The Sun.
London, England, 1845-11-13 00:00:00

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LONDON, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 1845.

The doleful ditties of Conciliation Hall speak well for the
working of the Irish Colleges measure. The Liberator weep-
ing over Dr. KIRWAN'S adhesion; Mr. SMITH O'BRncx, of
the white handkerchief, subsiding all at once from his theatri-
cal indigmation of last session into faint praise, and Mr.
Joux O'CoNmEi.r. quarrelling with Mr. SMITH O'BAIIEN for
his faint praises—are all unequivocal proofs that the mea-
sure is nucceading fast. Little as we believed in the power
of Conciliation Hall abuse against the intrinsic merits of the
Irish Colleges Bill, we never expected so soon to see Mr
O'CoNsma.'s tone so humbled as in his apostrophe to Dr.
KIRWAN, the newly-appointed President of Cork College.
" That Roy. Gentleman was his friend, and he could scarcely
believe he vould have countenanced a scheme which had
been unanimott;9lY condemned by the hierarchy. GoD help
the people of Ireland; but I trust the thought will not cross
their minds that their" aergy would be accessible to bribery.

At no former period of our experience as journalists have
we felt so sensibly as we now do the value of that maxim
in political criticism which is summarily expressed in the
well-known terms—" Measures, not men." We doubt
whether—since the days of ministerial autocracy, when the
pleasure of the Minister was the will of the SOVEREIGN, and
the will of the SOVEREIGN was the law of the Minister—any
such undisguised assertion of the doctrine, "stet pro ration&
voluntos," has been ventured on as that which the Govern-
ment of Sir ROBERT PEEL, is palpably inculcating, in its
utter disregard of the popular demand for the open-
ing of the ports. A very much greater and
more generous statesman tha❑ Sir ROBERT PEEL
—we mean Sir ROBERT War.Porz—neither misunderstood
nor affected to misunderstand the popular disgust elicited
by his EXCISE SCHEME, about a century ago. That bold
and unhesitating statesman did not during a Parliamentary
recess assemble councils to deliberate only to adjourn with-
out coming to any decision on the propriety or impropriety
of modifying his obnoxious plan for creating or rather re
viving new sources of revenue; but carefully, repeatedly,
and pointedly announced, explained, and reinforced the rea-
sons upon which he felt himself called on to persevere in it.
Between the two Sir ROBERTS of 1742 and 1845 there is,
to be sure, little enough of similarity; yet there does subsist
one remarkable analogy. Both of them have mananifested a
marvellously lew estimate of the morality of public men, and
of the dignity of public principle. But the man who " ran
away with the clothes of the Whigs whilst they were bathing"
(to use the felicitous metaphor of Mr. DISRAELI), is all
nothing the greater perverter of that morality—the greater
disparager of that principle. The contemporary of PULTENEY
and; "honest" SHIPPER was ill-advised enough to blurt out
the stupendous fact avouched by his own Ministerial experi-
ence, "that every man" (of that day) "had his price." The
contemporary and colleague of the illustrious CANNING, whose
early-dated liberality he repudiated for the then stern Toryism
of the Duke of WELLINGTON, since modified to his own
sliding-scale of indefinitely expansive concession, according
to the force of the external pressure brought
to act upon it, sets about exemplifying the same
proposition in a more cunning and less hazardous manner.
Far too plausible to risk gratuitous avowals of dangerous
frankness, our present Premier is neither too high-toned nor
too unaccommodating in his political ethics to avail himself
of those foibles in his friends—or opponents—on which, as
WALPOLE was before him, he is at all times ready to extend
the basis of his own power. Public men are no longer cor-
rupted in this country by rouleaux of guineas "unexpectedly
discovered on their breakfast tables," or large Bank-notes
anonymously inclosed to them on the eve of debates on
which the probable divisions appear likely to affect the ex-
istence of decaying Governments, or to threaten them with
relapse after their re-establishment. But patronage—(the
possession, on the one hand, of official power or influence,
and the careful appropriation of lapsed or vacated places on
the other, not on the principle of detur optimo, but so as
to be the exclusive reward of official service)—this is
a lever as all-powerful, far safer, and more decorous,
and less palpable than direct bribery. It has never
been wielded—this patronage —with more effect than by
Sir ROBERT PEEL; and to his skill in the use of this
weapon we attribute the sort of disarmed and passive apathy
wherewith public men of all parties seem to look on, in vague
expectation of the adoption of some remedy for impending
scarcity.
Rating the morale of the Premier's government at no
higher value than this, and thereby not taking up any hypo-
thesis calculated to betray our judgment into any disparag-
ing estimate of his sagacity, we yet cannot compre-
hend the delusion under which he must be labouring
if he imagines that he can with impunity attempt
to obviate, by procrastinating, the opening of the ports.
He who is so ready to school others about their inability to
read the "signs of the times," must be seized with a chronic
blindness—a defective perception pro 114 c vice—if be cannot
recognise in the condition of the country the imperious and
paramount necessity for such a measure—in the quiet but
emphatic bearing of the public upon it—the decree which
must compel its prompt concession. The potato crop failure
now shares, with Ireland, the fatal distinction of proving
" his greatest difficulty." His tenure of power is
staked upon the single cast of solving that diffi-
culty. The opening of the ports is the only card
which can save the trimming and difficult game he has
hitherto had to play against adversaries who have become
more formidable as antagonists from the very successes he
has achieved against them, and with partners who are inca-
pable of playing up to him.

