The Sun.
London, England, 1845-05-12 00:00:00

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LONDON, MONDAY, MAY 12, 1845.

The Irish Academies' Bill, introduced by Sir JAMES
GRAHAM on Friday, appeared to meet with the general
approbation of the House, and looking at the difficulty
of establishing a system of education for young men of
different religious persuasions, which shall not give offence
to one party or another, we can see no objection whatever
to the scheme. Schools, and academies, and universities
are but ill adapted for teaching theology, and unless a
Confession of Faith is laid down which every pupil must
subscribe, the great object of such institutions would be
defeated, and constant wrangles be carried on about
particular dogmas in religion. If such a rule of faith is
established, then only one sect can be benefited, and
all the rest must trust, not only to their own means for
education, but also pay for the teaching of the favoured
class. This is the case at Oxford and Cambridge ; and
for that reason nearly one half of the community are op-
posed to these venerable institutions. Trinity College,
Dublin, is founded on a much more libcral plan ; it partakis
more of the progress of the age and less of the wisdom,
or, more properly speaking, of the bigotry of our an-
cestors, and admits Roman Catholics to certain honours
and preferments, and scholars professing the Catholic
faith are eligible for a considerable number of the pro-
fessorships. It is wise, therefore, to leave that seat of
learning as it is, atleast for a time, end till the experimen
proposed by the Government shall have had a fair trial.
Nothing, however, can prevent its success but bigotry
The system has been long in existence in one of the most
religious countries in the civilised werld, and it has
been found to work well. In the University of
Edinburgh, for instance, no religion whatever is
taught. Catholics and Protestants, and Maho-
medans and Hindoos may assemble in the same
class, enjoy alike the blessings of education, and
aspire also to the highest degrees. Such an inter-
course tends to humanise the mind—it wears off the
asperities of different sects encourages g'
od-
will among pupils who had unfortunately been
taught to hate and detest every religion but
their own, and it often leads to friendships which last
fur life, and contribute largely to mutual happiness. The
man who can obstruct, from selfish motives, such a
system can have no claims to those cardinal virtues which
raises the Christian faith above all others. Sir ROBERT
Innus, the representative of Oxford University, stood
almost alone in opposition to the Bill, and denounced it
as a " gigantic scheme of godless education." He, of
course, would have religion taught, but only the reli-
gion contained in the Thirty-nine Articles, and would
thereby exclude from its operation all Catholics, all
Jews, and all Dissenters—the very men who by some
strange infatuation have leagued themselves with their
bitterest enemy. The measure, we trust, will have no
such opponent in Ireland, but be welcomed as another
proof that the Government and the Imperial Parliament
are resolved to persevere in the right course, and pave
the way for full justice to that distracted country. When
measures of such importance are under discussion, it is
to be regretted that Mr. O'CONNELL and his colleague.
are still determined to absent themselves and take no
part whatever in the debates. The fact is thus stated
in one of the Dublin papers of Thursday :

" We are in a position to state," says the Freeman," that should
a call of the House be ordered, it will be disobeyed, and that
O'Connell, O'Brien, John O'Connell, Dillon Browse, Grattan,
and the other representatives of the people, who labour in the na-
tional cause, will treat the threat of Mr. Hume and the call of
the Speaker with equal indifference. When these men came to
the resolve of serving Ireland in Ireland, they counted the
cost and accepted all the difficulties of their choice. At pre-
sent the interests of Ireland demand their presence here, and
here they have determined to remain till duty shall call them
elsewhere. If duty should call them to Westminster either to
resist oppressive, or to improve ameliorating measures, they are
as prepared to labour there as they now are to labour
here. But they, and not the British Parliament, are the
judges of the time and the circumstances under which
their presence in the English House of Commons may become a
duty ; and should the Parliament attempt to coerce them to attend
its sittings at any time, other than they themselves may select,
they are resolved to give the Sergeant-at-Arms an opportunity of
making an arrest, and afterwards to test by due process the legality
of that arrest, and thus try the right of the British Parliament to
enforce the attendance of an Irish representative. This resolution
was unanimously come to yesterday by an influential Committee,
and we lose not an hour in giving the assembled senators thcbenefit
to be derived from an early knowledge of the fact."

