The Sun.
London, England, 1844-12-31 00:00:00

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LONDON, TUESDAY. DECEMBER 31, 1844,

It was last week our pleasant duty to advert to the
pacific and dignified speech of a Constitutional KING
to the legislative representation of the great monarchy
he governs. To-day we cannot forbear from touch-
ing on the contrasted topics suggested by our further
examination of the advices from Madrid, and the
rumoured discovery of a serious " plot"—so called—
in Poland against the usurped authority of Russia
over that much wronged-kingdom. The distractions
of Spain, and the disquietudes of Poland, are well
calculated to read a memorable lesson to factious
slaves on the one hand, and stern and relentless
tyrants on the other. Spain, unlike France, has a
feeble SOVEREIGN, " constitutional" only by a title
which can never be applied to her except in
the utmost excess of courtier-like flattery, or in the
license of the most sarcastic mockery. Poland has
been, and should be now, like France—a great
monarchy : but she has never possessed an efficient
legislative representation, through which to address,
advise, or control her KING. Poland has little in
common with Spain, in the nature of historical asso-
ciations, except it be to have been paralyzed by the
personal weaknesses and vices of -many bad kings.
But, whilst the Spanish kings, from PHILIP 11. to
FERDINAND VII., were, in effect, absolute, the Polish
Sovereigns, from SIGISMUND I. to STANISLAUS
AUGUSTUS, were kept, more or less stringently, in
check by their tumultuous Diets, their military
Nobles, and their Bishop-Princes. When they fell
at last, lamented victims of Imperial and Royal
treachery by the Partition Treaty, they witnessed at
least the agonized repentance of those infatuated
oligarchs, who, to compass the objects of their own
ambition or enmities, had placed the destroying
weapons in the hands of their unprincipled de-
spoilers. Spain, with all the palmy recollec-
tions of her more than Imperial grandeur
about her—of the laurelled days when she was mis-
tress of all the kingdoms of the Peninsula, Por-
tugal included—when her sceptre was extended over
the provinces of Holland and the Low Countries, and
Naples, and made itself felt through some of the
other principal States of Italy—when she assumed and
exercised the proud title of " Queen of the Indies,"
as well in the richest countries of the great Eastern
Archipelago, as throughout her vast dominions of
Mexico, Chili, and Peru ;—this Spain is now pros-
trated in the most sordid dust which was ever trodden
by the foot of an iron despotism, not before a con-
spiracy of mighty kings—not before a confederacy of
kinglike palatines, the natives of her soil—but before
an obscure foreign adventurer, a heartless, callous,
intriguing, unprincipled, faithless soldier of fortune !
The descendants of PELAGIO and the CID, of SAA-
VEDRA and of CORTEZ, at this moment hold their per-
sonal liberty, their property, their right to reside
upon their natal territory, their very lives, even, at
the good pleasure of such a creature of factions and
of falsehoods as NARVAEZ ! Their best and noblest
blood is profusely shed upon the public scaffold, for
no graver offence than demurring to the pro-
fligate government of the domestic minions,
or po'.itical favourites, paramount in a Court
which rejoices in the august auspices of the
quasi widow of FERDINAND VII., and those ready

struments of all sorts of political corruption, whom
French gold, French intrigues, and her own passions,
or prepossessions, unscrupulously employ for ends the
most subversive of tqat Constitution and those liher-

ties, which they, equally with herself, have heretofore
sworn to maintain inviolate.

Strange coincidence ! In one and the same (lay,
we have news from Warsaw and Mldrid that either
capital has just been the theatre of a newly-made
dis:orery. A plot in each, it seems, had been orga-

nised against the de facto authority under which it
groans. If the Polish affair should determ;ne in
teaching to the Emperor NICHOLAS the salutary
lesson that an outraged people is an inextinguishable
volcano—that the fires excited by the intolerable
action of foreign rapacity and bloodthirstioess may
smoulder for a time, hut never can be quenched,
until after they have burst forth in overwhelming
fury to consume all whose alien hands have supplied
the material of such combustion—we should think
the Polish affair a fortunate one for her own interests.
and those of Continental Europe at large. Spoliators
on a great scale are to be admonished only by " ter-

rible examples." It seems a hopeless task toremon-
Atrate with the AUTOCRAT by petitions ut right or
pleas ad nzisericordianz, or arguments "ad verecun-

diain."

The affair to which we refer, slightly

as• it is noticed in the private correspon.

dence, on the authority of which it has been

announced, may yet have its revelations ; and
these, we are fain to hope, may not be altogether

fruitless of better influences on the moody mind of

the CZAR. But, alas ! for the luckless Spaniards,
who may be discovered, unintimidated by the past,
and yet hopeful of the future, to have been engaged
in organising new efforts to emancipate their country

from its shameful thraldom. The long-enduring
tolerance of such powerful Governments as those of
Britain and France must have ere now allayed in the

breast of NARVAEZ every tendency to a condition o

doubt or apprehension as to the consequences which

his brutal administration of power may bring down,
. _

from without, on his own head. He has the patronage
of CHRISTINA and her French connexion at his

back—the forbearance cf the English Ministry before

him—the inconceivable apathy and patience of the
Spanish public on all hands—to encourage and cheer

him on in his work of proscription and decimation.
Such a man will not be taught. The adventurer, in
the sense of a popular proverb, is mounted, much to

his own astonishment, we doubt not ; and he wi.

speedily reach his destination, we trust, much to the
satisfaction of all good men.

In considering the progress of the Tractarian
heresy, which just now engrosses so much of public
attention, nothing is more remarkable than the
gradual, stealthy manner in which it worked its
way, and the tact with which it kept out of sight
every dogma that might come like a shock on the un-
prepared mind of the community. Nothing could
well be more modest, and apparently more harmless,
than the pretensions of its advocates when they first
entered the field of theological controversy. Their
gentle infancy gave no promise of the bigoted, un-
compromising manhood that has since distinguished
them. They merely wished, they said, to rouse the
lukewarm spirit of the Church ; to set an example of
zeal to all the working clergy ; and impress on them
a more earnest and active sense of their responsibility.
They did not desire—not they !—to make any in-
sidious or dangerous innovations on Protestantism.
They had no intention to do otherwise than keep
strictly within the pale of orthodoxy, as determined
by the usages of nearly three centuries. Nothing
was further from their thoughts than the idea of
giving a new interpretatio❑ to some of the more
stringent Articles of the Established Faith. As for
entertaining any sympathies with the Church of
Rome, or regarding certain of its tenets and cere-
monial observances with an eye of partial fondness,
they repudiated the notion with indignation. To re-
store the Church to its state of original efficiency by
fully awakening the zeal of its members, was the
Alpha and the Omega of their ambition. By this
jesuitical mode of proceeding—by adroitly keeping
in the back-ground the real objects which they had
at heart until the public mind should be prepared for
their development, the Tractarians succeeded in