The Sun.
London, England, 1844-01-16 00:00:00

(01 timing .7:iltnis

LONDON, TUESDAY, JANUARY 16, 1844.

Never did the Crown, or what is far more true
those who wield the powers of the Crown, go to
a jury under circumstances, such as usher in
the now pending trial. Never did Crown prose-
cutors, armed with all the power and authority
which belong to official prosecutions, contrive,
first of all, to place the parties prosecuted in such
an unfavourable position, as regards themselves,
their privileges, their chance of justification, and
all those important requirements which the
accused ought to possess, without claim,
and as matters of absolute right. And never
did Crown prosecutors place themselves in such
a position, as the Irish law-officers have assumed,
upon the present occasion ; a position unpa-
ralleled in English history, in the history of
Irish judicature, and in the annals of every
tribunal of the'whole world. For, liberty with-
out reality, is worse than despotism—trial by
jury, without purity in the selection of that jury,
is a farce—and far better, is open tyranny,
than affected liberty, with the reality of tyranny.
The freeman, who lives under free institutions,
relies upon the freedom which is his birthright—
!, e takes no particular care, to guard against the
croachments upon that freedom, until painful
7.perience tells him, in a voice not to be mis-
e.ken, that be has leant upon a broken reed;
that he has lived in fancied security, whilst really
in the very midst of dangers, and that the free-
dom in which be believed, was slavery in dis-
guise, not the less so, because its fetters were
bound round with roses.

The objects of the present prosecution have
felt and suffered all this ;—they have found, to
their cost, that trial by jury, in all its preliminary
stages, was nothing but the first proceedings of
an inquisition, excluding every privilege to 'the
acsused, and placing them under every disadvan-
tage; in truth, that, instead of having the pre-
sumption of innocence in their favour, they were
toredoonsed, predestined, and their convictions

fully determined upon. No privilege acceded ;
every usual indulgence withheld ;—no opportu-
nity of learning with what they were charged,—
before whom they were arraigned,--by whom the
testimony had been given,—but every informa-
tion denied, as to all preliminary proceedings.
The indictmentpresented to them ;—but by whom
found—under what authority so found—and by
what evidence so supported, no information af-
forded. Called upon, to plead to this indictment,
no liberty allowed,—no privilege conceded,—no-
thing, but, like the Jew in Shyloch, the pound
of flesh demanded. And plea pleaded—issue
joined—trial in prospect—a jury panel, that—
but we dare not say what we feel and think, of
the jury panel offered to the traversers.
Let any man read the proceedings, in the '
Irish Court of Queen's Bench in Ireland, of
Friday last ; let him find the fact admitted that
the jury list, from which the jury to try O'CoN-
NELL has been chosen, was not the jury list
settled by the Recorder, inasmuch as many
names had been by accident (accident in the
formation of a jury list!) omitted, and can he
doubt that there has been foul play, (whether
accidentally, or designedly, we leave to that
honest Judge PERRIN, to decide,) most grossly
affecting the interests of the traversers. And
this is the position in which the advisers of the
Crown have placed the accused ; a position the
most unfavourable, to men called upon, to
establish their innocence of• a charge almost in-
definate, almost impossible fully to meet; and
yet one, which not fully met, may affect their
liberties and their lives. For the lives of free-
men are in danger from incarceration
in a dungeon —the man accustomed to
breathe the pure air of Heaven, cannot
I exist under the care of the gaoler; and to deny
the free intercourse of kindred spirits, is to deny
the very essence of life. Never were men placed
in a position so unfavourable, as the accused have
been placed by the Crown lawyers.
And yet the singularity of the case is, that
whilst the Crown lawyers have placed the ac-
cused in the most unfavourable position in which
men could be placed, they have placed them
selves in a far worse position. A total denial of
justice may be tolerated in a pure despotism, for
there is no power of appeal, nor any remedy that
can be applied to ; but in Ireland, even with
Tory officials, and a Tory Government, justice
cannot be totally denied, without raising doubts
as to the propriety of the course adopted. And
when such doubts strghgthen into certainty,
when it is in the mouths of every one, and every
tongue repeats it,—that the Tory officials have
behaved most partially, most indecorously, most
injudiciously, and most unjustly,—are we not
justified in saying, that the Crown lawyers have
contrived to place, both the accused and them-
selves, in a position the most unfavourable before
the jury ?

