The Sun.
London, England, 1844-10-21 00:00:00

Isiatningiflt

LONDON, MONDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1844.

At a late meeting of the Bucks magistrates, at
which the demoralizing Game-laws were made the
subject of discussion, Sir 11. VERNEY boldly stated as
a fact which could not be gainsayed—and to which
no one present ventured to offer the slightest contra-
diction—that one-fourth of the Buckinghamshire
crops was annually destroyed by game ; and that of
five hundred and thirty individuals committed to the
county gaol, one hundred and sixty-nine were for
offences against the Game-laws! The worthy
Baronet concluded by proposing that Government
should be memorialised on the subject, but the pro-
posal was rejected by a large majority. This
is no more than we should have anticipated, for
it is astonishing with what tenacity the aristo-
qcracy—and more especially the squirearchy—
of England, cling to these injurious laws, which are
among the last remains of the oppressive feudal
system. In their partial eyes they are everything
that is just and beneficent in legislation, happily
adapted to the tastes of the age in general, and to
their own special interests in particular ; consequently
whoever offends against them must be the most
egregious and inexcusable of criminals. We really
believe there is no offence—not even arson or murder
---of which our provincial magistrates entertain so
great a horror, or which they punish with such re•
rnorseless severity, as an offence against the Game-
laws. A poacher is, in their estimation, a
miracle of depravity—a species of vermin
which deserves to be exterminated without mercy. If
they could have their own will in Parliament,
they would make the laws against him more strin-
gent than ever, and banish him for life to one of our
penal settlements, there to meditate in anguish and
solitude, on the atrocity of the crime he had perpe-
trated in snaring one of the 'Squire's superfluous
hares, or making free with one of the hundreds of
pheasants to be found in his well-stocked preserves.
Of course the majority of our readers are well aware
of the causes of the antipathy which our rural magis-
tracy entertain towards poaching. Most of them are
themselves keen sportsmen—preservers of game with
the utmost strictness ; consequently their sense of
justice is wondrously sharpened by their sense of
self-interest. Generally speaking, we do not accuse
them of undue severity in the administration of
the laws entrusted to them ; they are consi-
derate, tolerant—we wish we could add that
they are remarkable for :sagacity—and by no
means indisposed to visit with lenity such offenders
as they may be called on to punish ; but let an un-
happy poacher once be brought before them, and
away goes all their toleration—all their forbearance—
all their lenity ; the frown deepens on their brow,
and Justice puts on her most inexorable expression of
countenance, to mark her sense of the atrocious act
committed by the criminal on whom she is called to
adjudicate. This undue severity is deeply to be la-
mented, for it is productive of the most
jurious Consequences by tending to widen the
breach—already quite wide enough—between the
labouring classes and their superiorste; butG still more
to be lamented is the existence of h
their present tyrannical form. With all Game-laws
:lahwasr in
to the offencah-
riess they fail of putting a stop
poaching—and they would fail to do so, were they
ten ten times as stringent as they are—while they compel
the humbler orders to regard those who support them,
as legal despots and oppressors of the most petty and
vexatious character. It must ever be a difficult—
almost, indeed, an impossible—task to convince the
destitute labourer who may not be furnished with
means enough to provide himself and his family with
the day's meal, and who, moreover, from scarcity of

work, may have more time on his hands than he
knows how to employ ;—it must always, we say, be
a difficult task to convince such a man, who is, not
unfrequently, among the most ignorant of the com-
munity, that in taking a hare or a pheasant, or a
partridge, from a neighbouring preserve that con-
tains hundreds of them, reared with no other view
than to contribute to their owner's amusement, he is
committing such a flagrant outrage against so-
ciety as his inexorable judges uniformly assure
him is the case. Bitterly—most bitterly he resents
the punishment awarded him for his transgression
against the demoralizing Game-laws ; and when the
period of his imprisonment has expired, and he again
comes forth into the word, a free man, his whole na-
ture has undergone a change ; he feels that he has
been made the victim, not so much of justice, as of
arbitrary, self-interested authority ; and this conviction
renders him reckless—desperate—and eager to revenge
on society the wrongs which he conceives he has sus-
tained at its hands. How many a criminal of the blackest
die, who has held the blazing torch of " Swing," and
even shed the blood of his fellow-creatures, may trace
his ruin to the day when he was first convicted of
poaching, and punished for the offence with as much
remorseless severity as if he had perpetrated an act of
the most atrocious character !

The variety of incidents connected with royal pro-
gresses and royal visits which, for some weeks—or
months—past, it has become our duty to record—
may account for—but, we must honestly confess,
can scarcely excuse the postponement of other
matters of more serious import to the welfare of the
public, as affecting the health and the moral condi-
tion of vast masses of our population. Among the
topics which we have long been anxious to bring pro-
minently under the consideration of our readers, are
those suggested by the recent Reports of the
" Healths of Towns Commissioners." Fer—so long
as the maintenance and protection of human life in
the communities committed to their charge shall
form paramount objects of solicitude with rulers and
legislators, so long must the knowledge and control,
the modification, or the removal of the causes which
predispose those masses (composing the "lower
orders," as they are called) to disease and death, be
considered to assert the strongest possible claims on
the sympathising attention of their fellow-country-
men of all ranks and conditions. In the " First
Report" of these Commissioners " for inquiring into
the state of large Towns and Populous Districts,"
e find so many unsuspected and appalling phases of
social misery among the swarming multitudes who
throng the squalid suburbs of our mighty manufac-
turing emporia, or vegetate in neglected wretched-
ness and want among the nameless alleys and obscure
districts that radiate from this metropolis, as a centre,
of which the concentrated magnificence is hideously
contrasted with the gaunt and sordid aspect of its far-
outlying and scattered extremities ;—we find so many
revolting but impressive pictures of abject destitu-
tion, filth, and corruption, physical and moral, that
we know not which first to present for consideration,
as a memorable lesson upon the gigantic distress that
sits ever brooding, like their evil genius, over the
humblest quarters of gigantic cities. The first illus-
trations, therefore, which we have elsewhere selected
for extract, regard the condition of certain inferior
sections of this imperial city in which we write—of
the tenements that disgrace them —of the almost
fantastic forms in which the utter desolation of their
their ill-starred inhabitants develope itself; of the vile
nuisances, the noisome stench, the intense misery,
the privations, the polluted and infectious atmos-
phere, the contagious disorders, the " pestilence and
famine"—in, and amidst, and against all which,
human existence may maintain a precarious and con-
trasted tenure !

