The Sun.
London, England, 1844-07-19 00:00:00

atitiim

LONDON, FRIDAY, JULY 19, 1844.

In the House of Lords the Detached Parts of the
Counties Bill was read a second time.

1.,,r1 CAMPBELL presented a petition from CHARLES
11EN tT Y RUQSELL, pray:ng that he might he heard by
couu.L.l against the Race-course Gaming Bill, and
gave notice that, on th., order of the day being read
for t!te coantnittal of the Bill, counsel shoal be heard

against it.
Lord BRouGnAm, in reference to the Aliens Bill,
brought up f-oni the other House, called the attention
of their Lordships to the anomalous and unjust posi-
tion in which foreigners were placed in this country
as regarded the acquisition of property and the per-
formance,a civil duties. In no other country was a
foreigner so ill treated as in England. Even a natu-
ralised foreigner could not hold the humblest office
under the Crown, while a foreigner might, accord-
ing to the Act of Settlement, be chosen as the hus-
band of the QuEE,a, and he endowed with all
British privileges, It did not appear that the Bill
stood for discussion Huta evening, and no other Lord
spoke on the sub:ect.
On the motion of Lard MONTEAGLE the Art-
Unions Bill was read a second tine.
The LORD CHANCELLOR % gave notice that he would
move the second reading of the Sudbury Disfran-
chisement Bill on Monday, and move that counsel be
heard against the Bill.
On the motion of the Dube of RICHMOND, counsel
again, -ithe gorse-Racing B ill were ordered to be
- day at four o'cic ck, and the House ad-
, journed al half- past seven.
GiffilllMls met at one, o'clock and vent into
Committee on the Poor...law Aruendrnent Bill. A
number of clauses wtt,p4 adopted, and on clause 6t:

being read, Sir JAMES GRAHAM moved that the
Chairman report progress, and the House resumed.
After several petitions had been presented, Mr.
THOMAS S. DUNCOMBE called the attention
of the House to the proceedings before the Com-
mittee appointed to inquire into the system of open-
ing letters at the Post-office. The Hon. Member
made an excellent speech on the occasion, and gave
an amusing account of the way in which the inquiry
was conducted. Ile bad been called as a witness, and
requested to produce a list of the witnesses who could
confirm him in his statements made in the Muse,
but he declined to give the list, except on the condi-
tion that he should be present to hear the witnesses
examined. The Committee referred the point to the
House.

Lord SANDON, Chairman of the Committee, and
Mr. HumE rose together to speak, when the S2EAK ER
said there was no question before the House, upon
which Mr. DUNCOMBE moved that it be an instruc-
tion to the Committee that he be present at the'exami-
nation of the witnesses he might call. Lord SANDON
said the Committee had no objection to Mr. DUN-
COMBE being present to examine the witnesses, but
he should be present as a member, and incur the re-
sponsibility of the other members. After remarks
from Sir R. PEEL, Mr. HUME, Mr. LABOUCHERE, and
others, the motion of Mr. DUNCOMBE was put to the
vote, and on a division, it was rejected
by a majority of 90, there being for
the motion 51, and against it 141. Mr. DUNCOMBE
made an excellent speech on introducing the subject,
and in all the speeches that followed no substantial
reason was given for excluding him from the Com-
mittee. Will Sir JAMES GRAHAM, thus burk
the inquiry, by appointing a Secret Committee to
inquire into the practice of opening letters, and ex-
cluding the very man who could bring the delinquents
to justice ?
On the order of the day being read for the third
reading of the Unlawful Oaths (Ireland) Bill, Mr.
MORE OTERRALL opposed it, and moved that the Bill
be read a third time that day six months.
Lord ELIOT opposed the amendment, and after a
lengthened discussion the amendment was withdrawn,
and the Bill was read a third time and passed.
The House then went into Committee on the Poor-
law Amendment Bill, and several clauses were added,
at the suggestion of Sir J. GRAHAM.
Mr. R. YORKE moved a clause to restrain the
Commissioners from enforcing the indiscriminate se-
paration of man and wife, but it was rejected by a
majority of 90, their being only six votes in favour
of it.

Mr. BURROUGIIES proposed the addition of a clause
relating to illegitimate children, which was opposed
by Sir J. GRAHAM, but eventually carried by a ma-
jority of one.
The remaining clauses passed through Committee,
and the House resumed.

The House adjourned at a Quarter to Two o'Clock.

