The Sun.
London, England, 1844-12-24 00:00:00

• lOW

LONDON, TUESDAY, DECEMBER 24, 1844.

%.:;,e Charitable Bequests Act appears to have
crested nearly as great a ferment among the Catholic
clergy of Ireland as the Tractarian schism has created
amore;; the English clergy. The former, for the first
-i:ne or many a long year, are split into two distinct
..artiA4, each of which seems to entertain no very
laordieate amount of goodwill towards the other.
Moreover, each party has the honour of being headed
by an Archbishop, whose zeal in the views which he
advocates is of a firm and ardent character. Arch-
bisf.op MURRAY is at the head of those who are in
!avoar of the Charitable Bequests Act, while Arch-
bi-hep MiliaLE—" the lion of the fold of Judah," as
i 4 styled by his admirers—leads the van of those
who are opposed to it. The latter is warmly seconded
in his opposition by Mr. O'CONNELL, aided by
a majority of the priests of Munster and
Connaught, and the great mass, apparently,
of the Catholic Repealers, all of whom denounce
the Act in question as a piece, not merely of ques-
tionable, but of mischievous policy on the part of the
Government. As for Archbishop MURRAY he, it
would appear, is supported by the most temperate
and rational, but less noisy portion of the Catholic
middle classes—men who have not yet sworn undying
hustilily to the PEEL Administration, but are ready to
accept of "good," even though it may "come out of
Nazareth." In consequence of this dissension among
the members of his persuasion, Archbishop MURRAY
hes deemed it fit to address a Pastoral Letter to the
Roman Catholic Clergy and Laity of the diocese of
Dublin, wherein he explains his reasons for consent-
ing to take a share in the execution of the Charitable
Bequests Act, observing that he should consider it
a gross dereliction of duty, were he to fling
away any opportunity which this Act—im-
perfect as he admits it to be—places within his
reach of guarding in safety the treasury of the
poor, and of securing for the service of the Church
whatever property benevolent individuals may choose
to vest in the new Board, to be permanently dedi-
cated to that purpose. The Archbishop then enters
into some details respecting the embarrassments by
which Roman Catholic charities have hitherto been
surrounded. It seems that, in the year 1763, an Act
was passed requiring returns of all charitable be-
quests in the sister country to be made to the Pro-
testant Primate and the Bishops of each diocese at
their annual visitation ; and subsequently a Commit-
tee of Charity of the Irish House of Lords was ap-
pointed under an order of that House. By the Act
of Union this Committee necessarily ceased;
and, by a law, which has never since been either
altered or amended, the present Commissioners
charitable donations and bequests were incorpo-
rated. consisting of the Protestant Archbishops and
Bisle.,;‘s of Irelamd, the Dean of St. Patrick's, the
incumbents of all the parishes in Dublin, and the
Judges. The latter, as might be expected, never at-
tended the Board, consequently it was managed ex-
clusively by dignitaries and clergymen of the Esta-
blished Church, who gave altogether a Protestant
charat.ter to its proceedings. Such being the case,
the Roman Catholic Archbishops and Bishops of Ire-
land addressed in 1840 a memorial to Lord MORPETIT,
'wherein they intreated—and surely not without suffi-
cient reason !—that the Board of Irish Charities might
be rendered more generally useful and popular by the
introduction of Catholic Commissioners, and by some
other measure which might have a tendency to place their
charities upon the same footing as those of their Pro-
testant fellow-countrymen. " The recent Act," say s
Dr. MURRAY, " appears to have been intended
to
grant all that we then sought. It admits to the Board
of Charity Catholic Commissioners in sufficient
number to check any advers- influence which might
be attempted regarding the application of Catholic
charities ; and it takes away the dangerous power
enjoyed by the former Board of alienating, under

