The Sun.
London, England, 1844-02-20 00:00:00

ettrb 'ambition

SUN OFFICE, Seven o'clock,

SPIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS.
FROM TEE EVENING PAPERS OF THIS DAT.
GLOBE.—Whatever may be the effect of the pending
debate upon the majority of the House of Commons—
though "the Government may affect to triumph on the
division—the facts adduced, and the arguments employed
by the speakers from the Opposition benches will not be
lost upon the country. At every step in their Irish policy
the Ministers have been lowered in the estimation of
the people of England ; while in Ireland dislike has
heightened into hatred. No former Ministry ever ap-
peared in so humiliating a position—so positively con-
victed of incapacity for dealing with an acknowledged
" difficulty," as does that of Sir Robert Peel. A case
has been made out against them by the maladministra-
tion of their power in Ireland, which has drawn down
upon them the apprehensions of many and the wither-
ing scorn of more, in this country ; while it has
obtained-for the repeal of the Legislative Union, and
for those against whom the Government has obtained
a conviction for the proceedings they have been en-
gaged in to attain it—a sympathy more general and
cordial than O'Connell could have secured by his
best-devised projects, or his coadjutors by their most
strenuous exertions. Had Sir Robert Peel not lent
his powers to give impulse to the movement, it
would have expired of inanition. The Right. Hon.
Baronet no sooner appeared in the field, as the head
of a Government, than new life was infused into the
expiring scheme ; and every step he took in the path
of discouragement by threats and coercion, only stimu-
lated the Repealers to renewed exertions, until the
larger portion of the country became united in one vast
confederacy—not so much for Repeal, as of oppo-
sition to the policy of his administration. This feeling,
the emanation of long-cherished, because greatly
provoked dislike, has " grown with the growth.
and strengthened with the strength," of the Irish
people. It would have been diminished by con-
ciliation but cam never be destroyed by coer-
cion. Sir Robert Peel refused the counsel which
advised and urged the employment of a milder treat-
ment. He allowed his better nature, and his more
prudent and far-seeing policy, to be counteracted by
the Lyndhurst-and-Stanley portion of his Cabinet.
Milita.:;- occupation was substituted for constitutional
government. Bayonets bristled in almost every village.
Every building capable of being fortified was placed in
a state of military defence. The rivers which inter-
sected and d;vided the provinces became the stations
of ships of war. The whole country, in fact, wore
the aspect of a recent conquest, in which revolt would
follow the slightest relaxation of restriction, or indication
of confidence in the people. State prosecutions were
instituted ; these were conducted in the spirit and with
the violations of constitutional forms and stretches of
the prerogative, more in unison with the seventeenth
than the nineteenth century. The convictions thus ob-
tained have weakened, instead of strengthening, the hands
of Government ; for public opinion has been thereby
enlisted with the convicted parties. O'Connell has
regained a popularity which in this country was certainly
fast waning; while in Ireland it was rather dependent on
the course which the Government would take, than on
any approval of Repeal by the more respectable portion
of the Catholic population of that country. If there be
any one man in the United Kingdom to whom Mr.
O'Conn'ell has more reason to be grateful than another,
it is to that Cabinet Minister—be he who lie may—who
goaded the reluctant Premier into a consent to adopt
coercion as the policy of his Irish administration, un-
accompanied by any of those remedial and conciliatory
measures by which alone the nation could have been
reconciled to its adoption.
STANDARD.—Every one in this country is weary
of the lumbering debate that has now for five nights
occupied the House of Commons, and that for all that
appears may occupy it for five nights more, for there
is plainly no conceivable necessary termination to the
delivery of speeches by men who are not ashamed to
produce in cold blood, and to reproduce, and to pro-
duce again fallacies one thousand times refuted—truth
is in both senses the end of all legitimate discussion ;
but when men delibelately leave truth on one side, it is
obvious that in any sense discussion need not have any
end—a dreary prospect for us, and for all like us, com-
pelled to read Parliamentary debates. We are not by
any means disposed to provoke once more the question
which we hear at every corner—" Is there to be no end to
these Irish debates ?' —but in order that the people may
see all the mischief, we would remind them that these de-
bates, which are simply a nuisance in England, are a deadly
pestilence to the unhappy country which is the subject
of them, just ss the monotonous clatter of the copper-
smith, which merely annoys a healthy neighbour on one
