The Sun.
London, England, 1868-02-05 00:00:00

ZPijiT OF THE PUBLIC :onNiaa,

Mr. Bright, says the Tima, bas broached his echoic, of
redressing the anomx....iy of the Irish Church. It must be

taken and weighed with many others which come to us
from all quarters, but as a prelude to legislation it is net
promising. Mr. Bright's plan for settling the land ques.
ticn we are tempted to call whimsical. The ballot is

apparently the instrument of cure upon which he
would most rely. Grant the ballot and leases would
follow : and if leases, prosperity, good farming, and con-
tentment. Next to the ballot, and auxiliary to it,
Mr. Bright would place his plan of assisting tenants
to buy the farms they hold from the great English
landlords. We regret to think that these remedies
smack of the quackery against which Lord Stanley
protested. Everyone who knows Ireland knows that
the estates of the great English landlords are those which
are best managed, and the tenantry of which are the most
contented. But, apart from this, we must lay it down as
an indisputable result of experience that no class in Ireland
can he trusted with the absolute control of its agricultural
resources. There are many districts where leases have

been granted and lessees hold undisturbed possession, and
they all tell the same story of neglected cultivation, bad

fanning, cynical contentment with poverty. The Encum-
bered Estates Court, followed by the Landed Estates
Court, has subdivided many great estates ; they have come

into the possession of sm#,ll purchasers, and we hear the tale
of proprietors in Irish towns who had saved just enough
money to buy a lot, and now extract from the cultivator of
the soil the utmost penny, to the consequent debasement
of the farmer and impoverishment of the land. If the
existing state of Ireland be laid to the charge of the

present race of landlords, there is no warrant for believing

that the substitution for them of a number of petty pro.

prietors, or the indiscriminate granting of leases, would
produce any beneficial change. If legislation afford any
cure, it must be legislation of a totally different character.
There must be some authority capable of intervening
between proprietor and cultivator, and of reconciling the
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claims of eaCh with the wants of the community. We do

not say such intervention is necessary, but we protest that
any suggestion for removing the ills of Ireland by a trans-
formation of the race of Irish proprietors must be branded

as an instance of the 'quackery which Lord Stanley

deprecates.

In the opinion of the Daily News, secresy is the bane of
the Foreign Office ; the remedy for its faults, errors,
defects, and partialities is light. The public knows little
or nothing with certainty of what the Foreign Office is
doing. It is a public department without supervision or
verification. It can involve the nation in grave obliga-

tions and serious responsibilities without notice, and in the
most complete ignorance. It makes political treaties on
subjects of which we have never heard, and commercial
treaties which surprise our merchants and traders. It

involves us in wars with countries of which we know
nothing, by a series of mismanagements which announce
themselves only by their consequences. It employs a set
of men as diplomatists whose names we scarcely know ; it
transfers charges which ought to be voted annually for
the consular services to the Consolidated Fund ; and it

has gradually deprived the consular service of its higher
rewards, without a word of explanation until the change
was made. It has induced Parliament to assent to a
foolish and mischievous rule not to insist on its correspon-
dence being made public until it is concluded—that is, until
publ.•c discussion is useless for remedial purposes. And,
when it wants to snatch a public judgment in its favour,
it foists interlocutory despatches into the London Gazette.

Clearly, then, says the .2Vezcs, the Foreign Office is just in
that plight when a committee of the House of Commons

on its composition and administration would be most
valuable ; and if the investigation resulted in requiring
. .

from it an annual report to be laid before Parliament on
what it was doing, and how it was doing it, a much more
active sense of responsibility would be brought to bear on
its members, to the breaking up of its habits of routine,
its prejudices, and its spirit of exclusiveness, than now
exists.

