The Sun.
London, England, 1845-03-04 00:00:00

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LONDON, TUESDAY, MARCH 4,1845.

The House of Lords net at Five o'Clock.

Lord CAMPBELL moved the second reading of the
Common Law Process (England) Bill, and the Com-
mon Law Process (Ireland) Bill, and stated that the
LORD ADVOCATE had prepared a similar Bill for
Scotland. The object of the Bills was to enable pro-
cess to be served on subjects of Great Britain resid-
ing in foreign countries.
14EWSPAYPErk;GHAM approved of the principle of the
thought that the affidavit of the service
40,1. rate, be a British service.
,--,1::1_,_! ;::)-L-Lsoict:c , ELL said the objection might be con-
(
I',.- aider4cl;44l; mmittee, and the Bills were read a
O\ .- --triand : rime
_--'" After conversation between the Marquis of j
NI 141*istAltRY and the Duke of WELLI2iGTON) on the 1

no opposition.
On a grant of 8,000,0001. being proposed, a desultory
discussion on the subject of the window duty ensued ;
Mr. HussE suggested the substitution of a house duty
instead, which was objected to by Sir R. PEEL. Capt.
PECIIELL wished for a return of the number of ap-
peals, but the CHANCELLOR of the EZCIIEGWER
thought no materials existed for making such a return.
Mr. BERNAL complained of the evil of surcharges,
and Mr. ROEBUCK and Mr. HuME found fault with
the present mode of collection, which was defended
by Mr. W. Wizmams, on the score of economy.
The discussion on the subject of the sugar duties
then commenced, and the CHANCELLOR of the Ex-
CHEQUER proposed that the amended scale of duties
should come into operation on the 14th of March.
Mr. W. WILLIAMS, Mr. lIAWES, Mr. WALLACE,
and Lord SANDON urged the postponement of the
alteration, in order to give the holders of sugar time
to clear their stocks.
Mr. THORNELY and Sir W. CLAY objected to the
proposed system of classification of sugar as imprac-
ticable.
Mr. Hoca admitted the impracticability of the
attempt, but would wait and see what the Government
proposed to do.
Sir IL PEEL stated that the Government was still
engaged in inquiring as to the practicability of clas-
sification, 'and that he would give due notice of his
intention to bring the subject forward, so as not to
take the House by surpthe. With regard to any re-
mission of duty, he boded the House would not draw
any distinction between the wholesale and the retail
dealer.
Mr. LABoucHERE admitted the importance and dif-
ficulty of classification, and thought tlfat from the
unusual time of year at which the proposal had been
brought forward, the sugar trade was entitled to some
postponement, so as to enable them to dispose of
their stocks.
Mr. M. Ginsos; supported the postponement, which
was opposed by Mr. GLADSTONE.
A long conversation ensued, in the course of which
Mr. P. BORTIIWICR gave it as his opinion, that there
was a wider difference between East and West India
sugar than there was between that produced
by slave labour and free labour, and as a mere
matter of justice a differential duty, there-
fore, ought to be imposed on East India sugar ;
and Mr. HUME declared himself in favour of ex-
tending the same differential duties to East Indian
that they did to West Indian sugar, in order to in-
duce capitalists to embark in the cultivation of sugar
in India.

Ultirnate!y the CHANCELI.OR of the ERCIIEQUIgn
withdrew his resolution, the House resumed, the
Chairman rEported progress, arAd obtained leave to
sit again on Friday.
Thcf second reading of the Bastardy 13111 was post-
poned until Friday.
The Property-tax Bill passed through Committee,
and at the suggestion of the CHANCELLOR of the
ExctiEutiEß the discussion was r:;stponed until the
bringing up the report, which was fixed for Wednes-
day.
The House then resumed, and immediately after
adjourned, at a Quarter past Eight o'clock.

