The Sun.
London, England, 1844-10-01 00:00:00

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LONDON, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 1844.

We are well pleased to acknowledge that the daily
accounts we have received from the outports, and the
dockyards of Woolwich and Deptford, during the
last fortnight, demonstrate a most laudable degree of
activity and vigilance on the part of the Lords of the
Admiralty. Their Lordships' recent tour of inspec-
tion, we are bound to admit, seems likely to be
attended with very beneficial results, by securing the
most prompt' and permanent attention, on the part of
the subordinate executive authorities of this depart-
ment of the public service, to the efficiency of ships'
armaments, the extension of the List of Men-of-war
in Commission, and the organisation of better arrange-
ments for their manning. The complements of the
experimental- brigs, we see, have been most rapidly
and satisfactorily completed, and a serious error in
the scheme originally issued, in reference to them,
quickly discovered, and fairly rectified—by reducing
the disproportionate number of boys allotted, in the
first instance, to -each complement, and substituting,
for every such reduction of boys, five able seamen.
All this is extremely well, so far as it goes. But
here is not enough of tar "to pay the whole hull."
The organisation which has proved so effective for
manning some eight or ten small war craft, of the force
we have elsewhere described in detail, should be care-
fully revised, and settled on bases capable of adopting
themselves to much larger and more pressing exigen-
cies. The same machinery, with certain requisite
modifications, may be rendered effective for the imme-
diate registration, at least, of volunteer hands, whose
priority of entry on the books of her Majesty's ships
of war, when called for under any future emergency,
might be determined by the priority of their appear- !
ance, now, before a duly constituted board, and the
dates of their certificates of examination, competency,

and approval. It is impossible, in our judgment, to
overrate the value of such a proof, tendered by the
Government to those who are to man our fleets, that it is
in earnest. Many a brave fellow, and in all respects able
seaman, has retired in disgust, for ever, from a ser-
vice to which he has been from his youth strongly
attached, by the superadded discouragement of no
certain prospect of future employment in it follow-
ing on his being paid off and discharged from present
active duty. Let the registration plan announced
by Sir JAMES GRAHAM during his connexion with
the Admiralty Board be maintained as the principle
of a new scheme of register for her MAJESTY'S
Navy,—to be enlarged and improved with a careful
view to the very serious hazards we have had, during
the last two or three years, to encounter, in
the absence of a practical adhesion to such
a scheme—and to the aspect of passing events
in the seas of the New World as well as of the Old—
and to the very possible, if not probable, contingencies
of the times that are fast coming upon us. Let this
course be taken on the vital question of manning our
navy, and we will venture to predict that we shall be
spared those offensive demonstrations of petulance and
annoyance by other Powers, which now, at feverish
and intermitting intervals, impose upon us, in a season
of peace, the onerous and invidious duty of making
imperfect preparations for war. Such a course
would, at any rate, have this moral effect
—that it would avoid the unseemly and
undignified evidence of hurry and confusion
succeeding to inertness which recent events, we much
fear, must have afforded to the " world without."
The conduct of Sir ROBERT PEEL'S Government in
reference to the British navy has been, until arrested
by the solicitude occasioned by the movements of
France against Morocco, an enormous blunder—a
most inexcusable dereliction of public duty. One of
our Correspondents, a naval officer, has well observed,
in a short, but pithy, pamphlet, which we noticed not
long ago, "that the formidable expansions of the
naval strength of France have been uniformly coin -
cident with the contractions of our own, ever
since the Premier last entered office." It is
not too much to say, that in proportion as the flag
of England has been treated with an open disrespect,
or a more than suspicious neglect, in various parts
of the world, which had hitherto never been at-
tempted with impunity, the exhibition of our force
in the same locality, or the stations nearest adjacent
to them, has been scandalously disproportionate to
that of the offending flag there, and has incurred
imminent risks of signalising the native indomitable
courage and devotion of our gallant seamen and
their admirable officers only in useless struggles
against overwhelming material and numerical supe-
riority which, had they taken place, must have termi-
nated, in all human probability, in the discomfiture and
destruction of our countrymen. The days have been
in which a British Minister, who had allowed a
French fleet of seventeen men of war to be for weeks

