The Sun.
London, England, 1850-04-05 00:00:00

Oltening

LONDON, FRIDAY, APRIL 5, 1850.

Availing himself of the Easter vacation, the Prime
Minister of England, as the whole community knows
well enough by this time, has betaken himself to
Manchester. Politically the excursion is one of no
material importance, but individually it appears to us
fraught with circumstances of considerable interest,
besides being a subject worthy of self-gratulation to
the locality, and of no small degree of prospective
value to the mass of our manufacturing and mercan-
tile population. With regard to the Noble Premier
himself, his visit to this wonderful emporium of
British industry must be calculated to inspire him
with profound emotions, not merely from the
fact of his returning to a spot, last visited by him as
an unnoticed stripling, invested with the honourable
dignities devolving upon the First Minister of the
Crown, but from the testimonies which must have
crowded upon his recognition, in the midst of the
roaring mechanism of the manufactories, of the re-
sources, the ingenuity, and the application of that
great race whose destinies have been committed to
hie hands by his Sommax, in the belief of his ca-
pacity as a patriotic statesman. With reference,
moreover, to the civic authorities and the rest of the
population of Manchester, the arrival amongst them
for the first time in the annals of their municipality of
the Prime Minister of the British empire, must
inevitably have excited ageneral feeling of satisfaction,
blended with curiosity to see the man intrusted with
the chief responsibilities of the Government, and a
solicitude to accord to him that welcome which is
unquestionably due to his high office and his many
brilliant services for the people within the walls of the
Imperial Legislature. To this end all minor heart.
burnings appear to have been magnanimously for-
gotten for the time being, the most captious of the
Liberal politicians of Lancashire losing a recol-
lection of what Lord Jour; Russat.r. bad
failed to accomplish in the vivid and timely
remembrance of his various great and noble
achievements as a reformer. Invested with the
worthier attributes of nobility, less by that patrician
blood which flows in his veins, and which has de-
scended to him thrice-purified from its having, in
the dvs of the last dynasty, baptised the
scaffold of political martyrdom, than by the evidence
of genius as an orator and of enlightenment as an
administrator, the First Lord of the Treasury ap-
peared amongst the inhabitants of Manchester in the
light of a threefold attraction, the attraction of his
historic name, of his Auropean celebrity, and of his
lofty and responsible position as the Prime Minister
of England. Deeply as we have at times reason
to regret the course pursued by the Cabinet
of the Noble Lord, we yet bear in mind
so vividly the great boom of reform obtained
under his immediate and even personal aus-
pices, that we can and do regard with a senti-
ment of unmixed pleasure the ovation (deserved in
many respects) which his Lordship has within the
present week received from the industrious and intel•
ligent people of Manchester. It could not be for-
gotten by them that they, as the representatives of a
vast and influential section of the population, had
benefited largely by a public acknowledgment of error,
on the part of the Noble Premier, which was
to a certain extent more remarkable for its
moral intrepidity than the similar acknowledgment
of his illustrious predecessor, seeing that it was not,
like the latter, invested with the glory of a splendid
and conspicuous magnanimity. The Free-traders of
Lancashire—in other words, the immense bulk of its
inhabitants—recogniseel in the celebrated statesman
who was coming amongst them one of those leaders
of the Parliament who, at a period of tremendous
difficulty, had aided Sir ROBERT PSEL in relieving
the country from the unendurable and grinding influ-
ence of agricultural monopoly. Seeing in him also the
impersonation of that great Whig Party which, with
all its political shortcomings and all its aristocratic
predilections, has facilitated the onward progress of
civilization, and added some of our most illustrious
names to the roll of British statesmen, his own, like
that of CORDELIA, " though last not least," they
eagerly pressed forward to greet his arrival
with acclamations, enhancing the value of their
unanimous welcome by its manifest and spontaneous
cordiality.
Another circumstance has tended meanwhile to in-
crease the public interest in the provincial excursion
of the Premier—we mean the rapid approach of the
time when England will render her metropolis the
arena of a grand international exposition of industry.
That Lord JOHN should have preceded this memo-
rable occasion by a personal visit to the capital of
our manufacturing districts is one of those appro-
priate and felicitous coincidences which, is a peculiar
manner, arrest the observation of the community.
Among the particulars furnished by the reporters, it
will be perceived that a considerable amount
of incidental information, supplied by them in
their delineations of the progress of the Prime
Minister and his attendants through the
many extraordinary establishments of Manchester,
suggests to the mind of the reflective every encou-
ragement in their hopes of the
oßrdristhisihvs examination
in-
ternational competition. Ills
of the establishments of c aalni coofu-aportinrteerrss, ofcotton
, of engine
manufacturers, of card manufacturers,
weavers, of silk weavers, and o
principles of science are
trades, where the loftiest f other remarkable
applied to the product of sinrtgifieenivalty, fabricsbave
with the moat consummate
revived again to public notice those marvellous
achievements of British industry,
and British en-
terprise, and British perseverance, which cannot fail
to inspire the hearts of the intelligent with a confi-
dence in our national capability to compete with
any of the other peoples in either hemisphere.
From the circumstance, therefore, of its tending to
revive this feeling of confidence, as well as from its
being calculated to renovate a constitution worn out
by assiduous application to the toils of government,
we are disposed to regard with interest and satisfac-
tion this vacational excursion of the Premier to the
wonder-working manufactories of Manchester.

The more carefully we consider the tendency and
probable operation of the Bill brought forward by
the Solicitor-General immediately before the reces?,
for the purpose of providing " more simple and ef-
fectual securities for advances to purchasers of en-
cumbered estates in Ireland," the more we feel con-
vinced of the great and incalculable advantages that
would result to the people of Ireland if the principle
of the measure were fully and fairly carried out, and
applied to the present and future owners of all real
estates in that country; and of the deep injustice and
injury which it would inflict upon proprietors, whose
embarrassments did not bring them within the juris-
dictionallthe
of " the Commissioner?," in its present limited
and restricted form. Ireland possesses within itself
elements of prosperity—its natural capabili-
ties are -unbounded, but they are permitted to remain
neglect,
i and uncared for. Labour, which could convert
the unc; titivated wastes into rich arable and pasture
land, or
gardens, maybe obtained to any extent,
and at a lower rate of remuneration than in almost
any Sun 'peas country ; but no employment is af-
forded th e hardy peasants who, under a wiser and