The Sun.
London, England, 1844-06-10 00:00:00

The Banner of Ulster contains the follon ing re-
marks, in reference to the Government Landlord and
Tenant Commission :—" This Commission are not to
report, it is now understood, during the current ses-
sion. The question which most deeply interests the
tenantry of Ireland is to be left over for another year,
and perhaps indefinitely postponed. The remon-
strances of the press were successful in compelling
the shadow of inquiry, but the shadow refuses to be
embodied in any palpable shape, at least for twelve
months, and the investigations of the press must be
recommenced. The report is delayed on account, it
is said, of the importance attached to the subject,
and the anxiety of the Commissioners to avoid
rash recommendations. The importance of the
matter cannot be doubted, and the anxiety
to recommend no course without due consideration is
highly laudable ; but the loss by delay should not be
forgotten. People want to know whether they are
really placed in favourable or unfavourable circum-
stances. The majority of the farmers are perfectly
confident that an improvement could be made, but
then they want to know whether it will be effected."
When this important Commission, from which so
much has been, and still continues to be, expected, was ,
first issued, it was concluded as a matter of course,
that no time would be lost by the Commissioners in
putting the public into possession of the result of their
inquiries ; and now, it appears, that no report is to be.
issued for the space of twelve months—a most injurious
delay, considering the present excited state of Ireland,
The very importance of the question is the best reason
why no dilatoriness should be manifested by the Com-
missioners. It is not expected of them that they
should issue their report with railway speed, but
surely there is no good cause why they should delay
it for the space of one entire year. The truth is,
Government in this, as in every other question con-
nected with Ireland, seem unwilling or afraid to show
anything like activity or decision. They are in
earnest only in coercion, and shrink with the utmost
sensitiveness from the adoption of any step that wears
a conciliatory aspect. They have no hesitation in
putting down the monster meetings and sending Mr.
O'Comszia. to prison, but they cannot find it in their
hearts to apply a remedy to the admitted grievances
which caused those meetings, and have been the means
of arming the Li'verator —despite his incarceration--
with all but sovereign authority. The session is now
more than half over; the House will probably rise
about the beginning of August, in order that the
amusements of the sporting gentlemen may not be
interfered with; and what, let us ask, has been done—
what will be done for the benefit of the sister coun-
try ? The answer is soon given—nothing—abso-
lutely nothing ! The Registration Bill—such as it
is—is abandoned, or on the eve of abandonment ; the
result of the inquiries of the Landlord-and-Tenant
Commission will be an Eleusinian mystery for the
protracted space of twelve months, during which
period agrarian disturbances will of course con-
tinue in their old spirit; and as for that colossal
nuisance the Irish Church Establishment, "it needs
no ghost from the grave"—as HAMLET says—to
assure us that it will be permitted to exist in all its
present enormity. When such is the policy—say,
rather, the no-policy—pursued by the PEEL Cabinet
towards the sister country, can we wonder that the
repeal agitation progresses ; that the indomitable
spirit of O'CONNELL, though he himself is locked up
within the four walls of a Penitentiary, pervades
every quarter of the country, infusing hope into the
timid, quickening the energies of the hesitating,
and arming the bold with additional determination
of purpose ; and that the repeal rent turns
in without the slightest appearance of abate-
ment, to the amount of several hundred pounds
a week ? Doubtless Ministers confidently calculate
on the gradual subsidence of this popular ferment ;
but they will find themselves, we suspect, wholly
mistaken in their calculations ; repeal—thanks to
their blundering, vacillating, suicidal policy—is fast
becoming a principle—a faith—a religion with the
vast mass of the Irish community ; and that move-
ment on the part of Government which it was hoped
would crush it—namely, the imprisonment of Mr.
O'CosmEtst,—is the very st©p which will be the means
of imparting to it a tenfold impetus.

