The Sun.
London, England, 1845-01-20 00:00:00

:\o'tcening Attv.*.

LONDON, MONDAY, JANUARY 20, 1845.

Could we persuade ourselves that any apology were
needed at our hands for the earnestness—the per-
tinacity, it may be—with which we have deemed our-
selves called upon to press on the attention of her
MAJESTY'S Government the necessity of preparing
themselves at an early stage of the ensuing session of
Parliament to originate or co-operate in some great
and decided measure for the amendment an I re-
modification of our existing Monetary System, we
should have but to refer to the terrible evidences of
social misery and domestic disorganization which it is
our painful duty, day after day, to lay before our
readers. The growth and the intensity of crimes, the
offspring of a poverty without resources, a misery
without hope, a despair without mitigation, are
moral phenomena of which the parallel is scarcely
to be found in the history of civilised nations. With
the grandest development of every noble quality that
is an element of the National character, in all the
services of the State civil, military, ecclesiastical, we
perceive, in frightful juxtaposition, the excesses of
the most abandoned crimes that can dishonou.
human nature, exhibited, for the most part, among
those classes whose subsistence is derived from the
hard and incessant labour of their hands ; or that far
larger community who. have willing hearts, stout
arms, and skilled and experienced habits, but can
find no work, no employment upon which to use
them. Few kindly .relations subsist between two
branches of one vast family that would seem to
be so intimately connected, or rather so slightly sepa-
•-ated, as, the masses who work long hours for the
'mallest pittance .which the employer can dole out to
the employed, and the masses who would work as
long or longer, for as little—aye, or for less. These
conterminous conditions of distress, where the heels
of him who can just live, are galled by the on-
pressing foot of him who has not wherewith to live
at all, are the 'prolific spring whence flow fierce
jealousies and sanguinary dissensions, as if the parties
to them were Borderer clans, on the old frontier
" marches" between England and Scotland, or Wales
and England. The classes are animated by a class
hostility ; the one against its more fortunate, the other
against its less orderly competitor. Life—a living
for themselves and theirs—is the stake they fight
for ; and it is not to be war without death, in
some variety of form or extent, to the loser. ence
habits of • ferocity and recklessness are engen-
dered ; the rights of property are disregarded in
a strife where the sacred charter of human existence
is little heeded; The brutalising influences that act
upon the class seem to be-concentrated in the indivi-
dual. The most wretched Vecome the most wicked.
Those on whose personal effdrts or deportment the
most numerous. and the dearest interests depend,
sacrifice themselves, or the beings whose interests, by
every law, human or divine, they are solemnly bound
to protect—with equal recklessness. Burglaries, ac-
companied with acts of ferocious violence, infanticide,
manslaughter committed under hideous excitement ;
murders perpetrated upon cold deliberate calculation
—parricide, matricide, fratricide—(we avow the fact
with horror and humiliation)—have stained the annals
of metropolitan guilt here, in London, as well as in
the provincial districts, within the last three months,
three weeks, three days (we are afraid to consider
how recently), to an extent unparalleled, we believe,
in the memory of living man ! Without adverting
to primary, or possible, or moral agents, what
let us ask, is the great proximate cause the
immediate motive —of these atrocities ? We
answer, from the appalling evidence tendered at coro-
ners' inquests and criminal assizes—distress. The
labourer who looks upon his starving family and fire-
less hearth, the mother, who regards with eyes to
which the intensity of her sorrow denies the relief of
tears, her perishing infant—her perishing husband ;
the sons, just passing from boyhood into manhood,
desperate from privation and the presence of so much
suffering under their own eyes, become habituated to
the dark suggestions of hunger and want, cold and
suffering, and the dread of " worse behind" to come
with the morrow. The ties of kindred are soon sepa-
rated when those of citizenship are broken. Violence,
perhaps, brings after it its own punishment; punish-
ment fosters the intense desire for revenge ; revenge
explodes in murder! Even the maternal affections
take the same fearful hue. The cherished infant be-
comes an object of aversion and discontent, or of
anxiety terminating in frenzy ; and the hand that
tended it yesterday, to-day terminates its exist-
ence. The husband and the wife regard each
other with the aversion of brute animals, one of
which is ready to destroy the other for devouring the
fragment of food for which both are famishing. We
have shown that this unnatural state of things, in a
country swarming with opulence, abundant in the
luxuries as well as the necessaries of life,—can be
traced to no other but some great disorganising
cause. The want of a power of distribution of all
this abundance of food, and theso accumulated products
of industrial labour is that cause. But it is itselt
the effect only of our present monetary system and
the disastrous legislation of Sir ROBERT PEEL in
1819 and 1844. This fact cannot be too often re-
peated. In 1845 it must be remedied. We shall re-
cur more at large to this subject in noticing a very
able pamphlet, entitled, " Money the Moral Power
of Exchange," which we have not yet had time fully
to peruse. But it strengthens every conviction we
have arrived at on this the most vital question which
can occupy the Parliament of Great Britain.

When the late Lord SYDENHAM, as Mr. POWLETT
THOMSON, brought forward, in the spring of 1830, his
famous speech on the commutation of our taxation, he
felt the necessity for apprising his friends of his
reasons for not extending his scheme to any other but
those fiscal imposts which bore on the industrial
labour, or the foreign commerce of the country. Any
notices which, at any time, fell from him as to the
taxes collected immediately on landed property and
capital were but meagre and hasty ones ; as he would
not put upon record opinioiis on such topics which he
had not had the opportunity of carefully digesting and
confirming. It is probable that had the Right Hon.
Gentleman directed his inquiries, at the time, to this
branch of financial' economics, his labours would not
have been less highly appreciated by the late Mr. Hus-
KISSON, and by Parliament at large, than were his
plans for modifying the general principles and work-
ing of our fiscal system. Perhaps the most enormous
defects in that system, as it now operates on property
and capital, are the arbitrary application and the scale
of the legacy duty. A correspondent of the Times,
who subscribes himself " A. Country Lawyer," has
handled this subject with equal clearness and ability.
In his professional .experience of thirty years, he
tells us, he has heard repeatedly grievous impreca-
tions "on the framers of a law which presses heavily
on the middle classes, and leaves untouched the
great landed proprietors." Ile adds—" Many a sight
too, I have heard from the bereaved widow whils,
paying 'Over. the money she and her fatherless chil-
dren could. so ill spare." (We may remark, by the
way, on account of their singular
.aptitude for our
purpose; that both this passage and that which we are
about to quote; mutatis mutandis, might have been
penned with equal truth of the unjust and oppressive
Currency Bill of 1819, andof its complement of 1844.
They were fraiied, and have operated, for the singu-
lar oppression of the Middle classes, and classes, in-
deed, still lower—these comprising our industrial
community. They were framed, and have operated,