It is the province of the jury to weigh in-
tents—to test the acts done, by those intents
—to give to
,the accused that justice which is
their right—and, packed as is the jury (for any
jury must be packed, when the power to make a
proper selection is withheld, either by accident
or fraud), to show, that though crammed into
the jury-box, by the will of the Crown officials—
GOD forbid we should say, by will of the Crown
—they have the minds of men, free as the air
they breathe, pure as the breeze that fans their
isle, and equally devoid of taint or corruption.

The Gazette de France has announced, on the
authority of a private letter from Munich, the
death of the Duke D'ANGOULEME, son of the
late CHARLES X., who, it may be remembered,
in the year 1830, abdicated his pretensions to the
throne, in conjunction with his royal and saga-
cious parent. The other French papers take no
notice of this event, and it is possible, therefore,
tiaat the announcement may be premature. The
probability, however, is, that his Royal Highness
is by this time dead, for when the last accounts
reached Paris he was :in a state which left no
hope of his recovery. Though he lived in
a stormy period, and one calculated to
call forth whatever mental energies he pos-
sessed, the Duke never distinguished himself
in the slightest degree, and during the long
period of his exile he was as much forgotten by
France and Europe as if he had never existed.
It was not till the war drew to a close, and WEL-
LINGTON had crossed the Pyrennees, that he
made his public appearance at Bourdeaux, where
he was received with acclamations, and made
himself conspicuous by his eager desire—all dan-
ger being now over—to play the part of a warrior
and a patriot. He coveted also the reputation
of a diplomatist, and attempted to enter into
negotiations with WELLINGTON fbr the re-
establishment of the BOURBON dynasty, which,
however, were coldly and evasively treated,
it not being at that time decided by the
Allies than Louts XVIII. should be called to
the throne. Immediately on the restoration
taking place, the Duke—true to old hereditary
instincts—omitted no opportunity of showing his
marked dislike and contempt of those brave
military veterans who had acquired lame and
fortune under the Consulate and the Empire.- In
conjunction with the Duke DE BERRI, who, if
possible, was a still greater imbecile than himself,
he insulted the Marshals, and more especially
the officers of the Imperial Guard, on every
occasion ; and once, when questioning one of the
latter respecting the service he had seen, and being
told that he had been thirty years a soldier, he
turned upon his heel with the supercilious re-
mark, that he had been engaged in " thirty
years of brigandage." Conduct like this—which
the KING, to his credit, did all he could to check
—soon produced a reaction, and the triumphant
return of NAPOLEON was the consequence. We
do not find his Royal Highness—notwithstand-
ing his military propensities—taking a share
in the battle of Waterloo, in whose issue he was
so deeply interested ; possibly he was laid
up with a severe cold at the time, or he
was compelled, much against his inclination,
to remain in a state of drowsy inactivity. On
the second restoration, be became somewhat
more moderate and tolerant in his bearing to-
wards the army ; and in the year 1822 was ap-
pointed to head that absurd military expedition
into Spain, of which M. CHATEAUBRIAND, its
author, has so often boasted as a miracle of poli-
tical sagacity. On this occasion, the Duke
D'ANGOULEME, before quitting France, laying
his hand on the hilt of his sword, made that
absurd boast respecting his sense of duty and
patriotism as a soldier and a Frenchman, which
was so much ridiculed at the time, and procured
him the soubriquet of " Prince Hilt." As this
was his first, so was it his last, warlike expedi-
tion of any consequence, and he ever after rested
perfectly satisfied with the prodigious crop of
laurels he had gathered in the Peninsula, more
particularly in the attack on the Trocadero.
During the " Three Days," when, if at any period
ofhis life, he might reasonably have been expected
to exhibit something like vigour and decision
of character, he distinguished himself by nothing
but a quarrel with MARMONT, in the course of
which he cut his Royal fingers, in a vain attempt
to break the Marshal's sword. From this period
to the day of his death he lived in exile and per-
fect seclusion, forgotten by all but his own imme-
diate friends and dependents. In the private rela-
tions oflife, his conduct was,webelieve, unimpeach-
able ; he was a good son, a good husband, a kind
master; and, had he not unfortunately been born
to a throne, he might have passed happy and con-
tented through life, and maintained the cha-
racter of a very respectable, humdrum; and
somewhat thick-headed gentleman. His wife,

