The Sun.
London, England, 1850-06-27 00:00:00

RSDAY EVENING, JUNE 27, 1850.

changes in the organization of public departments—
changes which interfere with their daily avocations and
enjoyments, which derange their calculations, and which
may even ruinously depreciate their property—made at
the mere flat of a single branch of the Legislature,
without notice, and with scarce'y a show of discussion.
It may, as Sir Charles Wood averred on Tuesday night,
be strictly legal (though many doubt it), but it is cer-
tainly. unusual, and contrary to all the analogies of our
social and political system; and the public will be slow
to believe that anybody is real'y answerable for a little
revolution of this sort except the Government which has
wilfully, and even ostentatiously, allowed the nuisance to
take its own course. It is no business of ours to defend
the Sabbatarien zealots from the censures which their
folly deserves ; but Ministers may be assured that,
when the consequences of the recent change shall have
somssvhat further developed themselves, it will not
he the majority of ninety-three that will have to bear
the chief blame. What those consequences are likely to
be, we shall, it may be feared, soon have ample means of
judging. On Tuesday evening Lord Brougham men-
tioned the instance of a death which bad occurred within
the previous day or two, in consequence of the new re-
gulations rendering it impossible to call in medical aid
by letter; and though it will doubtless be said that the
case was an " isolated" one, it unfortunately happens
that" isolated cases," of one sort or another, constitute
no small part of every man's life. Liability to " isolated"
emergenciee, whether of a personal, a pecuniary, or a
domestic nature, is a fundamental condition of human
existence; and nothing is more certain than that, in
every considerable town in Great Britain, scores or hun-
dreds of instances will arise every Sunday in which im-
mediate communication with a distant locality will be a
mutter of life-and-death urgency. Of course we do not
mean to say that the new regime, if allowed to be-
come permanent, will be very frequently productive
of extreme and fatal consequences, as in the case
adduced by Lord Brougham. People will soon learn to
understand the thing, and, so far as may be, to accom-
modate themselves to it. Necessity is the mother of
ins cation. The proprietors of the London weekly jour-
nals have already, as our readers are aware, made ar-
rangements with at least one of the great railway com-
panies, which will tend to avert the threatened confis-
cation of their property; and there can be no doubt
that it will be perfectly practicable, with a little time
and experience, to organize a machinery adequate to the
supply of other social wants besides the craving for " la-
test intelligence." Country traders, who have bills fall-
ing due in London on the Monday will find means of
transmitting cash on the Sunday; and urgent family
tei3sives will, we may be sure, neither be kept back till
the critical moment is passed, nor be carelessly flung into
-the receptacles where everything lies " unsorted and
untouched." We may say, in general, that (after a
while) there will be a universal Sunday "collection awl
delivery" of all letters—except those of the very poor—
which are worth being done up in string and brown
paper, and charged as "parcels." In a word, the most
notable and conspicuous results of the present delectable
device for promoting Sabbatical religion will be (should
the thing last long enough), to make a considerable hole
in the Post-office revenue—to levy a vast amount of
private taxation on all classes of the community except
the poorest—to inflict on them a cruel and exasperating
hardship—and to add enormously to the amount of
Sunday labour throughout the country. We take it,
however, to be impossible, practically speaking, that
our experience of this absurd and fantastic innova-
tion will be sufficiently protracted to produce a
tithe of the social and moral mischief with
which it is fraught. Mr. Locke has given
notice of a motion, for the 9th of next month,
which will bring the whole question once more under
the consideration of the House of Commons ; and what-
ever Ministers may or may not do towards extricating
themselves from the very discreditable position which
they have assumed, there are, we trust, independent
Members of that assembly who will take care that the
matter shall at least undergo one night's thorough and
searching discussion. The issue we can scarcely re-
gard as dubious. Lord Ashley himself must, we should
imagine, be already somewhat sceptical as to the moral
operation of a system which tends to identify the very
name of the sacred day with unwonted wed odious social
restrictions ; and we cannot but believe that very many
among his recent supporters will have perceived, on
cooler reflection, that the decorous and religious ob-
servance of the weekly Christian holiday has nothing to
gain, but everything to lose, from that sort of fanatical
exaggeration which invariably ends in an anti-religious
reaction.

