The Sun.
London, England, 1845-02-24 00:00:00

antiag tflL

LONDON, MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1845.

• From the most saccharine .of vegetable productions
modern science can extract the most powerful acid
yet known to our chemists. It is because of their
knowledge of this fact, we suppose, that members of
very conflicting parties and opinions are bent upon
teaching Sir ROBERT PEEL and Mr. GOULBURN, that
to meddle with Sugar duties may be one of the
bitterest tasks which it can devolve on a Minister to
perform. The House of Commons' paper of " Notices
of Motion" for this evening, supplies a delectable
illustration of this phenomenon. When Sir ROBERT
PEEL brought forward his financial statement, on the
14th instant, his proposition about the contemplated
reduction of the sugar duties was, perhaps, the least
palatable of all the fiscal changes be proposed. It is true
the Right Hon. Baronet assumed that the result of such
alterations as he advocated in these duties would be
to reduce the cost of sugar to the consumer by some
11d. a pound. Undoubtedly, if this could be realised,
the boon would be a most beneficial and a very cons
siderable one. But what were the anticipations
assigned by himself as the data on which he calcu-
lated this resulting diminution of price ? The largely
increased production of the Mauritius and of our
chief West India sugar-growing colonies. Now, to
this increase of -production certain conditions are in-
dispensably necessary. The most paramount of these
is a vastly enlarged application of free labour to the
soil from whence this extended production is to be
raised. But what favourable prospect of this sort has
the singularly ineffective colonial administration
of Sir R. PEEL'S Government supplied us with ? Is
it to be found in Lord STANLEY'S cold and sybil-like
responses (ambiguous in their expression, super-
ciliously indifferent in their tone), to the planters
and proprietors, and legislatures of our colonies, when
they have remonstrated and entreated, in vain, touch-
ing his halting, uncertain policy about encouraging
the importation of Coolies for Bengal ; or promoting
with good faith and energy the immigration of active
and skilful labourers from the coasts and islands of
the Chinese empire ? We are far from doubting,
for an instant, the prodigious fertility of Jamaica,
the Mauritius, or Trinidad ; but the scarcity of field
labour, and the apathy of the emancipated negroes,
who formerly supplied it to those possessions,
have, for some years, kept their powers of
production in comparative abeyance. That
scarcity must be effectually remedied, in the first
instance, before the increased import, or anything
like it, can be looked for, which is the basis of Sir R.
PEEL'S sanguine expectations of largely reducing the
price of colonial sugars to the British consumer. If
such a very extended amount of produce be not realised,
the simple operation of his plan will be to give in-
creased protection to the sugar of our West Indian
colonies and the Mauritius, at the expense of the
consumer, to the benefit of the planter. The author
of a clever little pamphlet which has just been sent to
us, called "The Sugar Question,"* proposes to
remit the entire duty on all our colonial
sugars, and to place one of 18s. per cwt.
on all foreign sugars, not merely prohibiting
slave-grown sugar for refining, but excluding it alto-
gether. This plan, if we could deem it practicable,
would have the merit, at least, of extreme simplicity ;
nor should we quarrel with the advantage it might
yield to our West India proprietors, provided only
that it secured to the English consumer his sugar at
the cheapest price. Did Sir ROBERT reflect on the
imbroglio his own discriminating plan was preparing,
not only as between opposing interests of the slave-
labour and the free-labour grower, but as between the
West India and the East India grower ? Mr. HOGG,
we see, after a significant notice to move for illustra-
tive papers and returns, the bearing of which it is not
difficult to surmise, has another notice of a resolution,
by way of amendment on the Ministerial one—" That
there ought not to be any discriminating duty between
sugars, muscovado and clayed, not being refined ;
and that any such duty would interfere with the
measure of equalisation between sugars the produce
of the East and West Indies." Mr. M. GIBSON
opens on the advancing column of the Ministerial
proposition, from another (the Opposition) flank, a
battery of this sort :—" That no arrangement of the
sugar duties will be satisfactory and permanent which
does not involve an equalisation of duty on foreign
and colonial sugars." From another part of the field
Lcrd JOHN RUSSELL BUMS to the attack of the
Government plan with this threatening de-
monstration :—" That the plan proposed by her
MAJESTY'S Government, in reference to the
sugar duties, professes to keep up a distinc-
tion between foreign free labour and foreign
slave labour sugar, which is impracticable and
illusory ; aggravates the evil of the protection
given to the colonist at the expense of the
consumer ; and tends so greatly to impair
the revenue as to render the removal of the
income and property-tax, at the end of three years,
extremely uncertain and improbable." A pleasant
choice of antagonists among all these propositions, the
latter being, especially in its declaratory part, the
most formidable of all. We shall look with much-
curiosity to the debate of this evening, and not
absolutely without a sort of sympathy for the per-
plexing condition of the Minister. The so-much-
talked-of " sweets of office " are not to be culled, it
would appear, from " sugar " duties.

* Published by Smith, Elder, and Co., Comhill, London, 1845

We are far from imputing to the heads of our
English Universities the fact of their labouring
under that species of malady which the accomplished
Roman apprehended of the eloquent Apostle—" that
too much learning hath made them mad." Still, we
are not without our misgivings that amidst the con-
flicting agitations of the Church and the distractions
of its affairs, their self-possession and ordinary sanity
are becoming more than questionable. There is a
formidable minority of upwards of 3011 wayward
children of our nursing mother of Oxford committed,
through a series now of some eight or nine years, by
a long succession of overt acts of reproach and un-
faithfulness to the canons and practice of the
Established Protestant Church, to a scandalizing re-
pudiation of their venerable parent and guardian.
That repudiation they have sealed within this fort-
night by a solemn vote which must be considered in
the nature of a protest against all proceedings, penal
or admonitory only, against all impugners of the
"Articles" which the offenders had signed, whose
contumacy in since rejecting and abrogating them,
the University has been appealed to
are fullyotoeo arndaewmne.
The champions of Puseyism, it seems,
of all the mischiefs, the the heart-burnings,
the uncharitableness, the scandal, disunion, and decay
they are infusing into the system of that Church for
which they will still profess a vague and, therefore,
unintelligible attachment. Yet is it clear from their
own showing, that they set more store by the dress
and ceremonial with which the altar shall be ap-
proached, and the decorations wherewith it shall be
spread, than by the upholding of that pure, spiri-
tualised, and simple worship which is at once so con-
formable to our notions of the inexpressible majesty
of the SUPREME BEING, whose true temple, after all
is not built by human hands, and so obviously con-
sistent with the ethical theology and the divine
mcrality taught to man by His beneficent impersona-
tion. They would look on with delight at the
downfal of that Church, which, organized as it were
byv
a sustaining
energies,
inspiration from above, and its own
intuit e under all the discouragement and
difficulties of that night of superstition through which
its star was yet to shine ; and the bigoted persecutions
with
it was to encounter at the hands of enehrnies e, able,
multitudinous,
th
multitudinous, and powerful, armed it
judices of ages, as well As the accumulated authority