together cruizing about the Mediterranean with only
one English man-of-war to watch them (for what
could she do more ?)—would have been impeached for
incapacity, or something worse. No fear of that kind
can enter any man's head who is cognisant of the
plausible and flexible dexterity of Sir ROBERT. But
if we have weathered these threatening and once im-
minent perils for a time,—if, happily for the peace
of civilisation and the interests of the whole
human race, the two greatest and mightiest
nations of the globe are not at this moment
involved in a war of wholesale extermination,
for the most worthless of objects or the most insuffi-
cient of pretexts ;—we owe nothing to the sagacity
or the foresight, the prudence or the discretion, of a
Minister who founds his claim upon the confidence
of his countrymen on precisely these very qualifica-
tions. Sir ROBERT PEEL had formed a resolution—
and doubtless it was in itself a most salutary one—to
bring the public expenditure within the public in-
come. To accomplish this object, he re-imposed
upon the country one of the most odious and op-
pressive of imposts, against which it had, under all
former Administrations that levied it, indignantly re-
monstrated. By the aid of this impost he realised a sur-

plus revenue ; and it has been his intense anxiety to
maintain this surplus, at whatever present cost, at the
sacrifice of whatsoever future advantages, which has,
we must presume, suggested to him the reduction of
our magnificent navy to an effective force of that

almost contemptible amount at which it stood just
before the rising of Parliament for the recess. Well,
as we sat out with saying, we heartily rejoice that
much has been done in the intervening period,
on the part of the Admiralty authorities, to repair this
suicidal folly. But we also repeat that very much
more remains yet to be done, before the exigencies of
the present and of coming times can be duly pre-
pared for.

In advocating such further additions to our naval
7orce, and administrative improvements of the nature

we have ventured to suggest, we are aware that we

expose ourselves to the imputation of advocating a
large increase of the national expenditure. Prima

facie this would appear a reasonable charge. It is
not so, in reality, and on a fair consideration of the
facts. It is one thing to maintain, in times of peace,

excessive and threatening armaments, at a vast ex-
pense to ourselves, and to the jealousy and disquietude

of foreign States. It h another, to maintain
those armaments on a scale of bare efficiency
—but adapted to the purposes of any ex-
pansion which exigencies—probable or even un-
foreseen—may render not only expedient in them-

selves, but indispensable to that attitude of prepara-
tion on which alone we shall he justified in meeting
any powerful enemy. The difference between the
two scales of expenditure will be insignificant indeed

compared with the enormous outlay, to say nothing
of the inconceivable perils, which must be entailed by
any further neglect of all needful and timely measures
of a precautionary policy.

The speech delivered by Lord WHARNCLIFFE las

week at Leeds at a meeting of the friends and sup-
porters of the Society for Promoting the Increase of
Church Accommodation, &c. —on which we have
already commented in The Sun—is one that deserves
more than a single cursory notice, for, in the first
place, it is avowedly official in its character, and,
secondly, it contains some exceedingly liberal and
pertinent observations on one of the most important
matters that can possibly come under the attention of
the Legislature. Moreover, it is a decided move in

the direction of toleration—a frank and manly ac-
knowledgment that, on the great question of national
education, the claims of the Dissenters have a
right to be consulted quite as much as those
of the sticklers for orthodoxy ; and that
to consider the interests of the Church ex-
clusively, is to take but a purblind view of the case,
such as no Government which presumes to call itself
enlightened, is warranted in doing. " Prythee, think
there are people out of Britain !" says one of SHAKS-
PEARE'S characters, in reply to the bigoted nationality
of an individual with whom he is holding familiar con-
verse; and Lord WHARINCLITTE calmly and cour-
teously rebukes the dogmatic prejudices of the high-
church party in the same enlarged spirit, remind-
ing them that the population of the kingdom is
not solely made up of the orthodox ; but that a
vast mass of the community consists of Dis-
senters from the Establishment, whose conscien-

tious scruples, and feelings, and interests have every
possible claim on the attentive and favourable conside-
ration of Government. Language like this, which
but twenty years ago no Cabinet Minister would
have dreamed of using, is a sign of the times of the
most auspicious character, and though it will doubt-
less give great offence to the more intolerant members
of the Church, who entertain the same hatred of Dis-
sent that Commodore Txuoi rroi
all entelirbtearmale_dminofdaedn
attorney, yet it will be received by
individuals with the most unfeigned delight and ap-
probation. We have said that Lord Win RNCLIFFE'S
speech contains some exceedingly satisfactory
observations on one of the most important sub-
jects of the day. The subject to which we
allude, is the profession of the schoolmaster,
on which his Lordship thus expresses himself :—" No-
thing is more deplorable than the state of education,
speaking generally, of the schoolmasters who affect
to teach the people. No system of instruction can
be of much value until we have masters who shall be
able to combine the improvement of the moral and
religious knowledge of their pupils as well as of their
manners, with the general education they may im-
part. No pains that can be taken are too much
in this matter. I wish I could say that the busi-
ness of a schoolmaster could be truly called a pro-
fession. I wish that the middle and lower classes