His Excellency Earl DE GREY took his final de-
parture from the shores of Ireland on Tuesday last.
As he passed on his way to the place of embarka-
tion, he was received by the crowds who are always
in attendance on such occasions, with the most
frigid indifference ; here and there an attempt was
made to get up a cheer, which, however, had no
other effect than to draw forth loud groans and yells
..t reprobation from the populace ; seeing which his
Lordship's well-wishers gave up all further attempt
at applause, and the Ex-Viceroy was allowed to pro-
teed on his course in the midst of a comparative
silence, which was more significant than the noisiest
demonstrations. So ends the public career, as least
as far as Ireland is concerned, of Sir ROBERT PEEL'S
Lord Leiutenant, whom he selected as the fittest man
he knew of to carry out his favourite
system of policy, and who, he no doubt,
thought, would have effectually succeeded in
tranquillising the sister-country. But cruelly has
the Premier been disappointed in his expectations, for
never was there a more inglorious Government than
that of Earl Ds GREY. From first to last, for a pe-
riod of upwards of three years, it has been one con-
tinued succession of humiliating failures. While it
has alienated the Catholics, it has not conciliated the
Orangemen, and from time to time each party has
vied with the other in expressing their unqualified con-
tempt for it. Weak—rash—vacillating—inconsistent
—energetic precisely at the wrong moment, and timid
and indolent when it was most necessary to show de-
cision and vigour—we cannot point to one redeem-
ing feature in the Ex-Viceroy's Irish Government.
When his Excellency, who is the hero of a hundred
defeats, first took possession of his high office, he
foun.d Ireland, if not absolutely tranquil, at least willing
to hops that she might derive some little benefit from
his Administration. The repeal question, though
still agitated, was by no means foremost in men's
minds, and M. O'CONNELL more than once lamented
the supineness of his countrymen on the subject. By
an enlightened and Conciliatory course of policy, such
as he induced Ireland io believe he would adopt, Earl
DE GREY might have given a complete quietus to
he demand for the Repeal of the Union. Never had
a man a better opportunity of doing so. All that
was required of him was, that he should exhibit firm-
ness and impartiality, and not allow himself to be led
astray by party predilections. But to maintain a
rigid system of impartiality seems never once to have
entered into his calculations ; he might indeed profess
it, but he could not act upon it, for the PEEL
policy hung like a millstone about his neck,
paralysing whatever disposition he may have felt to
lo justice to an enlarged and unbiassed spirit. The
consequence was just what might have been antici-
pated. The clamour for a repeal of the Union
gathered daily fresh strength ; what was at first the
nere cry of the few soon became the demand of the
nany ; monster-meetings were held in all quarters;
subscriptions to a vast amount were continually pour-
ng into the repeal exchequer; and, ere the year 1842
lad passed away, the country was in a state of
combustion from one end to the other. Then
came the headlong rush into Ireland of horse,
root, and artillery; the repairing and garrisoning
,f forts ; the marchings and counter-marchings
of troops ; the mustering of war steam-boats ;
Ind, finally, the prohibition, at the eleventh hour, and
ander circumstances of imminent danger, of the Clon-
arf meeting, followed in due course by the trial and
imprisonment of O'CONNELL for conspiracy, the sole
effect of which has been to increase tenfold the exas-
peration of his countrymen, and impress them with
the conviction that his trial has been anything but
a fair one. Such are the results of three
years of the trimming PEEL policy carried
.iut through the agency of Earl DE GREY !
Its influence upon Ireland has been most
disastrous. It has neutralised all the good effects
produced by the conciliatory system of government
adopted by Lords NORMANDY and FORTESCUE, alid
engendered a state of things which it will require all
the known tact and experience of Lord HEYTESBURY
to ameliorate. We trust we are not unduly sanguine,
if we express our belief that the new Viceroy, warned
by the ignominious failures of his predecessor, will
deem it his duty to legislate on a totally different
principle, and substitute the substance of impartiality
for the shadow—the thing for the word.