side, will kill the patient on the other if he is recovering
from a fever, by depriving him of the rest upon which his
only hope of life depends. It is, in fact, impossible to
overrate the evil of the present transfer of" the Con-
ciliation Hall " to Westminster, or the guilt of those by
whom it has been made. It is, indeed, to underrate
the evil, to speak of it merely as a mere transfer of the
" Conciliation Hall," for incendiary speeches deli-
vered in the Houses of Parliament are ten-fold
more pernicious than the same speeches would be
delivered in Dublin, because the Irish peasant receives
such speeches (and they are all carried to him) as the
admissions of those whom he has been taught to con
sider as adversaries, or as at least the testimonies of im-
partial witnesses. If there is in the proceedings of the
Opposition any one circumstance more disgusting than
another, it is the new character with which, for their
purpose, they invest the Roman Catholic population
of Ireland—a character of universal treason—a
character not only different from, but exactly opposite
to, that in which they represented the same party
twenty or thirty years ago. We entreat those
who tan remember—as unfortunately we can—
the speeches of the Whigs twenty or thirty years
ago, to recollect with what zeal, with what
furyy, the disloyalty of Roman Catholics was re-
pelled as an impossible hypothesis in those speeches.
Few, now at an age of maturity, can forget that up to
1829 the Irish Roman Catholics were described by the
Whigs as not merely universally loyal, but as being the
only truly loyal part of the Irish population. All will
remember that an attempt to revive the falsehood was
made in 1835, when the Orange Committee was ap-
pointed ; and again on the occasion of her
Majesty's accession to the Croan, when Mr.
O'Connell spoiled the enterprise by his fulsome
professions, accompanied by his seditious practice.
How happens it, then, that the Roman Catholics—
so zealously loyal under privations, which, however
light, were represented to them as intolerably burthen
some—have become universally the separatists and trai-
tors that their Whig-Radical friends now describe them,
within a few years of the removal of every vestige of
privation ? This would be indeed, as tfr. Grattan
said, " not merely unfounded, but monstrous." The
answer is, that it is not true that the great body of the
Roman Catholics are unquestionably now more loyal,
now more averse from separation than they were thirty
years ago. We can add the testimony of our own cor-
respondents to what is stated in the article which we
have borrowed from the Morniny Herald, as to the
effect of the verdict against Mr. O'Connell—that
verdict, we are assured, has been received, not
v ith indifference, but with satisfaction by
nineteen-twentieths of the educated and intelligent
Roman Catholics, and even by the most ignorant of the
peasantry it has been received as a matter in which they
have little or no concern. Should evil result from it,
that evil will be the effect of the use which the Whigs
have sordidly and corruptly made of the topic in Par-
liament ; not of anything that has passed or is
passing in. Ireland. It is quite as true now as it
was when Lord Plunkett said it, in the passage quoted,
that " the separatists are neither numerous nor fonni -
dable,' though ;hey may appear so to superficial ob-
servers, for a reason given by the same Noble and
Learned Lord in the same speech :—" It is most unfair
to visit on [ascribed to] the Roman Catholics the
opinions and conduct of such public assemblies as pro.
fess to act for them. In all such places, we know that
unbounded applause attends the man who oc-
cupies the extreme positions of opinion ; and
that the extravagance of his expression of such
opinion will not be calculated to diminish it.
Now, what Lord Plunkett said to defend the Roman
Catholics against one set of accusers, it may be alloy eel
to us to say for their protection against a much more
foul and malignant charge than was ever before pre-
ferred against them. We say that they are not traitors,
and that the calmness and even complaicency a ith which
they see the fall of Mr. O'Connell, proves that that per-
son never possessed a tithe of the moral power ascribed
to him, and that he is no faithful expositor of Roman
Catholic feeling.

COURSE OF EXCH
Amsterdam CF. 12 6

►NGE.—(THIS DAY.)
Gibraltar —

Ditto, at sight l2 4
Rotterdam 9 U l2 6i
Antwerp 25 95
itimburgh M.B. 13 15
Altona l4 0
Paris, 3 days' sight 25 70
Ditto, 3 months 25 90
Marseilles
Bourdeaux
Frankfort on Maine 122
Petersburgh, 3Us 36i
Berlin .............. 3
7
fl
Vienna, effee. . M. 957
Trieste, ditto E 958
Madrid
Cidiz
Bilbao
Barcelona
Seville

Leghorn
Genoa 25 95
Milan —
Venice ........
Naples 394-
Palermo, per oz llBl
Lisbon: s3i
Oporto 531
Rio Janeiro 23
Bahia 23
Buenos Ayres —
NewYork,2ldys sight
Philadelphia —
PRICES OF BULLION, PER OZ.
Foreign Gold, bars...i3 17 9
Portugal Gold Coin 3 17 5
New Doubloons..... 0 0 0
New Dollars 0 4 94
Silver in Bars 0 4 111

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