Is there any one of our readers who has a definite
matured idea of the office, functions, and jurisdiction of
a Stipendiary Magistrate ? A magistrate of our police
c"urt-3, we mean, under the organisation of a recent
Act of Parliament ? We are so utterly at a loss upon
these subjects ourselves—after perusing our reporter's
statement of certain proceedings befcre Mr. BOND, of
the Queen-square Police-office—that we shall be glad
to receive some of those new lights that seem to
be illuminating other minds on subjects, our own
views of which appear to have become utterly anti-
quated. If Mr. BOND be right in his conceptions of a
Police Magistrate's duty, we must be extravagantly
wrong. If we are correct in our views of the end and
objects of a Police Magistrate's appointment, Mr. BOND
might as well have been sitting at the foot of the Cadi
of Bagdad as at Queen- square. for any purposes of
redress or aid to be afforded to the QUEEN'S lieges in
Westminster.

Mr. DUNN, a barrister—whose name, we take it, is
not unfamiliar to the readers of Police reports, in
connexion with some by-gone passages of " ill-starred
hopes,"—presents himself before Mr. BOND. lie com-
plains that for a long time past he has been annoyed by
a person in plain clothes (who enters the office with him),
and whom he believes to be a constable : that this man
has long been in the habit of dogging the complainant by
following him from the moment of his quitting his lodg-
ings till his return, through every street, square, or
alley he might happen to traverse ; that complainant had
tested the fact of this being an intended watch upon him
and his actions, by purposely taking very short and ab
rupt turnings ; still the " mysterious stranger" was at
his heels, inevitable as a tax-collector, persevering as a
dun, ugly as an evil conscience. Mr. DUNN wished to
know whether this person was one of the officers attached
to the Queen-square establishment, and Mr. BOND an-
swered in the negative. Then he very naturally asks the
magistrate if he will take his charge against the police.
man of following him with intent to commit a felony.
Has he no east- on which to found such a charge? He was
seen constantly watching his house when he is at home—
when he goes abroad, out starts this Argus from some
neighbouring public-house, and sticks to his skirts the
live long day, let him go where he will. Surely Mr.
DUNN is amply justified in describing this as an " un-
warrantable and illegal annoyance." What if Mr. DUNN'S
eccentricities have brought him, ere this, into notoriety,
in consequence of some affair of the heart—if we recollect
the matter at all ? Is that any reason for his being put
under a surveillance more rigorous than a French
loyalist had to encounter in Paris, through the various
phases of the Revolution? Does the Home Secretary's
system of Post-office eaves-dropping extend to the
permission of this clearly " illegal and unconstitutional"
practice, known only at this day to the most despotic of
European Governments ? Is there any criminal record,
any conviction for felony extant against Mr. DUNN, that
he should be put out of the pale of that common-law
protection which shelters every free-born Englishman,
not labouring under such disabilities, from all
nuisances of this vexatious and insulting nature?
Let us see how this case stands.—Mr. BOND
refuses to interfere with the accused, or even'
to subject him to an examination, when a: gentleman
alleges that he has for a long time past been subject to
the intolerable persecution of being perpetually followed
and watched by the same party. Why does the magis-
trate refuse ? Because the complaint is groundless? Not
at all. Because the accused denies the charge of Mr.
DUNN ? On the contrary, he dues not attempt to dis
prove or gainsay it. ." I believe this man," says Mr.
D "intends to commit a felony upon me. Will you