From the list of " Notices of Motions" for this
week in the House of Commons, we learn that, on
Thursday next, Lord WORSLEY wilt ask leave to bring
in a "Bill to facilitate the inclosure and improvement
of commons and lands held in common, the exchange
of lands, and the division of intermixed lands, to pro-
vide remedies for defective or incomplete executions,
and for the non-execution of the powers of general
and local inclosure Acts, an.l to provide for the re-
vival of such powers in certain cases." We are ex-
ceedingly sorry to find that the rage for inclosing
common lands and wastes is not yet appeased. In
the beginning of the last session of Parliament we ex-
pressed our unqualified dislike of these measures of
appropriation, which, under the most specious pre-
texts, effect the most serious disfranchisement of the
hereditary or prescriptive rights of the poor. It has
more than once occurred to us to be at the
trouble of ascertaining the number of statutes
which are in the nature of these " Private
that have been passed since the commencement
of the last war to the commencement of the present
year, with the view of enabling our readers to form
some sort of notion of the enormous extent to which
the influence of the landed proprietary in various
districts has succeeded in inducing successive Par-
liaments to authorise and sanction the most barefaced
encroachments on the birthright, or the customary
right of the most indigent natives of the vicinity to
common hinds 04 which themselves and their fathers,

for many generations before them, had been reared ;
where they had asursued the manly sports and ex •
ercised the noble pasti.nes which had formed
their physical habits, and given so healthful
a complexion to their moral character. We
own ourselves prone to believe that without the
advantage of these natural and expansive theatres for
the exercise of their limbs, the discipline of their
thewes and sinews, and the habituation to those emere
gencies and personal hazards which are, in boyhood,
the nursery of enterprise, and the unfailing school
of intrepidity and fortitude in after life ; we should
scarcely have exhibited to Europe under our En-
WARDS and our HARRIES the undaunted English yeo-
men who achieved the victories of Cressy, of Poic-
tiers, and of Agincourt. In the " Letters and Dis-
patches of the Great Duke of Marlborough," which
the accomplished care of Sir GEORGE MURRAY has
just ushered into the world, the congenial spirit of an
admirable living soldier has found, no doubt, a gratify-
ing labour in bringing into public light and notice in-
valuable documentary evidence to redeem the memory
of one of the greatest ef E.iglish or European generals
and diplomatists, from that ignorant disparagement in
which it hes been, of late years, a vulgar fashion to
indulge. We refer to the work, on this occasion,
only for the purpose of drawing from it that confirm-
ation which its contents supply, of the unaltered
character of physical superiority which the English
troops maintained at the beginning of the eighteenth
century, over the finest troops of continental nations
who served under the banners of the Imperialists.
We know that our soldiers were, at that time, re-
cruited chi( fly from the Midland and Northern
counties ; and it is important to remember how vast
a difference then existed in the conditions under
which our peasantry passed from infancy, through
the various stages intervening between it and
adolescence. There were wastes and moors, com-
mons, wealds and heaths—downs, woods, and forests,
over and through which they enjoyed full liberty of
way, over which they could pursue, without trespass
upon, or breaking into private lands and estate, their
athletic games and manly recreations. Out-door ex-
ercise, pure air, exciting but refreshing contest-, and
the development, with their muscular strength and
activity, of that self-confidence, and that constancy of
purpose, which are the most enduring bases of a mas•
culine nationality ; insensibly fostered, but perma-
nently established the endurance, constancy, and
elasticity of spirit which are still the most salient
characteristics of the British soldier and sailor. We
are quite aware of the inevitable, and, its many re-
spects, the beneficial operations of increasing com-
merce, capital, and agricultural and manufacturing
activity, to occupy these waste and common lands,
and to sustain and cherish, not merely the accumu-
lated population which their establi-hments call around
them, but to render that power of sustaining
and cherishing almost commensurate with the won-
derful ratio of increase that in modern times the po-
pulation of the British Isles has signally exhibited.
We may be told, too, that a large proportion of the
heavy English cavalry, which did such signal ser-
vice thirty years ago, in deciding the fate of the san-
guinary battle of Waterloo, were levied in Lan-
cashire, and in districts closely bordering upon Man-
chester. But we happen to know one such district
which contributed a considerable quota to those levies
that has. long since been,first, enclosed; secondly,
appropriated, purchased, built upon, and over built,
under the same magical talisman that it is still sought
to multiply—a British Inclosure Bill. Of course,
the same cause has worked in a similar manner in a