certain circumstances, Catholic bequests from the
known objects contemplated by the testator, and of
applying them to purposes which, if living, he would
abhor. So far our prayer has been granted. The state of
insecurity in which our charities were placed has been
removed ; and had the Act stopped there, we could
not, without the greatest inconsistency, utter one
word of complaint against it." The Archbishop
then goes on to point out the leading defects of the
Act in question, but takes care to add that, not-
withstanding the partial blemishes whi,th tend to
render it unpopular, no one can look into it with
an unprejudiced eye, and not see that it confers
advantages on the Catholics of the very
highest value, giving them, among other things, the
power of vesting property, without trouble or ex-
pense, in perpetual security, for procuring glebes for
their clergy, and for building, enlarging, and up-
holding or furnishing their places of worship. Not-
withstanding the violent opposition raised among
certain parties in Ireland to the Charitable Bequests
Act, we incline to regard it, despite its admitted de-
fects, in the same favourable light as Dr. MURRAY,
and to consider it as a step in the right direction.

We are accustomed, in this country, to take credit
to ourselves for this especial excellency in our social
institutions—namely, the tenderness they manifest for
human life. It is the beautiful theory of our law that
this tenderness appreciates as highly the value of ex-
istence to the meanest and most abject, not only of
our fellow-subjects, but of our fellow•-creatures (for
its sympathy is not bounded by considerations of
mere nationality), as it estimates the value of exist-
ence to the wealthiest, the most ennobled, or the most
powerful among us. Pity! that this theory should
be marred by occasional exceptions in practice ; and
the more pity, because it is easy to perceive that,
according to the spirit of those institutions and of that
law, this humanity of intention was meant to be ho-
nestly developed in their practical working. But the
practical exceptions we speak of are neither few, nor
trifling, nor simply accidental, nor limited in kind, nor
venial in their principle, nor unpernicious in their
example, nor undestructive in their consequences.
Tenderness for human life is not the positive charac-
teristic of the scheme, nor the crowning glory of the
administration of our New Poor Law, and of our
Model-Prison-and-Penitentiary-Silent-systems of dis-
cipline. It is not a power which withdraws the poor
labourer from the hideous employments with which the
calculating recklessness of cupidity too often tempts the
uncalculating recklessness of poverty. It permits the
famishing artisan, who heeds more the claims of his wife
and his family upon him for the immediate demands for
subsistence, than the deleterious influence of the occupa-
tion which is to provide it on the vital functions of his own
frame, to labour in white-lead works for certain para-
lysis, visceral disorganisation, and speedy death. It
encourages, by its apathy or its silence, the devotion
of others to other labours, the mechanical processes of
which are known to entail, inevitably, on all who en-
gage in them, the visitation, within periods more or
less brief in their duration, of maladies that destroy
the sight, cripple the limbs, vitiate the palate, ruin the
digestion, or ulcerate the lungs. This tenderness of
our law, unhappily, omits to set itself in action in re-
ference to a dozen or two of what are called by the
gentle, yet significant name of " unhealthy trades ;" such
as many departments of foundry, smelting, casting,
distillation from noxious mineral substances, the ge•
neration of certain gases, the composition of some
chemicals, &c. Its solicitude for human life forces
one, perhaps, out of a score of the owners of works
set in motion by powerful in-door machinery, to pro-
tect the operatives employed under the same roof by
the erection of galleries, or screens to ward off the
fatal contact of revolving wheels, and shafts, and
spindles. These are the excepted cases to prove the
same theory ; unhappily the rule is rather established
against it by a majority of appalling accidents, occa-
sioning a vast amount of bodily suffering and violent
deaths. We might, if we chose to descend into our
mines, or to explore our colliery pits, or to intrude
even upon the privacy of the work-rooms of many of
our principal dressmakers_ and Court milliners, mul-
tiply the examples in which the sacrifices of health,
and even of life itself, to the excitement of trading
competition, or the selfish importunity of vanity and
fashion—every week or every month of the year. But
there are some domestic calamities, the awful frequency
of which we must rather reckon by every day of every
week—that tear from us, in the heart of this great
capital, their unhappy victims to mutilation, agony,
and death of the most frightful kind, without either
the " tenderness" of the theory of our law, the sym-
pathies of our common nature, the influences of a
salutary fear, the warnings of experience, or the loss of
property accruing from such incidents, arousing us,
their survivors, to the duty of making well-organised
and efficient provision, to the utmost practicable ex-
tent, against the recurrence of such disasters, or for
the mitigation of their extent and severity when they
happen.

