The Sun.
London, England, 1844-02-12 00:00:00

TITHES.

Captain PECHELL asked if any Bill would be
brought in this session for preventing suits for tithes
being carried into the Ecclesiastical Courts ?
Sir J. GRAHAM had to state, in answer to the
question, that the Lord Chancellor on Monday would
introduce a Bill on the subject of the Ecclesiastical
Courts in the other House.
STATE OF IRELAND.

Mr. ESCOTT begged to ask the Noble Lord,
the Member for London, whether he intended to
bring on, on Tuesday, the motion of which he had
given notice, relating to Ireland ?—the trials not hav-
ing yet concluded, or at least no intelligence of their
being concluded having yet been received.
Lord J. RUSSELL, quite concurring in the pro-
priety of not having any debates in that House
which might influence the verdict of the jury, still
did not think it necessary that they should know the
result of the trials before they discussed the affairs
of Ireland.

Sir JAMES GRAHAM said it was very
important that the Attorney-General of Ireland
should be present during the debate, and it
was impossible that the Hon. and Learned Gentle-
man could be in his place on Tuesday. He did
not wish this to influence what the Noble Lord
might think his public duty, but he trusted
he would not think it unreasaonble if he asked
the Noble Lord to state what would be the pre-
cise terms and words of his motion.
Lord JOHN RUSSELL said he should
certainly lament the absence of the At-
torney-General, but he did not think that cir-
cumstance ought to induce him to defer for forty-
eight hours the motion for which he now had pre-
cedence. With regard to the actual form of the
motion, it would contain nothing more than what he
had already stated, that the House should resolve
itself into a Committee of the whole House on the
affairs of Ireland. If the Government thought proper
to agree to this motion—(A laugh)—or, if it should be
agreed to by the House, he should move a series of
resolutions, some of which would strongly inculpate
the conduct of the present Government.
Sir JAMES GRAHAM said if the House should
determine to go into a Committee of the whole
House, it would certainly not be his duty, as a Mi-
nister of the Crown—(A. laugh)—to oppose the reso-
lutions of the Noble Lord.
The House then Adjourned.

SPIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS,

FROM THE EVENING PAPERS OF SATURDAY.
GLOBE.—We know not whether Lord Devon's
imperturbable negative on all remarks hazarded in
the Lords on the Irish Land Inquiry is to be taken
as equally pregnant with wise meaning as Lord
Burleigh's shake of the head ; but that the Noble
and Learned Lord is wise in saying nothing of
his task at present is evident enough. For our own
part, though the language of doubt is injurious to
the prestige of newspaper infallibility, we had
rather say frankly that we do not quite know yet
what to think about this Commission, than come out
so strong as our formidable Contemporary the Times
did the other day—only to draw our horns in again.
The first and second articles of the Times have been
in curious and amusing contrast. The following was
the "thunder" of the Times in the first of these
articles :—" Here is the case Lord Devon has to
deal with :--The peasant population of Ireland
are in pressing want of land to raise
food for their families. The immediate
possession of every given five acres out of
lease is essential to, perhaps, each one of some twenty
individuals, having wives and children. They bid
against each other, without exactly calculating the
produce of the land ; they have a right to do so—
a legal right. The landlord accepts the highest
offer, which also, without professedly calculating
the acreable value, he has an undoubted right to
do. We say nothing of the moral right of either
party—of the tenant to offer more than the land
will pay, or of the landlord to accept it. But: if
we must give an opinion on the subject, beyond
all question it is as dishonest in the tenant to offer,
as it is in the landlord to let the farm for, a higher
rent than can be fairly made of it. But the differ-
ence is this :—The tenant is compelled by the iron
hand of hanger—an excuse assuredly for deeper
crimes than an untenable promise under pinching
want ; whereas the landlord is not forced by famine,
and is not to be excused by purblind cupidity,
for demanding a rent which the most indus-
trious occupier could not pay—for which no
solvent tenant, and none but a perishing despe-
rado, would have the face to pledge himself. What
then happens ? The rents are not paid—eject-
ments are executed—the defaulting tenants are
ousted, the incomers murdered in their beds. Is not
this a true picture ? Is anything exaggerated ? And
must the reality last for ever ? This is what Lord
Devon has to deal with. Property is already out-
raged ; living men are sacrificed to the name of pro-
perty ; yet there comes in a vociferating lawyer—
' Oh! take care you don't touch the right of pro-
perty ; hold sacred every blood-stained clod; let
peasants by hundreds gasp in their own gore;
let them, Lord Devon, manure the wasted soil
with their bodies, but, above all things, protect
the_ full purse—prey upon the empty stomach.'"
By yesterday the Times seems to have got aware
that it
ath ladeasgrt in
grasped
abovedhatasubject
summaryt too
style
. Accord-
ingly hot to
handle,
it " aggravate!,
As
fitsvoice, and le
roars you like
any nightingale :"
hmto termed
'
ori.ordCla.nricarde's pro-
be
found surmise, that if not an i
nciuirtyto
land-
lord and tenant' question, it ought
acquit Lord e
Devon
oneof
into fixity of tenure,'
being such a mountebank as to undertake a
grave examination into the merit of a thing
which, like fixity of tenure,' if it have any significa-
tion at all, must mean unblushing confiscation of
every landlord's property, and nothing else in the
world. Fixity of tenure must be perpetuity of tenure
—that is to say, if a tenant have his occupancy at
will, or for a short lease, this new talisman called
fixity,' is to transform a short term into a long one,
and the tenant into the owner of his farm." The