The Standard understands that the decision of the
Court of Common Pleas in the case of Grissell v. Bristow
has been received with surprise and dismay on the Stock
Exchange, and that the brokers now as a body feel them-
selves to be greatly ill-used men. It is said that an appeal
to the House of Lords has been resolved on. But the
issue seems to our contemporary a very plain one. It
often happens that the motive of a man who sells shares,
when they stand at a heavy discount, is to get rid of his
liability, and this he can only do by transferring them
to some one else. The broker knows this better than
anybody, and by the course of business he virtually
undertakes to secure the making of the transfer, at
least so far as he has the power to promote it. If
the transferee refuses to execute, the broker cannot
help his refusal, or compel his compliance, and the
vendor's remedy in such case is against the buying
principal. But it is quite another thing when the broker,
for his own convenience, arranges with his fellow broker
rot to do something which he ought to do, and so fails to
snake any endeavour to get the shares transferred at all
The defendant relied upon the usage of the Stock Ex.
change ; but this usage was very properly held insufficient
to protect him. In the first place, the usage is unreason-
able ; and in the second, it was one of which the plaintiff
did and could know nothing. Again, though the members
of the Stock Exchange invariably deal with each other as
principals, their rules expressly reserve the right of
resorting to their employers whenever any necessity for
so doing arises. In other words, though the defendant
may have to pay Mr. Grissell the money which that
gentleman has lost by his default, he has, or might have
had, his remedy against the person for whom he bought.
It certainly does seem strange to the Times that a sane
and respectable man, who left his friend's house after aye
o'clock with the alleged intention of returning before
seven, and who, moreover, had a wedding to attend the
next morning, should of his own free will absent himself
altogether, and disappear from the world. Yet such an
event is proved by experienced not only to be possible,
but to be even more likely than a murder in a tavern or
a brothel. People are always disappearing, sometimes
under the influence of an uncontrollable impulse bear-
ing no affinity to reason, sometimes under the spel
of a sudden temptation, sometimes out of shame
at some excess into which they may have been be-
trayed. It may be remembered that at the time of
the accident on the ice in the Regent's Park many persons
were looked for by their friends in the dead-house who
had never been near the park at all, but had merely dis-
appeared during the preceding twenty-four hours. T4ese
represented, in fact, the evasions of a single London day.
It ,is at least within the bounds of possibility that the
missing man may have gone to some place where he was
made intoxicated and kept until the dinner and the next
day's wedding were over, and that afterwards he was
ashamed to return. The posting of the placard, with the
offer of a reward for his recovery, may have still further
preventedhis reappearance by seeming to preclude the possi-
bility of the matter being hushed up. The throwing away
of the hat may have been but a stratagem, and if it should
turn out that the finder, who kept it several days, was
mistaken as to the day he found it, this supposition would
acquire further strength. There is also the possibility of
a simple unreasoning flight. Men have before now gone
out to their business like Mr. Speke, and the next thing
that has been heard of them is that they were at New
York or Bombay. It is not always the surest way in
these matters to look for what appears the most reason-
able. Men's minds often act in utter defiance of reason,
and the most improbable solution proves to be the true
C4le,

The Post, apropos of the American papers on the re-
lease of Mr. Train, proceeds to consider the principle of
naturalisation lately enunciated in the President's Mes-
sage. Certain individuals accused of Fenianism before
British tribunals alleged that, although British subjects
by birth, they had become naturalised citizens of a.
American Republic, and in such capacity had been
divested of the allegiance which they owed to the land of
their birth. The plea was disallowed, and all the autho-
rities on the law of nations confirmed the justice of this
adverse decision. In the United States, however, this
adoption of a well-established principle was regarded
as an attack upon the liberties of the Ame-
rican people, and at the opening of Congress the
President, in his Message, suggested that a measure should
be passed with the view of putting an end to this foreign
jurisdiction. The Committee on Foreign Affairs, to which
the matter was referred by the House of Representatives,
has, it is believed, agreed upon the leading provisions of a
bill calculated to give effect to the proposal of the chief
magistrate. Our contemporary expressed at the time
astonishment at a proposed act of legislation so obviously
beyond the province of any particular State as that indi-
cated in Mr. Johnson's Message. Whether a British
natural-born subject can be divested of the duties inciden-
tal to his allegiance, as such, by the process of naturalisa-
tion in another State, can alone be a subject for the
consideration of the British Legislature. If it is the law
of England that his obligations cannot be got rid of by
any act of his own in a foreign country, it is clearly fur
English legislators, and for them alone, to change this law.
In his speech at Bradford, the other day, says the Tele-
graph, Mr. Forster made one or two critical remarks of
special value on the Workshops Act and the .
it Factory Acts.
The Workshops Act does not order the Government in-
upectors to visit the places in which is meant to be car-
ried out--it only permits them. But, as Mr. Forster said.
permission is not sufficient. Already the inspectors have
quite enough t) do, and we cannot expect them to visit
every large workshop as well as every large mill. They
will follow the example of some colliery inspectors, who
do not go down half a dozen pits in the course of a year,
and whose supervision is thus comparatively worthless.
Such laxity will not do. Without rigid inspection the
Workshops Act will in many cases remain a dead letter;
employers will dodge it—there is no other fitting word—
just as they often strive hard to be classed in the list to
which the Factory Acts do not apply. Mr. Forster well
said that, for the sake of the children, inspectors are as
I)peadary in workshops as bishops are in the Church,