But why should Sir ROBERT hesitate to obey the wish of
the vast majority, by virtue of whose past confidence or ap-
proval he retains the first place in her ➢laarsTy's Councils?
Is it because he would compromise his popularity with his
own party, the Conservatives? Why he has over and over
again relinquished and repudiated them on other ques-
tions, when he could command adequate support
for his purpose from their opponents. Is it that

be dreads a combination of the landed interest ?
In how many instances has be already thwarted and re-
sisted them? Does any man imagine that he is afraid to

appease the alarms of the empire, and to satisfy the clamour
of the famishing, out of some delicacy for the trammels of
those views and prejudices which the political associations

of his earlier official and Parliamentary career respected and
upheld as identified with the principles of a sound and saga-
cious policy ? Such a man needs only to be reminded
that Sir ROBERT PEEL has thrown them overboard, from

time to time, with as little ceremony as he knocked some
hundreds of items out of the tariff of Customs' Duties

retained by his predecessors. Besides, who among
our modern Ministers has ever bidden higher, or more
_ _

largely for the favour of the people than Sir ROBERT, 11-1-.1118

measures for the relief of civil and religious disabilities—

the extension of education—the relaxation of imposts on

raw materials, of manufactures, &c., &c. In a vord,

seems difficult, if not impossible, to ascribe his dogged re.

fusal to open the ports at once, under exigencies so fearful as
those of the present time, to any other motive than personal

deference or consideration for some colleague in office, the

prestige of whose continued and close alliance he is rash
enough to set before the cordial and firm support of a great

and determined people. If this be the fact, the career of

the Prime Minister draws as near to its termination as the

past reputation of the statesman.

The Madrid Gazette of the sth contains a circular issued
by the Intendant of the Queen's Household, calling upon all
persons whose pensions on the privy purse were suspended in
1834, to send into his office the documents necessary to prove
that they enjoyed such pensions, in order that their payment
may be resumed. These pensions, it is understood, amount
to about 15.0001. The NARVAEZ Government appear to be
adopting a more merciful system. All the persons implicated
in the disturbances which took place in Catalonia, and who
had been imprisoned since at Palma, had been pardoned
by the QUEEN, and permitted to return to their families.
The municipal elections had commenced, and the Progres_
sistas had succeeded in returning their candidates at several
places, among others Saragossa, Cuenca, and Guadalajara.
A mutiny in the regiment of Girona broke out on the 3d
inst. at Valencia, but with what object is not stated. A ser-
geant and twenty-five soldiers attacked the guard, killed its
commandant and twoofficers, marched out, and being joined
by some of the townspeople, attacked the Pilar barracks,
where they were repulsed, Their plan being frustrated,
they fled and concealed themselves. Eighteun soldiers arid
other suspected persons were arrested, and, two hours after,
tranquillity was restored, The t9PM and province had been
declared in a state of siege. A good deal of busineqs was dons