We allude to that class of accidents which we
have so constantly to announce under the heading of
" Destructive" fires, " attended with loss of human
life." These terrible cases have been, of late, over-
whelming from their extent, their number, and their
fatal termination. We need not pause for a moment
except to notice, by name, the last we have had to an-
nounce—namely, the fire at Mr. FARBY'S, in Guild-
ford-street, Russell-square. It will occupy, however,
a melancholy prominence on the list of these casual-
ties, for its destruction of life as well as of property.
On the present occasion we advert to it simply to
point our question-47:y is not an adequate and effi-
cient system of fire-escapes organised in this metro-
polis Shall we talk of our " tenderness for life"
while whole hecatombs of human victims perish
annually in this manner at the shrine of that bad
deity—whatever it be—which is the impersonation
of parochial carelessness or apathy, stupidity or
parsimony ? An unfortunate youth, of high promise
it may be, in the profession into which he has just
been instituted, shall be consumed to ashes, it seems,
for want of some external means whereby he might
have escaped from his dormitory at the top of the
house in which he slept into the street ; and active
officers, appointed for the conservation of the peace
and property of the residents within their appointed

district, perish beneath the flaming ruins below, for
want of the same assistance in carrying out their

spirited design of rushing to the relief of those above.
There can be awarded no praise too great to such a

body as the fire brigade, or such a public servant as
their admirable superintendent, Mr. BRAIDWOOD

but if a competent, vigilant, prompt, and most effec-
tive force can be thus organised, equipped, and main-
tained for extinguishing fires, why not a body, equally
well appointed, for the higher object of rescuing the
lives which these fires put in such eminent jeopardy ?

Hitherto all the machines prepared for the purposes

of escape from fire have proved comparatively use-
less, in the very small and almost fractional number
of cases in which they have been employed—or even
thought of. This result we are not disposed to at-
tribute to such causes of inefficient working as their
incompetent structure, their inadequate height, or
strength, or application, which CHARLES DICKENS
somewhere puts, in his sarcastic manner, into the
mouth of a Professor "No-go," for some of the

machines we have seen are simple, and cleverly
adapted enough. But there is no one establishment
for them ;—no stuff for such an establishment. When

half-a-dozen people have bean burned to death in one

of these devouring fires, we may, perchance, see

half-a-dozen charity boys exemplifying the merits of
the last new invented " escape" in safe descents, at

broad noon, from a two or three story window into
the street of some tradesman, who speculates on the

sensation produced by the recent calamity to dispose

of a few score yards of questionable bed-ticking. But

for any purposes of practical escape—the inmates of
any house, on fire, that very night, in that very

street, would have as little chance of saving them-
selves by THE " escape" which had that afternoon
amused the passengers who had had leisure enough

to look at the young exhibitors in it, as a skater
tumbling through the ice of one of the Hampstead-

heath ponds would find of being helped out again, by

vociferating for the Humane Society's men, or their

drags, or their skiff, stationed on the Serpentine in
Hyde Park. Really the deficiency we speak of is

becoming an alarming public grievance. If the

parish authorities will not endeavour to remedy
it, we hope the Legislature will speedily enforce its
remedy. _

Madrid Journals of the 15th have been received,
from which we learn that more executions and arrests
have taken place, The Gazette contains a dispatch
".4 4.4.144) '•:

from the Captain General of Arragon, dated the 11th
inst., announcing that the Sergeant VICENTE LABA-
RUZ, one of the chiefs of the late revolt, and the mur-
derer of the officers slaughtered on the night of the
18th ult., had been shot by a party sent in pursuit
of him.