who survives him, was the daughter ei Louis
XVI., and was a prisoner in the Temple at the
time when her ill-starred parent was led forth to
execution. NAPOLEON observed of her, that
"she was the only man of the family," and
with justice, for from the days of the Grande
Monarque—who was himself by no means re-
markable for superior talents—there has not been
one single member of the BOURBON family who
was otherwise than an imbecile.

Mr. THOMAS ATTWOOD has addressed a letter,
on the irresistible necessity for an immediate ex-
pansion of the currency by an enlargement of
our paper circulation, the facts and general rea-
soning of which the Editor of the Times will find
it no easy task to evade. It is a communication
marked by the same singleness and earnestness
of purpose, the same enlarged views of the ne-
cessity for squaring the amount of our powers of
distribution by a medium of representation and
exchange, in proportion, on the one hand, to the
increasing productiveness of our industrial and
manufacturing activity,—and to the colossal de-
mands of our state taxation and of our intersocial
debts and liabilities, on the other—which have
always actuated the consistent efforts of the late
Member for Birmingham in pressing upon the Le-
gislature the adjustment of this vital question.
Mr. ATTWOOD feels warmly and speaks out;
and like all enthusiasts, it may be that
his intimate acquaintance and habitual dealing
with the subject on which he treats, occasionally
exaggerates his impressions upon some of its
bearings. We are not prepared to say that this
is the fact; but, for the sake of the argument,
we are willing to concede the point to our Con-
temporary. Now the Times must see that it by
no means follows, because its correspondent may
occasionally overrate the tendencies of particular
facts, he must be, therefore, mistaken in the
results of the general statistics on which his
arguments are founded. Had Mr. ATTWOOD
erred as egregiously as the Times has assumed,
in attributing a higher antiquity to the circula-
tion of bills of exchange in this country than the
reign of CHARLES 11., a misconception on that
point was scarcely worth dwelling upon in an
attempt to refute a condensed review of the
whole immediate operation and ultimate effect
of PEEL'S destructive Bill of 1819. It served a
purpose, however ; and our Contemporary was
not slow to seize it. He contended, by implica-
tion, that all the other premises propounded by
Mr. ATTWOOD were equally unfounded ; and
being thus in a position to blink the difficult and
inconvenient task of discussing with his :;dver-
sary the real and complicated question at issue,
he indulged in his vein for " bantering," ad
libitum, but with no great degree of can :our, and
infinitely less of success.