Had any man told me that Dr. KIRWAN would have taken a
situation under the Colleges- Act, I would have said I
would as soon believe that a stream could return to its
source." The charity of the words we have printed in italics !
Mr. O'CONNELL does not say that Dr. KIRWAN has been
bribed. 'W hat is more, he does not believe it.
But, to appease his own wounded vanity, he wishes to

make his gaping lieges of Conciliation Hall believe
that he imputes bribery to Dr. KIRWAN', and in the same
breath in which he makes a mock appeal to GOD, insinuates
the vilest of slanders against his friend. We could not wish
a better proof that Mr. O'CONNELL sees himself defeated.
The miracle of the stream returning to its source is more
nearly exemplified in Mr. Szurrn O'BRIEN. In his gentle
wooings of the Colleges Bill, he is returning to his first love;
for no man ever was more zealous for mixed collegiate edu-
cation in former days than Mr. Smut' O'BRIEN, who last
session was to die on the floor of St. Stephen's opposing the
Irish Colleges Bill. To be sure Mr. SMITH O'BRIEN'S opinions
are of no importance to any sensible man ; and the world
does not not need additional proofs of the weathercock cha-
racter of Conciliation Hall statesmanship. But the follow-
ing extract from a paper on Education in Ireland, by W.
SAtrrx O'BRIEN, M.P., published by the Central Society of
Education, in 1839, presents such an amusing contrast to
SMITH O'BRIEN'S oratory on the same subject in 1845, that we
cannot resist the temptation of giving it :-
4' We cannot avoid attracting notice to the fact, that in a
country in which above fourlifths of the population are Roman
Catholics, the Catholics are excluded from all share in the admi-
nistration and emoluments of the only university which Ireland at
present possesses. We regard it as a matter of infinite importance to
the harmony of society in Ireland that the Roman Catholic youth
should be educated in association with Protestants of their own sta-
tion. To those who are about to enter into either the Protestant
or Roman Catholic Church this union in youth is more peculiarly
advantageous, because the wide difference of their studies and pur.
suits in after life has but too natural a tendency to create angry and
embittered feelings, such as now unhappily exist between the
clergy of the different churches in Ireland to an extent hitherto
unknown in any other country in the world. The period of pecu.
liar preparation for the church ought to follow the completion of a
course of general study. Till that course is fully completed, the
Catholic and Protestant ought to be united in their education."
In the writer of the above one might have expected to find
one of the warmest supporters of the Irish Colleges Bill. But,
dis antes. visum. The Knight of the White Handkerchief
flourished his white handkerchief against Sir ROBERT PEEL'S
Colleges Bill as stoutly as he now flourishes it against the
union. The stream is, however, now returning to its source.
Another miracle for baffled Mr. 04CoNNELL!

The three Presidents of the new colleges are now appointed:
and the appointment of two Roman Catholics and a Presby-
terian to superintend academical education in Ireland by the
Minister of Irish Protestantism—the Minister taught of
ELDON, and erst loved by RODEN—is an event, which, in
times more propitious for the physical prosperity of Ireland,
would meet with loud celebration. But even now this har-
binger of future moral blessing for Ireland should not be
utterly disregarded; and we, who steadily and zealously
supported Sir ROBERT PEEL'S Irish Colleges measure, rejoice
to be able to render thanks and praise for the appointments
with which he is carrying the measure into execution.