take my charge ?" Mr. BOND does not refuse because
he doubts the fact —because there is no case—because
there is no probable ground to proceed upon—but be-
cause this ESCOTT-of course, letter and figure—is a police
constable. " I have nothing whatever to do, Sir," say's
Mr. BOND, " with regard to the management of the
police." What of that? Has he no cognizance to take
of offenders, policemen or not ? If the constable mis-
conducts himself (he adds) or any complaint is
lodged against him, he must be taken before the Com-
missioners of the Police, who, "if they saw occasion,"
would order the constable to be brought before him, to be
dealt with according to law. But what if they should
not " see occasion ?" Now, among the very numerous
charges of delinquency which from time to time are
brought against "officers of that force" at criminal as-
sizes—we have seen several of personal outrages ad-
duced, and in several instances established. Suppose
other Magistrates had held the same opinions
as Mr. BOND, how would those culprits have
ever been committed ? Does Mr. BOND imagine that
he is administering justice in the name of the QUEEN'S
Majesty, or of the Commissioners of the Police ? And
does he seriously imagine that any man in his senses
will submit to carry his complaint against a policeman
for an assault or an annoyance, or a suspicion of felo•
nious intent, before the Scotland-yard Commis-
sioners in the first place, to be remitted to the proper
tribunal in the second, only in the event of
these Commissioners, forsooth, " seeing occa-
sion" for it ? We are really sick Of the ridiculous
pretensions and vagaries of the police constabulary on
many recent occasions. But, for Heaven's sake, let the
Commissioners stick to their drillings and reports, and
marchings and counter- marchings, without presuming to
interfere between the subjects of the QUEEN and their
remedy against any members of a paid constabulary who
may have acted illegally towards them. We entirely
coincide in Mr. DUNN'S opinion of his own case :—The
conduct of the constable has been illegal (unless, in-
deed, he have a pocket warrant from the Home Secretary)
and though we should deprecate all extreme measures,
we should not particularly lament if such intolerable and
suspicious intrusion on any Englishman's privacy had
been summarily chastised in the person of a policeman
in plain clothes, whose actions must really have borne so
felonious an aspect. Mr. BOND was bound, at all events
to hear the charge; hit he seems to have been impressed
with as reverential an awe for t'ie aristocratic majesty of
the Police Commissioners, es the Inspector FORBES
himself ; from whose refusal to listen to Mr. DUNN pre-
viously, he seems indeed to have liar en h s own cue.