In his letter of the 9th instant Mr. ATTWOOD
has done well, we think, to leave this little
triumph undisputed; he has graver points to
press; and, like the Ambassador who stumbled
over the threshhold of the very presence-cham-
ber, never drops the missives which he has
charged himself to deliver. In passing, however,
we must take leave to protest against any doc-
trine so absurd as that in which, for the wise
purpose just mentioned, he acquiesces. We have
yet to learn that since it is matter of history that
the bills of exchange of the MEDICI of Florence,
and of their factors in all other cities of the
civilised world, passed currently from hand to
hand, all over Europe, and even in the marts of
Asia, from the close of the fourteenth century—
and the bills of the FUGGERS of Antwerp, as
early as the time of CHARLES V. were ex-
changeable and negotiable here, under HENRY
by the guilds and private merchants of
London, having dealings with the Low Coun-
tries, such bills were never seen here till the
reign of CHARLES 11. The mistake has its
origin in that common error, which limits the
definition of " money" to coinage, as metallic
currency, instead of including within its designa-
tion, promissory and bank notes, bills of exchange,
and, perhaps, bankers' deposits.
For ourselves, we see no way of escaping from
the propositions contended for by Mr. ATTWOOD,
that " nearly all the complicated and innu-
merable transactions of life are effected through
the agency of monetary debts ;" and that " the
transfer and exchange of acknowledgments of
debt for each other has literally become vital to
the existence of society amongst us." He has
the advantage, we take it, of our Contemporary,
in retorting the coarse epithet of " rascality" on
those capitalists, fundholders, annuitants of fixed
incomes, unencumbered landlords, and mortga-
gees, whose active partisanship precipitated the
measure of 1819. The late Lord LIVERPOOL—
Mr. ATTWOOD reminds the Times—told the
House of Lords that " their rents had been
doubled and trebled in paper money." After
this, to enforce their payment in a currency
vastly diminished in amount, dnd prodigiously
dearer in material, does seem to have been the
height of injustice. " The means of the people,"
he adds, in allusion to the quadruplication of
the National Debt, the duplication of official
salaries, and the consequent increase of taxes
within the last thirty or forty years, " are
cut down to the metallic level. Are their
burdens to be kept up at the raper
level ?" This question is a cencis and
pithy one : and it is one of many connected with,
resulting from, and inevitably incident to, the
present anomalous condition of our monetary
system, with its multiplying wants, its increasing
functions and liabilities, and its extravagantly
diminished bases. In these three conditions we
assign the elements of the whole disturbance and
danger which beset it. Shall we be told that
our category does not include the decay of trade,
but too sensibly experienced already by a large
portion of the community ? Let us subjoin what
was stated by that profound thinker, and saga-
cious and experienced money merchant, the late
Mr. N. M. ROTHSCHILD, in his evidence before
the Bank Charter Committee. " If this country
fromh as motnhe abundance,
the whole
win
hole world; iat
nldv hyaovue allma make if esnzt
oraned
ye
very scarce, the trade will go to other countries."
The preferable alternative of these two is at least
the polar star of Mr. ATTWOOD'S financial plan.
Let the country adopt it.

Among the most offensive pruriencies of
modern legislation, we cannot refrain from
reckoning the rage for " Prisoners' classifica-
tion," "Prison discipline," and "Prison build-
ing," as perhaps the favourite type of the law-
making mania. In no other instance is the tran-
sition from soundness of principle to abuse of
practice so abrupt or unfortunate as that which
our statesmen generally make, from the specula-
tions of their Cabinets to the Bills which they
introduce into Parliament on the "Better Ma-
nagement of Prisons." No object can be pro-
posed of more intrinsic humanity, or of sounder
administrative wisdom, than to establish a system
of careful inspection, at undefined periods, of
moral and responsible management, of good
order and impressive regulation, providing at
once for the due physical subsistence, and (of
such as desire it) for religious instruction and
counsel, as to all prisoners confined under sen-
tence by lawful authority. It is not merely
" well " it .is not only " proper "
that due care should be shown fbr the
health, and the orderly deportment of prisoners,
but it is just, equitable, and right, that in their
confinement they should not be deprived of the
advantages of such superintendence. Imprison-
men t is the whole, or a part of the penalty, which
the law of the land has decreed against them for
this or that violation of it. If it be but part and
parcel of that penalty, the law carefully pro-
nounces, by the mouth of the Court, the precise
character and extent of the additional punish-
ment which shall be superadded to imprison-
ment. If this latter sentence involve the whole
of the atonement which the law will exact fur the
offence committed or wrong done, it is contrary,
not merely to the spirit, but to the letter of the
law itself to exceed the pain of imprisonment
by any super a
odw rdaeosdf
(especiallyit visitationever on the prisoner. In
functionaries
neitheruo nm oo tic
law,rai seesst
i,tchh toe intentionsa investre n iontd
jovufi
dd
gtul
eaiesl