names inserted in the challenge)." Tke Crown,
instead of joining issue upon the question of fact,
instead of having the allegation set forth in the chal-
lenge—the charge of fraud—tried in open Court, de-
murred to the challenge ; that is, insisted that, even
admitting that the panel was fraudulently fabricated,
still the case should be tried by a jury derived from
that corrupted source. In the House of Lords, the
question to be decided is utterly unconnected with
that of fact, namely, whether an infamous tampering
with the panel took place ; but is simply whether
the verdict should stand, notwithstanding that this
suppresion of the names of jurors may have been per-
petrated in the process by which the panel was
made up.
If the question of fact were to undergo an investiga-
tion in the Lords, it might be plausibly suggested
that to the Lords that investigatiou should be con-
signed ; but with the fact the Lords have nothing
whatever to do. It is only in the House of Commons
that we can effectually inquire whether a Protestant
jury has been packed, for the conviction of the fore-
most man in a Catholic nation, under a Government
by which protestations of impartiality and of purity
are so strenuously made. God forbid that we should
be sufficiently pusillanimous, or sufficiently apathetic, '
not to demand an inquiry into what even Sir
James Graham admitted to have been a most fortu-
nate occurrence. It will require a more than ordi-
nary exercise of the peculiar abilitiesby which the ac-
complished Baronet is distinguished, to show any
plausible reason for not investigating, through a Com-
mittee, an imputation which so many circumstances
have concurred to establish.

R. L. SHEIL.

THE SUGAR PLANTERS.

At all events the country can now experience no
difficulty in comprehending the policy of Ministers
on the subject of sugar. It is openly and obviously
an attempt to conciliate the West India interest, which
will not succeed, because a too great disposition is at
the same time evinced to conciliate public opinion.
The planters have made the discovery that they are to
he flung overboard, sooner or later. For the mance
Sir Robert Peel informs them they are to enjoy a pro-
tecting duty of ten shillings per hundred weight, but
they are not to count upon it ; at the end of the year he
is to be on their back again, and then the ten shillings
will probably be reduced to five, or annihilated alto-
gether. This they must, indisputably, look upon as
a pleasant prospect ; but all the pleasure to be derived
from it they most richly deserve to enjoy, first, be-
cause they are grasping and unjust monopolists; and,
secondly, because they have not the spirit to resent
the assault made by the landowners upon their mo-
nopoly, by uniting with the free-traders to bring
about a. repeal of the corn-laws. They have but a
year's respite, either to reap the fruits of their own
injustice, or to avenge themselves by striking at the
injustice of others. If they neglect the opportunity
they will fall, not only unpitied, but objects of uni-
versal derision. They will pass down to posterity as
men who were as devoid of courage as of hu-
manity—who clung to slavery so long as its
abomination could be protracted, and who, when
they could be slave-holders no longer, commenced a
base and hypocritical crusade against the last linger-
ing remnants of the disreputable body from which
they had been compelled to separate themselves.
With regard to Ministers, nothing can be more pi-
tiable than the situation in which they are placed, if
we except, perhaps, the House of Commons, which
consents, at the bidding of Sir Robert Peel, to vote
that black is white, or white black, or any other ab-
surdity or contradiction whatsoever. Both the House
and the Cabinet have ensconced themselves behind a
thicket of inextricable absurdities, and most gross
and palpable sophisms. No principle whatever guides
their decisions. In one country they are hostile,
in another they are friendly, to slavery; they make
distinctions without a difference—coin epithets to desig-
nate different forms of servitude—disguise plain mat-
ters of fact—pervert the testimony of travellers, or
oppose it by other testimony, anonymous, and there-
fore worthless to the public, since, for aught anybody
knows, it may be a poor invention—imagine petty
contrivances to elude objections in debate, though
they know that those contrivances must prove worth-
less in practice—and while making all this display of
cunning disingenuousness and hypocrisy, experiencing
all the while the consciousness that they are unable
successfully to oppose public opinion, and that they
mean, in the course of twelve months, quietly to suc-
cumb to it. In some respects, perhaps, cir-
cumstinces have combined to make Minis-
ters appear to be answerable for a greater
amount of ignorance than they really possess,
since they probably know considerably more than
they would be thought to know of the condition of
labourers in Java China, and the Birman Empire.
They are aware that although not negroes, the culti-
vators of the soil are, to all intents and purposes,
slaves' in one country transferred like cattle with the
estates, in another compelled to labour by the stick,
and in a thin! kept to their tasks by a mixture of in-
fluences in which force greatly predominates. But
the Peel Administration is determined hencefor-
ward to understand by the word slavery nothing but
that predial or farm servitude, the type of which is

found in the Spanish West Indies and the Brazils. To
slavery in any other form they have no objection.
They will buy and sell freely with Turkey, where a
large portion of the population has always consisted
of slaves—with Egypt, where precisely the sane
state of things exist—with the United States, which
are ambitious to rival Turkey and Egypt in this
particular—and, in one word, with the Role world,
without inquiring whether labour be forced or free, if
we except Cuba and the Brazils. Now, is not this
gross and impudent hypocrisy,
if anything can be
called hypocrisy which exhibits itself after so undis-
guised a fashion? We would rather describe it as
unparalleled effrontery, systematically insulting the
country by the use of words which have no meaning
in the mouths of those who utter them, It is not
any respect for humanity that guides them, because
they consent to purchase slave .grown cotton and
coffee—it is a not a consideration of religious feeling,
because they consent to deal in slave-grown sugar it-
self, provided it be consumed by foreigners or our
own countrymen settled in the colonies—it is, and can
he nothing else, therefore, than the result of a tacit
compact with %Vest Indians to protract their mono-
poly as long as possible, provided they in return will
uphold the monopoly of corn at home. If any one
can make anything else of it we heartily wish him
joy of his ingenuity—the undertaking surpasses
our power altogether. Connected with this
question there is another of much interest to
the community ; we mean the probable down-
fal of the Peel cabinet. Within the last few
days it has been within an ace of dissolution, and has, in
fact, hovered for some months on the confines of life
and death. The slightest accident would now suffice
to overthrow the Ministry, and break up the party
which but a short while ago appeared all powerful,
and the reason is that there exists no solid principles
on which such a Ministry and such a party can re-
pose. Conservatism is a sort of negative force, a ris
inertia, which may impede but cannot operate. When
the time of action arrives this opprobium of action
must be got rid of, for there is no compelling of
nonentity to coalesce with existence. Society itself
advances perpetually, and the policy which would
regulate its movements must obviously advance
along with it. To be what is called a Conservative
is to stand still, while to be a Reformer is to adapt the
institutions of the country, under all circumstances, to
the exigencies of the times.—Sunday Times.