The Sun.
London, England, 1844-08-30 00:00:00

SPIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS.

FROM THE EVENING 1:1.1•E1tS OF YEsTERDAY.
GLOBE.—We resuroc our notice of Lor l Lynd-
hurst's Act for simplifying' the tran,fl-r of property.
We have already expres;ed our opinion of its gene-
tlmerits, but it -has incidental excellences which
demand special acknowledgment. Besides the drastic
purgative which will doubtless work so wholesome an
effect upon indentures generally, Lord Lyndhurst,
with that elephantine dexterity which loves to disport
itself even with the picking up of a stray needle,
has bent himself to the " more private and particu-
lar" requirements which occasionally befal us. For
instance, it would sometimes happen that a score
brothers and sisters might suddenly find themselves
in common possession of a single patrimonial acre. As
the undivided twentieth part or share of the aforesaid
one acre would nut furnish the most perfectly exclusive
mid unmolested title or enjoyment, it was not unusual
for some mutual understanding to be come to upon
the subject, without troubling the already over-worked
profession of the law. But Lord Lyndhurst, well know-
ing tit so long as Lord Brougham lives, it is every
man's own fault if he is too much overburthened with
engagements, has provided that for the future, no
partition, exchange, or assignment shall be valid at
law unless by deed. 'Phis law has one very great
advantage, which does not always balong to Acts of
Parliament. It is c‘trtain to be obeyed. As no con-
veyancer for the last twenty years has effected these
arrangements by any other means, there is no doubt
they will readily obey Lord Lyndhurst's com-
mands that it shall always be so done for the future.
To be sure there would occasionally occur cases—at
least we used to be told so—in which the bast drawn
deed could not be fully relied on ; and the old hands
liked to have the further powers of the common law
to fall back upon. But this was very unsatisfactory,
as we can easily show by a precisely parallel case. A
friend of ours once observed to us the facility with
which the human body could balance itself under al-
most any contingency. He threw himselfinto a variety
of attitudes in proof of his position. We showed him
at once that all this ingenuity was very unnecessary,
by laying him flat on the floor. And Lord Lynd-
hurst, having, we have no doubt, made up his own
mind that the old common law principles and appli-
anees will never be wanted, has provided not only
that they shall not be used, but that they shall cease
to exist. There is a decisivenese, a final settlement,
about this kind of legislation, which we relish ex-
ceedingly ; and of which we have seen very little of
late years. We did our best, as every one knows, to
defend the Whigs ; but we must confess that their
Real Property Acts were very different things
from Lord Lyndhurst's. It took them a
long Act of some ninety odd sections to substitute
other modes of assurance for the old system of
fines and recoveries. To say, as Lord Lyndhurst
doea, that you shall not transfer at all, is a far " sim-
pler" way of doing the thing. And they were so
wedded to system. They never went out of their way
to leave the thing they were doing. If you took up
an Act, you knew at once what was its object, and
never expected to find stuffed into some odd corner
a section about any other matter. To he sure, they
reaped the field of real property legislation pretty
clean—we are glad to be able to say that; but
Lord Lyndhurst takes whatever he can come at, and
gleans up even the wild wheat, and a good deal of
it too. There always used to be a great deal of mys-
tery about contingent interests and reversions, and
all that sort of thing. No one knew what could be
done with them, or who could do it. Nay, some of
our legal Gamaliels say even now, that they cannot
make head or tail of Lord Lyndhurst's measure. But
with submission, this is carrying conveyance crocheti-
ness a little too far. It must be obvious that " any person"
is now competent to convey anything, the only pre-re-
quisite being, that it shall not be quite certain that he has
anything to convey. The disabilities of infancy and
coverture are, of course intentionally, abolished at a
sweep—as to uncertain interests. There seems, in
fact, but one point. on which to hang a doubt. The
interpretation clause informs us that the word per-
son shall extend to a corporation as well as to
an individual." Now, which of these is a cor-
poration sole ? Will his Lordship be so good
as to tell the public. Is the Bishop of London as
individual ? Johnson, we know, says that an indi-
vidual is a fellow. This creates the only difficulty
we feel. For the rest, we are clear, that how-
ever remote the contingency, General Tom Thumb
may, under the Act, convey whatever expectant in-
terest he has in being shown some fine day for a hip-
popotamus. The operation of the Act is to com-
mence under the auspices of the new year. But
there is one boon for which, as it is no doubt
of great advantage, our hopes must be de-
ferred somewhat longer. We refer to the re-
conveyance of mortgaged estates by the mortgagee's
executors. This it seems is not to be allowed " until
no action or suit shall be depending." This really
is an euphuism of which we did not suspect Lord