does not seem to be the Premier's destiny to be
more fortunate in dealing with the silver, than he has
hitherto been in meddling with the gold element of
our currency. In former articles we have demon-
strated—(to those of our readers who had not already
arrived at the same conclusion by the light of their
own experience and judgment)—on the authority of
the "Enquirer after Truth," that the Premier was
" hurrying on the measure " now before Parliament
" with indecent haste." We have showed, from the
same pamphlet, the confirmation of our previous
charges against the Right Hon. Baronet:-Ist. That
he had really exhibited an incapacity to understand
the nature and properties of " money" in the larger
awl more legitimate sense, wherein it is necessary to
consider it, in reference to any scheme for regulating
the general monetary system of a country. 2d. That
he has essentially misstated the history of " one pound"
in attempting to trace it from earlier periods of the
monarchy to the present. Id. That he has com-
mitted a double mistake in saying that "subse-
quently to the reign of WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR, a
great alteration was made, not in the name, but in the
intrinsic value of the pound sterling, by debasements
of the currency ;" fur, the " debasements" of our
currency hare been probably less than those of any
other European State in all that interval ; and the
alterations of the coin, which have diminished its
" intrinsic value," have been produced by the diminu-
tion of the weight of that coin. 4th. That his asser-
tion that the pound sterling means a definite quantity
of the " precious metals of certain weight and fine-
ness," is refuted and disproved by the very historical
data which he had adduced to establish that assertion
affirmatively. 5. That the allegation of Sir ROBERT 011
the 7th inst., " that it was not until a late period of the
reign of ELIZABETH that silver, being then the stan-
dard
of value, received that determinate weight, which
it retained without variation, with constant refusals
to alter it, till 1716," is utterly overthrown by the
fluctuation in the relative value or proportion of silver
to gold, in that lapse of more than 200 years, from
10.095 to 1, to 15 to 1.6. That subsequently to the
late period (namely, 43d year) in the reign of ELIZA-
BETH, this "determinate axed value" ascribed by Sir
ROBERT PEEL to " the gold pound of the value of
20s. of our present money, was so little determinate
so far from fixed, that it was altered, in 1604, to a
gold coin of fineness and quantity value 255.; in 1625
to 225. 9d. ; in 1675, to 215.; and in 1815, to 20s.
It is curious to turn from blunders of fact, and

torfously wide of the notorious truths is yet more un-
accountable. " They were almost without any ex-
ception, Chartered State Banks, with limited re-
sponsibility ; their paid-up capital—the only guaran-
tee for their liabilities—being in reality, almost
illusory, and their notes 'ere depreciated, not from
excess, but from genera; discredit and fraudulent
bankruptcy r This is the real history of their case, in
a few words, sketched by the Magistrates and Council
of the town of Ayr. How came the Premier so to
pervert a plain tale, as he has done, in his speech of
the 6th ult.?

It is time, surely, that Members of the Legislature
should shake off the fatal apathy with which they
have hitherto looked on at the progress of this blun-
dering but most fatal proposition, with which the
rash incompetency of the Premier—unwarned by his
more juvenile experiment of 1819, unabashed by the
commercial ruin and social disasters which in suc-
ceeding years have associated his name with the de-
tested recollections of that statute of imbecile pre-
sumption and the wanton misery which it has in-
flicted—is now again, about to vex the monetary sys-
tem of this country. Five-and-twenty years might
have afforded him, one should have thought, leisure
for a searching examination into the results of his
destructive blunder, if they could not bring him to a
profound sense of his fault, and becoming sorrow for
the evils it had inflicted on the empire.
Contrasting those evils, recurring serious and ac-
cumulative as they are, with the impassable and
complacent igoisme to which we so lately referred, as
distinguishing the whole deportment of Sir ROBERT
in reference to this question—we beg to refer him to
another letter from Common Sense, which will supply
him with a reflection of his own capacity and powers
for dealing with a subject so complex and multi-
plied and vital in all its relations as our monetary
system, far more just, simple, and true, than the
estimate he has himself, so unhappily for the public,
formed of those properties. The letter we allude to
is headed " A Nearly Incredible Fact."