Times has evidently, become wary of pursuing its
slashing style of Tuesday, about " the right
to live, original and inalienable, against the right
to possess, the creation of conventional society."
Every relation between men, excepting cutting each
others' throats, is the creation of society. What does
the original and inalienable right to live amount to in
the case, for instance, of the savage, who has laid in
no store of provisions for the winter ? We remember
a description, in one of the recent voyages of Polar
discovery, of groups of starving beings gathering round
the travellers, who had made a cache of provisions
for their winter use. These savages tacitly recognised
"the right to possess, the creation," as the civilised
Times calls it " of conventional society,"—even when
it was exercised, as in this case, with inevitable inat-
tention to " the right to live, original and inalien-
able," in their own persons. Their supplications
were mute ; they flitted famishing, but not raging,
round the food which they might not taste. In a
sound system, there is no opposition between the right
to possess, and the right to live. Indeed the former
arises from the latter. There would be no living if
there was no possession. Life would be reduced to
its most precarious and lowest terms. Society has,
doubtless, an indefinite right to modify the tenure of
possession ; but, in doing so, it must have constant
reference to the stability essential to undisturbed pro-
duction, and to that unbroken confidence in law
under which only the means of production will freely
distribute themselves. We see what results even from
the partial impairing of that confidence in Ireland.
We see that the most attractive natural powers of
manufacturing production, and great cheapness and
command of labour—fail, however, to attract manufac-
tures to her shores. This is not now the fault of
England. All our home and colonial markets—all
such channels of commerce as Belgium lost, when
she separated from Holland, lie open to the sister
country, through the whole extent of the British
empire and dependencies. What prevents her profit-
ing by them ? What prevents her profiting by out-
lets enviable to half Europe ? What prevents her
obtaining capital lavished (lately): on Illinois, or
Louisiana, or Mississippi ? Nothing but her
state of internal restlessness restlessness, a
misfortune, it may be, rather than a crime
—but restlessness which, whatever may be
the misfortune of its origin, has produced habits
which, most assuredly, the true friend of Ireland,
while he would remedy all evils which law can
remedy, would denounce fearlessly—not less fear-
lessly than Dr. Doyle denounced them—than Mr.
O'Connell has denounced them in former times. Re-
peal of the union, if attained, or attainable, could
remedy the effect of these habits, which, of course,
is felt most strongly in Ireland, but has tinctured our
operative masses in England too (we refer, amongst
others, to the habit of violence in Trades Unions,
which actually drives old manufactures out; and, unless
curbed, must necessarily discourage the rise of new
ones, and which Mr. O'Connell himself has repeatedly
stigmatised with the strongest emphasis)—repeal of
the union, we say, could remedy the effect of law -
less habits in no other way than by bringing them
(the restraints of English power removed) fairly
to a head—curing agrarian and operative disaffec-
tion to law by letting loose its last extremes—
exhibiting, in short, in Ireland, one more popular
purgation of blood and fire—one more utter demo-
cratic revolution—to be followed—by the sort of
regimen that does follow, when those volcanoes burn out.
It is certainly not beyond possibility, that, some time
or other, English power may be unable to prevent
this Irish internal combustion. And Providence may
doubtless, in the end, educe good out of evil. But a
wise and far-sighted Government would seek strenu-
ously to obviate these extremities—not by one inquiry
or one measure—but by every measure within its
power. We shall revert to some of the suggestions
concerning the material condition of Ireland put forth
by the Edinburgh Review—by M. Wiggins, the
land-agent, in a volume just published, and by the
author of a pamphlet, entitled Remarks by a Junior
to his Senior."
STANDARD.—From the commencement of the
state trials in Ireland, it has been our most anxious
wish to avoid allusion to them; but this wish we have
not been permitted to indulge. Scarcely a day of the
last two months has passed in which we have not
been compelled to protect the interests of truth and
justice by exposing some direct falsehood or correct-
ing some misrepresentation-put forward by those who
embrace the party of the traverters. It is a signi-
ficant circumstance, but one which ought not to
reflect injuriously upon the case of the gentlemen
upon their trial—that throughout their professed
friends have been the aggressors in this matter.
From the party opposed to them in politics, no
uncandid censures of their line of defence has been
offered ; no captious objections to their evi-
dence or arguments have proceeded, though,
if we had been disposed to take that course,
we surely could not want occasion. The ut-
most length to which the Conservative press has
gone has been to answer falsehood and the perver-
sion of indifferent facts ; and even to this length we
have proceeded with reluctance and pain. Had our
adversaries permitted, the process would have
gone on in the decent silence out of Court
due to the administration of justice. We do not
pretend that we have not formed an opinion upon
the case. No man, who has paid the least at-
tention to what has been passing in Ireland for the
last year, can honestly say that he has not formed an
opinion. The Opposition journals themselves, by
the manner in which they magnified the importance
of the repeal agitation, by their incessant taunts to
the Government for so long permitting its continuance,
without some attempt to suppress or appease it,
have forbidden that any one should be without
a formed opinion upon the subject. They were suffi-
cient prompters of the prosecution if other prompters
had been wanting; and it is disgusting to see them
now crossing every step of the proceeding which,
four months ago, they urged, whether directly or in.
directly, with such factious violence. Let them say
what they may, they are as much responsible
for the prosecution as the Ministers by whom it
was instituted in their official capacity. The Oppo-
sition journals, it is true, may have urged the prose-
cutions in the hope that they might be defeated by dis-
honest means, and their conduct for the last two
months has been perfectly consistent with that
but they willscarcely
treacherous rous and disgraceful, davow ascheme
so
to
the best interests of the country. The Morning
Chronicle of this day has another long article
upon the subject of the ten Roman Catholics set
aside upon the formation of the jury. It will be
remarked that the number of these Roman Catholic
gentlemen is now reduced from eleven, the number
originally stated, to ten—a circumstance not un-
worthy of consideration in a question where the
perfect knowledge of the religious profession and
political opinions of every person upon the panel,
assumed to be possessed by the Crown solicitor, is the
gravamen of the accusation. Hitherto, it has been
alleged that eleven Roman Catholics were set aside,
the number is now reduced to ten.. There has,
therefore, been evidently a mistake as to the religious
profession of one gentleman, on the part of those who
have had their attention earnestly directed to the sub-
ject for weeks; but the subject of complaint is now
reduced to the mistake of the Crown solicitor as to
the political connections of two gentlemen, upon 24
hours of inquiry, with little motive to inquire
with extraordinary diligence ; but it will, we sup
pose, be admitted, that a gentleman's temporary poli-
tical connexion is a matter less easy to be ascertained
than the faith which he_has professed through life.
After many weeks of close investigation, the com-
plainants have mistaken one Protestant Repealer for
a Roman Catholic, doubtless because he is a Repealer.
The Crown Solicitor, having twenty-four hours to
study the list, mistook two Roman Catholics, who
are not Repealers, for members of the Association
Here is the whole of the case.