Lyndhurst could be guilty. Why not Latter Lam-
mas at once ? And besides, even suppose we
could venture so far into the wilderness of con-
jecture as to hint that the " suit" ought to have
something to do with the subject matter
(which, as the Act does not say, no judge could
listen to for a moment), there is still a sad want
of precision. It is not for us to say whether or not a
suit is to be considered as "depending" during the
half-dozen days' interval between his Lordship's pro-
nouncing a decree and the appeal to the House of
Lords. We are sorry for these blemishes. We are
sure the public would have forgiven Lord Lyndhurst,
if the five lines which he has rendered unnecessary in
all future conveyances had been lumped once for all
in the Act itself.
STANDARD.—The person who calls himself
Captain \Varner, has, after some weeks' deliberation,
published a most impertinent attack on Sir Howard
Douglas, in reference to the remarks he made in the
House of Commons, on the opinions falsely ascribed
to him, in reference to Mr. 'Warner's invention; in
which lie insinuates that Sir Howard endeavoured
to get possession of his secret, for the
purpose of obtaining for himself the premium
to which it might be considered entitled !
Had not Mr. Warner already put himself out of court
by boasting of feats
_during the last war, of which
there not only exists no record, but which every man
of science proclaims to have been physically impos-
sible, we should hardly have insulted Sir H. Douglas
so far as to have weighed his assertions against the
grave statement of a gentleman of such uimpeachable
veracity and worth as that officer. Mr. Warner's con-
duct has, however, rendered such course unnecessary;
several of his statements in support of his inven-
tion having been shown to be unfounded. We all
of us remember the boast of the leaper of Rhodes, and
cannot but place Mr. Warner's destruction of the two
French privateers and the performances of his " long
range" during the last " war," of which there are no
records, oral or written, in the same category of achieve-
ments. Mr. Warner has destroyed his own credit with
the Government by attempting to prove too much,
ar.d he has therefore only himself to blame for the want
of confidence which they have exhibited. The only
proof he has yet given of his acquaintance with the
" long range" is to be found in his grandiloquent
accounts of the feats he professes to have performed.
But for his cupidity in requiring a larger sum for
making the proposed experiment than it could or
ought to have cast, the Government would,
it is clear, have afforded him an opportunity of
snaking good his boast; but if the destruction, on
his principle, of an empty vessel of two or three hun-
dred tons, can only be effected at the cost at which he
has estimated it, his shell will clearly prove too expensive
an operation for general use. We need say nothing of
the absurdity of supposing, that as it is indispensable
that a certain number of persons in every fleet 'should
be made the depositories of his secret, it could long
remain unknown. Nay, it is all but certain that the
very fragments of the missiles themselves would carry
with them evidence sufficient of' the nature of the
agent employed. Mr. Warner is angry with the
Standard for not placing faith in the rhodomontade
in -which he has indulged on the miraculous nature
of his inventions, but still more for its announcement
a few days ago, that the Government had declined his
proposal to destroy a ship off the Good Win Sands
(which he does not deny), and which he affirms they
may hereafter regret. We may add, in conclusion,
that the insolent tone adopted by Mr. Warner to-
wards all those gentlemen who have expressed an un-
favourable opinion of his pretensions (some of them
officers, like Sir Howard Douglas, possessing most
complete knowledge of the science of their profession),
is little calculatedto remove the impression to which
his absurd vaunts, unsupported by a tittle of evidence,
have given rise.

SCOTCH POLITICALREFORMERS.
We feel highly gratified in announcing
Palmer,that the
foundation atone for a monument to Muir,
o-
Sk:rvin, and Gerald, the political martyrs of 1793,
.was laicrat Edinburgh on Wednesday, Joseph Hume,
Ek44,31.P., officiating as master of the ceremony, and
*sited the various documents that had been'pre-
,-
.
pared in the foundation-stone.
• If ever the country produced patriots who deserved
a monument to their memory, it was these martyrs to
liberty who suffered in Scotland at the period referred
to. The expression of popular opinion, either through
the medium of public meetings or the press, had not
obtained any staple footing in Scotland at that period.
Indeed, so far as newspapers were concerned, it was
nearly twenty years afterwards before Scotland con-
tained any influential journal that would support the
claim for that fair and just possession of the suffrage
contended for by the Reformers of 1793. The question
of popular representation and of popular rights had not
been -broached in this division of the kingdom, from
the time it was urged in the Scottish Parliament, by
Fletcher, of Saltoun, till it was taken up by Thomas
truir and his associates. It was most unfortunate
for the cause, that the excesses and bloodshed which
oecurred about the same time in Faris afforded an