hundred different parts of the kingdom. Take the
extreme operation of such a case in the unequalled
suburb of Manchester, Oldham, which now inter-
poses at least a five miles continuous,
incessant, unvarying, unrelieved street of te-
nements so multiplied, with all these swarming
tenantry, that not a green field nor a fresh paddock,
nor a grove, nor a thicket, ncr, we may even say, a
hedge-row, interposes its delicious anomaly- to refresh
the exhausted senses of the wayfaring traveller
through these long and labyrinthine lines of brick
and mortar, or to present to the exhausted artisan,
on his one hebdomadal holiday, a type of the fresh
world, the breezy hills, the fertile plains, the bright
atmosphere beyond. Is it fair, reasonable, humane—
is it wise, is it politic—to embitter the contrast of the
stern necessities of the poor mechanic's own condition
by a Parliamentary sentence of exclusion, in the shape
of an Inclosure Bill, from every unoccupied grassy,
open bit of country—every green lane and sequestered
dingle, where he might otherwise inhale, in undis-
turbed enjoyment, the good thoughts and holy in-
fluences and humanising sympathies which men drink
up with the fresh breezes and the genial sunbeams, in
proportion to the lengthened periods for which they
are debarred from such enjoyments.
We don't like—we cannot but mistrust the very
terms of Lord Wouseet's notice. In the con-
templation of an inclosure bill, " to facilitate the in-
closure and improvement of commons and lands
held in common," is an uni-lateral proposition. Its
one-sided purpose is to help the wealthy landowner
whose property is contiguous to the common to get,
at the least possible expense and trouble, the largest
possible " allotment."
The sole facility that the poor man experiences is
to his cost; namely the facility with which his pre-
scriptive or customary common rights may be voted
away. The sole " improvement" forced upon the
humble cottager's reluctant endurance is, that he is
elbowed out of the dear haunts of his childhood ; and
finds himself no longer the denizen of a broken but
healthful heath to which he used to wander through
ancient hedge-rows, perfumed successively e% ith the
odours of the primrose, the hawthorn, the cowslip,
and the wild rose. bird, blue-bells, hyacinth, to the
gone and heather-sprinkled waste glowing with berries
of purple and blossoms of gold ; but a superfluous
disagreeable " low man," caged and imprisoned
among, according to the accidents of the locality,
acres of mills and manufactories, or a prim, well-re-
gulated wilderness of pert villas and squirearchical
demesnes, the lawns and the turf, the paddocks,—the
very gardens,—of which have been purloined from
the open waste over which the light-hearted carols of
his childhood had blithely echoed. Neither is it to
us any sufficing prospect of compensation for the pro
cess of absorption of waste and common lands, out of
the possession and enjoyment of the poor, that the hu-
manity of the Legislature, within the last half-dozen
years, has been awakened to the expediency of pro-
viding the humbler inhabitants of great towns with
"parks and public promenades for the purpose of
healthful exercise and amusement." These are good
in the absence of ether remedial measures for check-
ing the growing evil of inclosures ; but they are
by no means an adequate substitute for the
privilege of free commons, whose sacrifice they
are to atone for. There is, already, too great
a favouring of mawkish refinements, systematically
being introduced into the habits and amusements of
the " milliens ;" and with all our gratification that
the " millions" are at last to have "parks and pro-
menades" appropriated for their use, the unavoidable
disproportion of the accommodation to the numbers
to be accommodated, is in itself a cardinal deficiency.
But in point of all salutary influences, physical or
moral, there can be no comparison between such
miniature parks as are in process of " contriving,"
and the wide, invigorating commons, that you are
taking from the universal poor of the kingdom. As
this sort of spoliation has hitherth advanced, we may
expect, at no great distance of time, to see all the
heaths in Britain passing into the private property—
straight-laced-exclusive appro;elations of Hounslow-
heath on the west, or Cambridge-heath on the east—
the one fast effecting a junction with the
London suburb of Brantford continued from Turn-
ham-green,--the other long since swamped
in the devouring house-flood of Dalston ; and Hack-
ney, Lambeth, Brixton, and Streatham, are rapidly
becoming " one and indivisible" on the south. On
the north it is but a hilly street from Tottenham-
court-road to Hempstead. And apropos of Hamp-
stead-heath. We cannot, out of respect for the
public or political character of Lord Woase,sa- pin
our faith to any scheme his Lordship may bring for-
ward for " the inclosure and improvement of come
mon lands," or for the other very questionable land-
owner purposes set forth in the remaining terms of
his motion, with the recent pertinacious efforts of Sir
Thomas MARY ox WILSON to carry the Hampstead
Heath Inclosure job. The Commissioners of the
Duchy of Lancaster, too, not to be behind hand in
the work of cutting off the " lungs of London,"
wherever practicable, have miserably jobbed, we find,
the little vacant green space betwqen the WTest-