Senor CABALLERO, late Minister of the Interior in
the LOPEZ Cabinet, and six of his neighbours, have
been arrested at Barraca, half way between Teruel and
Valencia, and conducted to the strong castle of Mur-
riedron, on the Mediterranean coast.

The following letter from Vittoria, of the 16th,
shows in a melancholy light the atrocious system
adopted by NARYAEZ of shooting prisoners without a
trial :

" Amon,,o.st the grounds assigned by the partisans of
the Spanish Ministry for the execution of the two sons
of Zurbano, it was stated that they had addressed letters
to various wealthy persons demanding money, and
threatening death in the event of a refusal. Three inn-
keepers of the environs of Salvatierra have been ar-
rested on various charges of robbery in the province of
Alava, and it appears, from what has already transpired,
that they were the authors of the letters bearing the
forged signatures of the two Zurbanos."
The Three per Cents. closed at 31i for cash, and
32i at 60 days ; the Five per Cents. at 22i. at 60
days; and the Coupons at 26k at 60 days.

We are glad to learn, from the Paris papers, that
the Protestants of Switzerland are making prepara-
tions to resist the encroachments of the Jesuits, and,
following the example of the laity of England in their
determination to maintain the Reformed religion.
On Sunday, the 15th, notwithstanding the severity
of the weather, a meeting, amounting to 3,000 per-
sons, chiefly citizens of Berne, Soleure, Argau, and
refugees from Lucerne, was held at Fraubrunnen,
when, after several speeches in favour of liberty; an
association was formed to watch the movements of
this cunning and deceitful sect. A petition was also
adopted, in which the Government of Berne is re-
quested to place itself at the head of the cantons op-
posed to the re-establishment of the Jesuits in
Switzerland, and at the same time avowing the de-
termination of the association to support the Govern-
ment with all their means, in averting such a dan-
gerous intrusion. It is a singular coincidence that
these enemies of liberty should be making almost
similar movements in England (for the Puseyites
belong to the tribe), in France, and in Switzerland,
and that they should exhibit their wicked inten
tions in such an open manner as to rouse
against them the laity of the three coun-
tries. This is a favourable symptom of the
times, and a proof that the days are gone by
when the people were enslaved by the Church, and de-
barred from all useful instruction for the purpose of
keeping them obedient to a selfish and tyrannical
priesthood. The state of Spain, however, forms a
melancholy exception, for while in other States eccle-
siastical power is held in check by the Government
or the people, it is now daily increasing in that unfor-
tunate country.
For two days the writers in the Paris papers have
almost entirely refrained from politics and directed
their attention to nobler subjects. The Constitutionnei
has a long article on the contraband trade, suggested
by a Parliamentary return moved for by Mr. HOME
last session ; and the Journal des Debate has another,
on post-office reform, recommending a great reduc-
tion on the postage of letters. It will be seen from
the following extract that it reoemmends a graduated
scale of charges :
" The Committee on Postage had to examine the new
modes of taxation which were proposed, and to point
out that which it considered most advantageous and
equitable. In a prudent spirit of reserve it does not
think that in such a matter it is proper to make use of
the Parliamentary right of initiative. It contents itself
with calling on the Administration to speedily pay atten-
tion to the question, and bring a Bill concerning it be-
lore the Chambers. It however expressed its leaning to-
wards a ~ystem establishing a uniform charge of 20c. for
all letters, except those put in the Paris Post-office for
Paris, and in any town for the town itself, the first of
which should pay 15c., and the second 10c., as at pre-
sent. The Committee is of opinion that if the tax %%ere
reduced to 20c. it would be well to abolish the present
system of sending letters free for official purposes; and,
finally, it observes that if England, in place of adopting
a tax of 10c. had left it at 20c., postal reform, iu place of
injuring the British treasury, would have given it an in-
crease of revenue. To simplify communications of diffe-
rent kinds, to accelerate them, to render them accessible
to all by their cheapness, ought to be one of the most
constant cat es of the Administration. It is for this mo-
tive that are opened on all sides canals and roads, that
railroads are down in the budget for 75 millions, the
companies adding at least an equal sum. It is for this
also that the present stupid system of quarantine will,
►without doubt, be soon altered, and undergo the same
fate that has visited that of England and Austria. For
the same reason, we hope that M. Come will be anxious
to join his name to a complete modification of the post-
age of letters, and will respond, as is fitting, to the en-
lightened wishes of the Committee."