We are quite of their opinion, who hold the pro-
' greys of incendiarism in the rural districts to be an
evidence of the fearful depreciation of moral cha-
racter which, somehow or other, is taking place but
too palpably among certain classes of our industrial
population. It is too true that this inauspicious
symptom is most developed in our agricultural dis-
tricts, but it cannot be said th3t our manufactuling
localities are free from it. The frequency of the
crime, and the class of the victims against whom its
visitations are always directed in the former cases,
tell their own tale. A little consideration would
enable us, we fear, to trace the " fire-raising;" in
the latter to the same spirit of indiscriminating resent-
ment which is ever prepared to sacrifice all considera-
tions of prudence and fOreeist—all, providence for the
future, all regard for the present—to the instant gra-
tification of one passion—reckless of all conse-
quences, indifferent to all ties, sympathies, or affec-
tions. It is only, we suspect, a keen sense of into-
lerable wrong, acting with the concentrated energy
of despair, which can thus incite the hideous revenge
of hopeless poverty against the possessors of pro-
perty, in - which their own, war of destruction must
inevitably prevent them from participating. If we
desire our readers—if we call upon members of the
Legislature, in particular—to examine into the motives
of this revenge, we need hardly guard ourselves be-
orehand against the suspicion of attempting to

extenuate the gult, or palliate the infamy of this
crime of arson. On the contrary, we shall ever de-
nounce it as the most contemptible, as well as the
most cowardly,—the basest, as it is also the most
ferocious, outrage:which any individual can commit
against social propsrty and the rights and security of
his fellow-citizens. It is the most dangerous of all
the delinquencies that private malice (by whatever
extremity of wrong incited), can be guilty, against
the unsuspecting confidence of the community, or any
of the individual members who compose that commu-
nity. Common reason, therefore, and the analogy of all
criminal impulses must lead us to suppose that an
offence of such a character as this cannot become, in
some sections of the kingdom—we blush to write it—
common, and the subject of constant alarm and agi-
tation among their peaceably disposed population,
without predisposing causes of great intensity. These
must have existed, too (it may be safely assumed),
for some time past ; for no maxim is more generally
true than that men do not rush headlong, on the first
suggestion or prompting of their evil natures, into
the last excesses of criminal atrocity. Now the pre-
valence of incendiary fires in Essex, in Suffolk, in
in Norfolk, in Kent, and other counties, is a " social
evil " but too easily explicable, we fear, on princi-
ples, the action of which will be found to confirm
this view of the subject.
Mr. WonEliousn, of Norfolk, we see, made a very
lame and very unfortunate effort to repudiate, on the
part of the county with which he is immedi-
ately connected, the guilt of being eminently a
theatre for the exhibition of these incendiary out-
rages. 15 e have no desire to dwell upon the
unbecoming personalities into which this foolish at-
tempt had betrayed ;.him, because the party, who
with justice complained of them, must have felt Wm-
self fully satisfied by the fair and ample apology
which Mr. WODEHOUSE, to his honour, tendered for
them. But why will Mr. WODEHOUSE, and those
other Hon. Members who are so clamorous for " pro-
tection,, to home agriculture, that they turn a deaf
ear to the clamour for home subsistence, refuse to
grant the boon of cheap bread to the perishing
hundreds of thousands from whose desolate hovels
it is that the hunger-pinched incendiary steals to his
secret work of suicidal conflagration ? Did it never
occur to Mr. WonEnouse—is it a fact which, though
its notoriety have passed into a proverb, is still
unknown to the landed interest,—" that famine and
destitution will drive wise men mad ?" Is it so (IS-
ficult to conceive that a broken-hearted, un-
employed, or ill-fed labourer, goaded to in-
tolerable distraction by the monstrous con-
templation of his dismantled hovel (the furniture
of which has been, perhaps, already seized and sold
under distraint, to discharge his landlord's demand
for rent), and of his pining children, who vainly,
but incessantly ask him for " bread," which is too
dear for him to buy out of the fractional wages he
receives—that such a being should turn in his frenzy,
to the destruction of the very roof to which he should
have looked for shelter, and the very granaries from
which his supply of bread is to be drawn P Alas!
these are not the limits within which a desperate man
can be brought to circumscribe his reasoning—(if
such a term could be applied to the mere ebullitions
of passionate indignation). He only knows that he
starves in the midst of plenty: his children
are dying for want under the shadow of the well-
stored homested, in which are garnered all the super-
fluous production and stores which represent the
wealth of him from whom he can obtain either no
employment at all, or employment at a rate of remu-
neration which will not procure for him and his
family the common necessaries of life. His own
wretchedness, their distress, his abject misery and
their helplessness, are constantly contrasted in his
jaundiced and distorted meditations, by the abun-
dance, the competency, and occasionally even by the
affluence of the more fortunate possessor of well-
stored harvests, fine stock, and farming offices, who
is either the landlord or the tenant•farm?r of the pro-
perty on which he works. If the former, he insists
on rents from the latter which alone can support him
in the dignified ease of his position ; and, in order to
pay these rents, the latter can afford to pay
only such diminished wages to his labourers
as are inadequate to the demands of the
poorest measure of subsistence for himself and
family. In the meanwhile, the vicious habits of
thinking, generated by a long course of vicious legis-
lation, induce both the land owner and the tenant-
farmer to concur in the scheme for keeping up an
unnatural high price of bread ; and no amount of
suffering among the poor, but industrious, agricul-
tural labourers who surrouud them can appeal with
sufficient force to their good feelings, or their good
sense, their sympathy or their discernment, to induce
them to concur in forcing the repeal of laws which
thus artificially aggravate the cost of the first neces-
sary of life, and which are the primary element of a
monopoly system, fatal alike to the true interests of
home and foreign trade. The wretch who seex all
this beyond the walls of his melancholy hut, and feels
all this so bitterly within them, becomes a maniac,
and devotes to wasting ruin the abundance, from the
benefits of which he is thus shut out, and the shelter
of a home, the comforts of which are almost ostenta-
tiously arrayed before their unhappy producer, as if
to madden him by their tantalizing unapproachability
for him !