From the concurring testimony of the City or money
articles of our own paper and our contemporaries, we
are induced to believe that the period of re-action in the
Share• market, to which we have so often felt it our duty
to advert, is not very far distant. The Times thus
pointedly alludes to the matter, in its Friday's impres-
sion :—" The Railway Share-market continues heavy,
and the increase of sales depresses prices. In fact, all
the markets are in a declining condition ; and some few
fancy that the period of re-action has at length arrived."
It must have struek the most casual observer of
such operations for some time past, that prices
in the Share-market have either maintained
a buoyancy difficult to be accounted for on all
ordinary principles of scrip speculation, or have
even exhibited a tendency to rise in a degree to be looked
for, under ordinary circumstances, only in the shares
of first-rate and long-established concerns which have
attained a species of maturity in the continued confi-
dence of the public. One can perfectly well understand,
when the interest on Government securities is so low as
that which they at present pay, that shares in the capital
of such magnificent and undoubted Companies, or Asso-
ciations, as the Bank of England, the East India Com-
pany, the New River Company, and some others
which rarely find their way, at all even, into
the market, should be eagerly sought after as
the safest and most eligible channels in which
individuals can make investments. It is easy to imagine
that, with a view to the security of their principal,
parties may be disposed to buy into such concerns as
these, at as high a premium (should the shares be
carrying such, in the market) as to leave them but an
inconsiderably higher return of interest than they would
receive from investments in the Government stocks.
They are justified, however, in thus determining, by
the guarantees of long experience, reiterated tests, and
not merely the unabated but increasing favour in which
these Associations stand with the monied public of all
the civilised world. But when we find—out of two new
railway undertakings—some, not yet in actual working,
others but very recently commenced—that 99 are above
par, and perhaps 70 or 80 at a premium in
the share market, and again that the range of this pre-
mium from 1 per cent. on the shares of some railway
companies to le per cent. on those of others, is
not referable to the •arying degre3 of relative advan-
tages which they are likely to secure to their respective
proprietaries, but by some not apparent and not inhe-
rent causes ; we are justified in surmising that a spirit
of gambling, either fraudulent or capricious, must be the
principle which strikes these differences of nominal
value, where there are, as yet, no practical results of
fact and of experimental working to decide the real
value of such shares. Now, whether the price that
is thus set, be created by the caprice or the fraud of
gambling speculation, that is to say, whether it be a
fancy or a factitious price, it is equally worthless as an
index of value:. If these premises be admitted, let us
apply them to the eighty or ninety millions of capital
stock of railway undertakings, which the heat of that
excitement we speak of has, for months past, kept fer-
menting and raising to an artificial temperature. The
time is coming at which, if we may be allowed to pursue
the figure, a vast proportion of this aerated mass is to be
drawn off. What will be the per centageof immediate
loss occasioned by that process ? When the moment
has come at which the operation of settling and
realising shall be extensively resorted to —when it
will no longer be a question with speculators how high
by a little management the) can send up shares on this
ur that project over a certain day (all dealings in them,
in the meanwhile, being in the nature of time bargains
only, and for " differences°", but how low beyond their
original cost price they can prevent them from tumbling
down, when the disorganization of the general share
market shall square prices by the value of money multi-
plied in the inverse ratio of the discredit that will have
infalliby overtaken the scrip of two-thirds of such com-
panies ; when that moment shall have- arrived, we must
be prepared to hear of frightful deficiencies and
defalcations. The balance between the prices at
which shares have been nominally bought, and
must be actually sold, will represent a sacrifice of capi-
tal perfectly appalling. And all this will be indepen-
dent of that loss which is always most severe, on the
most sanguine or mercurial speculation. What we have
supposed above, applies specially to the railway projects
that will probably be at a discount—that is to say, to
the great majority of them. But there will
be a few a favourite few —of which more
shares will have become the subject of cm-
tracts for delivery at a specified day, than
there will be afloat in the market. These can
only be evoked by the potent but ruinous spell of
pa)ing increased premiums upon them. By analogy we
shall have the old story re-enacted of the Dutch Bur-
gomaster who speculated in the " stock" of the unique
black and white Verelst Viceroy tulip, to the extent of a
thousand bulbs at a thousand guilders a piece. The
frenzy of the tulip-mania had just then attained its height,
and " the one famous," Alemaez Viceroy had fetched
4,200 guilders. Our Burgomaster was tempted by what-
ever amount of premium he liked to set upon his Verelsts,
till at last he had disposed of his thousand bulbs
for 2,000 guilders each, covenanting to deliver
the said bulbs in two months. A very capital
operation he thought he had made. His tulip contract
shares changed owners, till they were distributed into
nearly a thousand hands. The usual panic came, and
with it the re• action. The Burgomaster's day of de-
livery arrived ; and, lo ! there were but 500 bulbs to be
had, or known to be in existence. Could the Burgo-
master have summoned together twice the capital repre-
sented by the exorbitant price he had obtained for his
bulb shares, he could not have extricated himself from
the ruin which overwhelmed him.

Madrid journals of the 2d inst. have been received.
Monday was kept as a close holiday, being the anniver-
zary of the rising against the French in 1808. The
Cortes did not meet, and the Bourse a as shut.

The first clause of the Bill for farming the fortifica-
tions of Paris has been adopted by the Chamber of
Deputies. The sum proposed was 14,130,000 f. (5G,5001.),
and on a division there was for the clause, 227, and
against it, 144—majority, R 3. This is very large
majority, and leaves no doubt that the fortification of
the capital is now un flit accompli. The debate on this
clause was enlivened in a variety of ways—by some
sharp-shooting between M. ARAGO and General Parx-
HANS, an amusing speech of M. ALLARD (the reporter
of the Bill), and a personal quarrel between M. THIERS
and M. DE LAMARTINE. The philosopher, when the
affair became serious, had no chance with the
General, and was compelled to admit that
many of his calculations and conclusions, made at a
former sitting, were quite untenable. M. ALLARDE
to the eitizeus
of
turned into utter ridicule the idea that any new danger
Psis
re other could beoaepr meansprehen dedfrom
arming the forts T ralready