The following intelligence from Belgium appears in
he Siecle:—

" The treaty concluded between Belgium and the Zoll-
verein, of which the Belgian Cabinet was so proud, has
in the end proved fatal to them. It could not support
the trial of a discussion. M. l)elhougue, then Member
for Ghent, had already exposed its anti-French' ten-
dency in a very able and sensible speech, and the re-
inainder of the debates demonstrated that the advan-
tages ceded by Prussia to Belgium were much inferior
to those granted by Belgium to Prussia. The discussion
continued amidst universal expressions of discontent,
and in a manner calculated to weary the Ministry itself.
After a Secret Committee upon the question, in which
high words were exchanged between some of the mem-
bers, had sat, a division manifested itself in the Cabinet.
The Ministry is now in a state of dissolution, and a
courier had been dispatched to Paris to inform King
Leopold of that crisis, which will necessitate his presence
at Brussels. The character of the parties in the Chamber
of Representarives has become more distinct. The tiers-
parti, represented by M. Nothomb, and which had ren-
dered public service, is keeping aloof ; and the Liberal
party, now- triumphant, will find itself in presence of the
compact and well-drilled phalanx of the Catholic party.
If M. Guizot were bold and skilful, he would avail him-

self of the crisis to bring about a re-action in favour of
France; but when has the French Ministry taken advan-
tage of any of the chances which fortune has thrown in
its way?"

The Journal de Cherbourg says that the Reine
Blanche is expected at Cherbourg about the end of
this month or the beginning of January, and that
Admiral DUPETIT TUOUARS will come by her as a
passenger. The same journal adds :

" A great number of the National Guards and other
citizens of Cherbourg, are determined to go in procession
to meet the Gallant Admiral on his arrival, and at his
entrance into the town they will present him with a
crown of laurel, preparatory to his receiving the sword
of honour voted to him by France. On the Reine
Blanche being signalled, the National Guard will at
once meet in the market place in grand tenue and under
arms."

TIIE BOURSE-SATURDAY, DEC. 21.

First Highest Lowest Last
• -

Price. Price. Price Price.
French Five per Cents•—• • • 120 80 .. 120 80 .. 120 55 .. 120 65
Four-and-a-half.... 113 2.5 .. 113 25 .. 113 25 .. 113 25
Fours.. 107 2.5 .. 107 25 .. 107 25 .. 167 25
Three per Cents..... 84 35 .. 85 50 .. 85 30 .. R 3 40
Bank of France•.•... 3275 • • 3275 • 3275 —9275
Lafiltte Bank, I,ooof. Shareslll2 50 —lll5 ..1112 50 1115
5,000 f. Sharesso9o ..5090 ..5C90 .• 5i.90
Belgian Bank.. • • .• • . 655 .. 655 .. 640 .. 640
1841.........1110 —llOO ..1100 ..1100
1831
Belgian Fives.lB4o •• •• 104 i 104} • • 104} • • 104 k
Spanish Threes 3* .. 31 • • 38 .. 38

Active .•• • • . 33: • • 33: . • 33:
Passive
Neapolitan

• • 33/
•• 6
• . 98

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