(From the Cork Examiner.)
The fanatics of Sabbatical labour must apparently be
satisfied with having annoy el the public for an exceed-
ingly short space of time. Their success has excited
universal outcry through England. Lord Brougham de-
nies that it is legal for the Government to carry out
the new regulations, the Post-office being a means of
taxation, which they have no right to abrogate or lessen;
and the Marquis of Lansdowne promises to take the
point into serious consideration. The Chancellor of the
Exchequer confesses to a malicious satisfaction at the in-
convenience to which the public have subjected them-
selves; indeed, it is doubtful whether the testy indi-
vidual is not more pleased at the consequences of the
vote in the Commons, than angry at its having been
adopted against his advice. Lord John Russell agrees
in the opinion of the Chancellor, with rogard to the
change being unadvisable. Meanwhile, the Times
spends the opposition to the measure of the last body of
the English classes. The anxiety of Ministers to see
the House of Commons retrace its steps is not at all ac-
cepted as an excuse for their complying with an address
voted in such a way. The Spectator says their " con-
duct presents a case of the most naked mala fides—
that it is grossly unconstitutional,' and despicably
shabby ;" and the whole press, without exception, merely
varies the terms of condemnation. From all these indi-
cations, we give the new regulations a very short time
longer to live. The best, because the shortest, argument
on the question is, that the stoppage of the postal de-
livery really tends to increase the amount of labour on
the Sabbath. This has been over and over again de-
monstrated. Within the limited range of a single per-
son's acquaintance, and on the first occasion when the
obnoxious regulations came into force, we have known
an extent of trouble taken with communications, almost
equal to that of all the persons engaged in the heal
post-office. Ono fact is stronger than a column of logic.
We give the following illustration of the new Post-office
rule. A farmer in the county gaol for debt, had his bail
papers sent up to Dublin. They were examined and
found all right. They were transmitted to Cork, and
reached here on Sunday morning. From the non-de-
livery of letters, he was kept a prisoner till to-day, thus
suffering a whole day's incarceration that might have
been prevented.
__

(From the Scotsman.)
The chief effect, as yet, of the remarkable postal
change which came into operation last Suedey, has been
a great outburst of bitter abuse against all coecerned in
it, coming from those who have been silent or very
cautious end gentle in the previous stages of the ques-
tion. Every morning the Times (which we take only
its conspicuous among a large number) comes out
firmer and fiercer, and with fresh specimens of the op-
pressions and absurdities arising out of the new system.
ishat the complaints area just and the specimens feir
there is no doubt ; and even in our own much smaller
sphere w e have already evidenced that, as we have al-
ways maintained, the change will not only inflict great
incenvenietce and cruelty, but, without that inconve-
nience and cruelty being thereby removed in the more
claanint class of cases, will greatly increase the amount
of Sunday labour. The very first Sunday's experi-
ence has caused requests to be made to us from
various districts to enter cn arrangements by which,
through means of parcels, &c., the paper:, may be ob-
tainable as hitherta when the readers pay their Sunday
visits to the places where (no anomalous neighbourship)
the church and post office stand t( gather; and there is
no doubt that arrangements of that kind, nut only as
regards despatching, but, in the case of papers published
early in the week,as regardareceiving also,will,be,adopted,
and to some extent are already adopted, by the chief
portion of the newspaper press. The proprietors of the
London Saturday papers are already far advanced with
preparations for a Sunday delivery in a large number of
places by means of private messengers, and a pressure,
the success of which seems considered certain,
has been commenced on the English railway
companies, to • induce them to esteblieh a
Sunday precis delivery. Our advertising co-
lumns also bear evidence already that the
coffeehouse-keepers and others of the same class even in
Scotland are calling new machinery into operation in
order to obtain their supply of papers. These are spe-
cimens of the remedies resorted to in one department
alone—whence inferences may be drawn as to what will
be the amount of labour called into existence to provide
remedies in all the other departments, as well as of the
amount of cruelty inflicted and of indignant feeling en-
gendered in those numerous and various cases (the cases
of individuals as distinguished from trades or communi-
ties, and the poor as distinguished from the rich) in
which the wrong is irremediable. The Times of Mon-
day incidentally makes the following allusion to the mode
in which last Sunday was spent in London, the city to
which the advocates of the prohibition of intercourse are
so fond of referring in example:—
The railways could not supply trains fast enough
for the multitude pressing into the metropolitan stations,
and by the time a regular train had got off there re-
mained enough for a supplementary special. The river,
which had not erased to flow, presented a similar spec-
tacle; and as no air was to be got in the streets, it was a
comfort to think of the several score thousands who in-
haled it, not quite pure perhaps, but still in motion on
the Thames. We never remember to have seen so com-
plete a turn-out of the population on the pavement as
there was in the evening, just as the air out of doors was
beginning to be cooler than within. We must add that
we saw a good many reading their newspapers, which
they did with the look of men exercising a privilege,
and resolved to keep it if possible."
This indicates two of the peculiarities connected with
the case of London, to which we have occasionally ad-
verted. The one is that, besides an amount of Sunday
business happily unknown either in Scotland or the pro-
vincial towns of England, London, with her shut Post-
officc, is on Sunday the most jaunting and pleasure-
seeking town in the kingdom. Of course, we do not
adduce these things as cause and effect, but only as
coincident, and as having a bearing both on the motive
under which the Londoners keep their Post-office shut,
and on the assumption of the Agnawites that ehutting
it throughout the kingdom would produce better Sab-
bath obsere ance. The second peculiarity in the case of
London indicated above, is that, in so far as she ha: her
copulation concentred, and is rather the giver than
the receiver of intelligence, she is much less de-
pendent on the Post-office than any other district is. For
instance, London is nearly as populous as all Scotland,
but it is very easy to see tee; difference as to the necessity
of Post-off ce csmeaunication between a population
crushcd tegv:et-r yen twelv;_. square !bites, and one spread
over more mall 30,000 square nailes--hetvieen a popula-
tion, the members of which, any Sunday, at almost any
hour, can reach one another, in person or otherwise,