The evidence to which the public will not fail to
attach a primary share of importance, is that of Dr.
SOUTHWOOD SMITH, the Physician of the London
Fever Hospital. Dr. SOUTHWOOD SMITH is a gen-
tleman whose residence in the eastern districts of the
metropolis has necessarily brought him much into
contact with the victims of penury and disease in
their most fearful aggravation, and amidst the
hovels and cellars of their most profound and most
helpless wretchedness. He appears to have addressed
himself to his benevolent, but sickening task, with
the enthusiastic perseverance of a philanthropist, but
with the acute and vigilant research, also, of a
scientific observer. He has collected an enormous
aggregation of facts with an industry which will
astonish, and a method that must gratify, those even
who may not be able to appreciate the enlightened
and philosophic spirit in which he has generalised,
and reasoned upon, their results. We have never
perused a paper suggestive of conditions more singu-
lar in themselves, more important in their relations
to the general working of our whole social system,
than that which is occupied by the Doctor's evidence.
His replies to the Commissioners, in cases where the
interrogatories must have evidently been unpre-
meditated and asked off-hand, seem to us all distin-
guished by the same fine power ;—a matured and
disciplined habit of reflection, so familiar with the
matters upon which it has concentrated its energies,
in all their aspects, that it is never at a loss how to
deal with them, in whatever forms, and however
abruptly they may be exhibited to him. But we
must not content ourselves by stopping short of one
important moral which the perusal of such evidence
will press on the most languid or torpid sensibility.
Let the contrast of these scenes of want and crime—
of these abodes of sorrow, sickness, and degradation
—these unlighted, unventilated, undrained; damp,
dirty, noxious, horrifying receptacles of men whom
misery has degraded from the rank of sentient beings
to the level of grovelling, torpid animals, animated by
brute appetites and instincts, but cursed with the in-
ability to gratify the cravings of them ;—let this
terrible contrast awaken wholesome reflection and
stimulate slumbering charity in others, of destiny
more fortunate and moving within the sphere of that
wealth, luxury, refinement, of the healthful homes
and well-ordered establishments, the plenty, elegance,
and cleanliness, which are nowhere more widely dif-
fused than in London. Let all who have so lately
been absorbed by the glittering pageantry of courts,
the splendid hospitality of palaces, and the regal pomp
I and banquetinga which have so recently celebrated
the friendly greetings of two mighty Sovereigns in
this capital, now turn a benevolent ear, and hold out
a helping hand, to the wailings of desolate poverty
and to their feebleness, whose very wants are so
abject and overmastering as to preclude them from the
power of putting forth those efforts they would be but
too willing to make to improve their own pitiable and
disconsolate condition. We shall endeavour to offer
some suggestions as to the mode in which such relief
might be advantageously and extensively afforded on
recurring to the subject of this report.

Madrid jouanals of the 12th and 13th instant have
been received. The Chamber of Deputies met again
on the 13th, and, after some routine business, ad-
journed. After the adjournment, about 150 Deputies
assembled at the residence of M. SALAMANCA, and it
was unanimously agreed to support M. CASTRY Y
ORozco for the Presidency of the Chamber. It is
said that a considerable number of Deputies desire a
modification of the Cabinet, which would preserve
General NARVAEZ. The other fractions of the
Chamber, who do not desire a change of Ministers,
will support M. ISTURIZ for the Presidency. The
following gloomy picture of the state of parties in
the new Cortes appears in the Clamor Publico of
the 13th :
" New dissensions, and serious divisions, are about to
separate the men who represent the fatal period through
which Spain is at present progressing. The question of
reform is for those men a point agreed upon, but they
are neither agreed on the manner of accomplishing it,
nor upoa the period at which it ought to take place.
The Cabinet, alarmed at the fate which menaces it,
regards as urgent the destruction of the constitutional
basis of the fundamental law, and the conversion of
the Ministerial plans into organic laws, promulgated in
haste to enchain public opinion, which repels them as
an attempt against public liberty, and the laws and
guarantees of the Spanish people. The Carlist faction
requires the restitution of the Church property, and the
marriage of the son of Don Carlos with Queen Isabella
11., in order afterwards to declare the intervention of the
Cortes incompatible with the dignity of the throne. The
Franco-Spanish party wish for an enlightened despotism
in place of the Constitution of 1837, and desire that the
present Ministry should retain office. There remains a
very small fraction of Moderados who make a show of
being e
opposed. to the Government of the sabre, but who
endure They rieejs, c t
but
the
artheyma flatter
marring©
iag e
ft
he the
partisans Queen with
a son of Don
of
that measure. They approve of a Parram
detest popular institutions. They condeirnnettiiit, but. they
e
of the national sovereignty, and present but an?nperzciple
assemblage—a handful of men without a will ofetrheelirt
own, or without a principle. Such are the lements of