Between this poverty at home and this affluence
abroad, is there any middle ground—any spot of
refuge—any point of consolation and of hope—to
which the furious outcast might betake himself, in
order to cherish more charitable hopes of the sym-
pathy of others—to get a glimpse of more cheering
prospects fur the future years of his children and him-
self? Let Mr. Wonmious.r. tell us how, in that
county, which is the stronghold of the corn-tax inte-
rest, the poor-law is administered, especially in re-
spect of able-bodied paupers, and the public will pro-
bably arrive at some new guides to the solution of the
impelling causes of incendiarism in Norfolk, and be
able to devise some practicable plans for their entire
removal, or present alleviation.

Madrid jourhals of the 10th inst. have been re-
ceived. The Gazette publishes a return of the
national property sold in the month of June, which
realised 9,041,996 reals (90,0001.) The entire pro-
perty sold had realised more than two millions ster-
ling. The ensuing election begins to excite some
little interest. The lists are to be closed on the 3d of
August, and publicly posted up on the 19th during
fifteen days; The elections will commence throughout
the provinces on the 3d of September, and the general
scrutiny take place on the 14th.
The Funds are rather more firm. The Three per
Cents. reached 261 for cash, 27 at 60 days; and the
Fives 201 cash.

The French Chamber of Deputies have rejected,
as was anticipated, the amendment of M. CREMIEUX
which would have excluded from all participation'
in railroad companies the Members of both Chambers.
The majority was very large, the motion for the
amendment being only 105, while the Bill as amended
by the Peers was adopted by 195 ; majority 90. In the
Chamber of Peers a brief discussion took place relative
to the late arrests. The Viscount DUBOUCHAGE com-
plained that M.CFIARBONNIER DE LA GUESNERIE, Wh(
had been brought from a distance of sixty leagues, and,
though 60 years of age and afflicted with acute rheu-
matism, was kept for ninety-six hours in a humid cell.
It was now near three weeks since those arrests had
been made, and yet, though two of the persons taken
up had offered to give heavy bail for their appearance,
they could not obtain their liberty. Undoubte:lly
the Government ought to be authorised to take all
proper precautions, but not in the vexatious manner
practised in this instance. Tire Minister or Public
Instruction said the Noble Peer was greatly mis-
taken in supposing that these arrests were preventive—
they were exe?uted in virtue of judicial warrants,
and after law proceedings regularly instituted. But
the Noble Peer was also in error in supposing that any
inhumanity was practised. The persons arrested ac-
knowledged themselves that they had been perfectly well
treated ; which fact it was easy to ascertain, as access
to them waz not interdicted. The Marquis DE Boissr
said the donticilliary visit to the Prince de ROSBECQ
had been made in an offensive manner. This was
denied on the part of the Government. The Prince
had been arrested in consequence of a regular war-
rant from a judge, and two of the most moderate
and gentlemanly commissaries of police in the admi-
nistration'had been -selected for the duty. Two re-
latives of the Prince de RosnEcct had declared that
nothing could exceed the perfect politeness end pro-
priety of their proceedings.
A telegraphic dispatch had amlounced the acquittal ;