The Sun.
London, England, 1844-11-12 00:00:00

SPIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS.
PROM TRIO DAILY PAPERS OF YESTERDAY.
CHRONICLE.—The English must be univer-
sally regared as a most unamiable people, if the lan-
guage of the chief organs of public opinion in all the
countries around us, or in contact with us, can at all
be taken as an expression of general feeling. Hated
in France, execrated in Spain, vilipended even in little
Greece , denounced by Dr. List as the commercial
prophet of the Germans, treated with every incivility
by brother Jonathan, and repudiated by sister Ire-
land with the scowl of Nemesis—what has England
done to deserve nineteen-twentieths of such hate ?
We saved France from partition and spoliation, and
made her a present of constitutional freedom ; we
emptied our pockets of heaps of gold and our hearts
of our best sympathies and life's-blood for the
Peninsula; Greece Canning created, from the love
he bore to Thucydides and Plutarch. Our Tories
certainly have done their best to hurt the American
and crush the Irishman ; but of late years
the Tories have begun to show fear, cover-
ing their hate both to Ireland and to America,
and sven their effort is to be amiable, whilst our
Liberals have not ceased to be rationally so. The
phenomenon of our universal execration is, therefore,
a fact worth inquiring into, in order that, if it pro-
ceed from manner, we should learn to improve our
urbanity, if from matter, that we might seriously
sat about removing the cause of the world's ill-
humour. When with this view we seriously set to
examine the causes of complaint against us, and to
analyse the motives and the arguments of those'who
chielly, who almost solely, raise this cry, we univer-
sally find that it is not people's interests that the
English damage or threaten; it is their sentiments
that we offend. The Spaniard, questioned respecting
his grievances, tells us we ruled the country under
the name of spartero. The Greek has some com-
plaint as trivial. Dr. List reproaches us with the
dreadful crime of manufacturing cheaper than Ger-
many, and daring to send and sell such produce ; one
should think, to prohibit ought to satisfy his spleen,
'without abusing us. Jonathan says, that in addition
to all the money scandalously sunk in his State bonds,
we gave sent more to bribe both ways the electors
for the Presidential chair. The Irishman no longer
complains of the penal laws, or the wealth of the
Church Establishment, but says we have robbed him
of his nationalty. It seems to him as if there was no
such thing as collective glory, as if the Irish had no
part in the triumphs and the might of the united em-
pire, and as if it would have been a far more collossal
achievement to have kept in that glorious state of in-
dependent isolatroa: which prevailed when Brian
Boroihme repelled the Danes, than to have gone on in
the same historical cares:* with England ; that is,
admitting strange races to sa;)erpose or interpose their
vigour and variety, in order for all to blend ono day
into a race and an empire dornkating the circum-
ference of' the globe, There is no accounting for tastes,
and this is certainly a mere matter of taste and senti-
ment. And yet the anti-Anglican school in Ireland is
little more than this. Its politics are those tact of interest
but of sentiment ; and sentiment is a thing that un-
fortunately you cannot argue with. If we once more
go the round of our abhorrers, we shall find Oat
their Anglo-phobia is an antagonism purely of senti-
ment. The French thanderers uee precisely the same
language as the sentimental politicians of Ireland.
They say that we have impaired their nationality,
which they, with more reason than Pat, require to be
unh minded. To establish this very quality of un-
boundedness, they have founded a barren empire in
the Pacific, almost on the only spot where we had an
interest, th :ugh merely a co-religionist one; and
they are quite mad that we should question the right
of unbounded nationaiity to tread down our mission-
aries. In the same way, the abuses of the right of
search are a mere matter of sentiment. Every French
statesman who talks of the matter, out of public
view, laughs at the sentiment of the mob on the sub-
ject. Thiers' cock-and-bull story of French consi-
deration being anwindri by the bombardment of
Acre, was sentiment, mere sentiment, and sentiment,
too, that no one more contemned or saw through than
M. Thiers himself. But he was carried away by the
current, and the French Liberal party lost power on
a question of sentiment. If M. Guizot has kept it
.since, it is that he has paid attention to realities, and
left sentiment to take care of itself.