CUATSWORTH.—It is a singular fact, that in this
era of "fashionable" novels and romances, advantage has
never yet been taken of the interest and curiosity that must
attach to laying the scene of a work of this description at one
or other of the actual localities where " Fashion" chiefly holds
her Court ; for instance, Chatsworth—the very Parthenon
anion the temples of modern Fashion. That the lint novel
claiming this happy distinction, under the attractive title of
" Chatsworth ; or, the Romance of a Week," should be
ushered into the world under the auspices of so popular a
name as that of Mr. Plumer Ward, the accomplished author
of " Tremaine," " De Vere," &c., must command for it unu-
sual attention, exclusive of the guarantee that • Mr. Ward's
social and literary position affords, as to the pretensions of
any work bearing the sanction of his distippished name.
LETTERS TO INDIA AND HONG-KONG.—The fol-
lowing important notice was issued on Friday at the General
Post-office, St. Martin's-le-Grand :—" General Post-office,
Feb. 1844.—0 n and from the 15th inst., the postage on let-
ters posted in the United Kingdom ad addressed to India,
marked to be forwarded vid Southampton, may be paid in
advance or not at the option of the sender. This regulation
applies only to letters from places within the territories of
the Hon. East India Company conveyed by packet, aid South-
ampton, the postage on all other letters addressed to India,
aid France, as well as on all letters addressed to countries
beyond India (the colony of Hong-Kong excepted), by
whatever route they may be forwarded, must be paid in ad-
vance as at present, or the letters cannot be forwarded.—By
command, W. L. MABERLY, Secretary."

FIRE IN THE STRAND.—Between nine and ten
o'clock on Saturday evening a fire broke out at the office of
the Morning Chronicle newspaper, directly opposite Somerset
House. It appears that in the early part of the evening some
soot in one of the chimneys became ignited, but it was
quickly, to all appearance, extinguished. About an hour and
a half after the office was closed the porter went out to the
rear of the premises in New Church-court to see if any ap-
pearance of sparks still existed, when he was astonished at
seeing a bright light through the window of a small store-
room at the top of the building, which is four stories high,
and, on hastening up stairs and breaking open the door,
found the contents of the room in flames. The brigade en-
gines from the Chandos-street and Crown-street stations, fol-
lowed by that of the County Fire Office, were promptly in
attendance, but their services were not required, the fire be-
ing by that time nearly extinguished by the neighbours. The
room was filled with cases of type, the whole of which is
much damaged. The chimney in the room had been stopped
up for years, and some of the burning soot falling down had
eet fire to a beam which communicated to the room.