TlMES.—There is a melancholy sort of justice in
the fate which appears to await Colonel Prim, unless
some accident should intervene to rescue him from
the vengeance of his judges, and prevent them from
making him the victim of that power which he con-
tributed to place in their hands. The part he took
in the revolution of last year was sufficiently con-
spicuous to hive earned for him the very first honorary
distinctions bestowed by the Moderados on their re-
turn to Madrid. His present conduct, in opposition
to that Government, may have proceeded either from
disappointed ambition, or from the tardy discovery
that he had sacrificed the liberties of Spain to the
" triumph of an arbitrary and sanguinary faction ; but
whatever may have been his intentions or motives,
they will, in all probability, earn for him the further
distinction of being shot as a traitor ; and, if the
statement which has been puolished as to his demea-
nour under examination be correct, we may perhaps
add that " noth'ng in his life became him like the
leaving it." That he was engaged in a conspiracy
against the present Spanish Administration is not
denied; and in a country where every political party
plots and conspires in turn, the present state of affairs
is sufficiently momentous to set on foot an army of
conspirators. But the specific charge of his having
taken a part in the plot for the assassination of Nar-
vaez appears to rest on very insufficient evidence; and
it is at least equally probable that Narvaez has allowed
this accusation to be preferred, an i will proceed to
extremities against Prim, on the strength of a prede-
termined conviction, in order to rid himself of a rival
whom he thinks dangerous, and to strike terror into
the hearts of the Opposition at this crisis. If General
Narvaez is not grievously belied, his character is
stained by the most atrocious crimes of
public "and private life. The perilous sup-
port which he is giving at the present time
to what are termed the prerogatives of the
Crown rests upon no higher basis than the defence of
his own person and faction, and aims at no other end
than the destruction of his opponents. The work of
bloodshed has already commenced at Barcelona,
where four men have been executed with a horrible
mixture of religious pomp and political excitement;
and if the dormant energies of the Spanish people are
again roused to resist these acts of oppression, des-
tined to divert public attention from the inroads made
upon the Constitution, the modes of attack and of
defence will, we have no doubt, he equally ferocious
on both sides, and equally fail to the re-establish-
ment of public order and freedom. Every day and
every event renders the progress of a re-action more
certain ; yet, however we may deprecate the policy of
the present Administration, and abhor the unscrupu-
lous revolutionary character of some of these pre-
tended loyalists, it cannot be denied that such a re-
action is likely to prove more formidable to the tran-
quillity of Spain, and the existence of the Queen's
• Government, than any of the changes which have
preceded it. Whatever may have been the part as-
sumed by the Court of France in these transactions, of
this much we entertain not the slightest doubt—that the
apparent and temporary prevalence or ascendancy of
the men and the measures supported by that Power,
lead not to the establishment of a serious and perma-
nent alliance and connexion between the two States,
but to a catastrophe from which France herself will
be the principal foreign sufferer. In reality, the
whole-course of the French policy in Spain since the
fall of Espaytero has been a series of miserable fai-
lures ; for having, as was supposed, acquired a pre-
ponderating influence at Madrid by the return of the
Moderados, that influence has been found totally in-
adequate even to protect its own chosen instruments
from destruction. The true question between the re-
spective influences of' France and England in Spain,
is not which may have the largest share in the coun-
sels and the crimes of the faction of the hour ; but
which may be able most effectually to contribute to
uphold the independence and dignity of that nation
in time of danger. We have strenuously,
generously, perhaps imprudently, wished to see
• Spain restored to her former power and pros-
' perity by a system of government purged from the
vices of her absolute monarchy. But, had the expe-
riment been entirely successful, we have no guarantee
. that this renovated power would not have been
turned against ourselves ; and we have laboured
enough for Spain to have learned the full amount of
her gratitude. Such, nevertheless, was the policy
suggested by a liberal interest in the freedom and
• welfare of a people which is endeared to us chiefly by
the sacrifices we have at various times made for it.
'- But every succeeding year has shown that Spain is
less able to maintain free institutions and less
• able to understand the first principles on which
her material prosperity depends. Some of our san-
guine Contemporaries go on to talk about a great
liberal party in the Peninsula. It is a delusion. That
. party has died out, and therefore we conclude that it
was rot really a party, but a faction. The undeni-
able reality is, that the country continues to sink
• lower and lower in the rank of nations. France has
- invested her successively with the cast-off robes of
her kings, and then with the cast-off cap of liberty of
her Jacobins : but Spain herself has been the chief
author of her own degradation. The soil, sterile of all
true great less or manly virtue, produces only the
rank weeds of revolutionary passions, of corruption,
of conspiracies.
GLOBE.—.By means of the income-tax—which
fifty
ir
has produced nearly
perer cent. more than he
computed, added to a number favourable contin-
gencies—Sir Robert Peel finds ;:f imself
n
of a large surplus revenue. Under such
nimd)cs is recs us n-
stances, the country has a right to ask
two things : —First—that the odious impost upon
expect
trade and professions be removed at the expire-
; lion of the three years for which the tax was