The Sun.
London, England, 1844-12-17 00:00:00

is the duty which belongs to your position in society.
b,tween selfish lawmakers and injure.l millions. You
who make the lawmakers can unmake t e misery,
Up to your duty, or both Jew and Gentile amongst
you must bear the curse of Meroz.
A NORWICH WEAVER BOY.

SPIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS.
FRON THE EITE?iING PAPERS OF YESTERDAY.
GLUBE.—We intimated last week that an anxious
wish prevailed among the Liberal members of the Ox-
ford Convocation, that in dealing with Mr. Ward and
his book, the beads of the University would avoid two
things. Conceding that it was due to truth and honesty
that some steps should be taken to mark with suitable
ignominy the attempts now making to reconcile subscrip-
tion to Protestant articles with the advancement of the in-
terests of priestcraft, we expressed a hope—first, that there
would be no repetition of the impropriety and folly of
submitting theological differences to the arbitration of
those sagacious critics, the majority of Convocation; and
secondly, that in vindicating its consistency, the Board
should avoid adopting extreme measures towards the un-
fortunate disciple of the Littlemore Pope—of whom we
may truly say, on his own confession, " non sponte sun."
We have now before us the actual statute, which ap-
peared on Friday last, and which we understand was
assented to by a largo majority of the Oxford Board of
Heads, and we think it has sufficiently guarded against
both the evils which some had apprehnded. No at-
tempt to submit theological opinions to an incompetent
tribunal is made, nor is it proposed to deprive the author
of "The Ideal Church" of any pecuniary advantages
purchased by his non-natural profession of conformity.
The first of the two Statutes proposed, after reciting
certain passages of the work, in which (to quote the
author's own words) he proposes to show " how the
dry wording " (which Dr. Pusey would call the literal
sense) " may be divorced from the natural spirit" of the
Articles of the Church, " how their prima facie mean-
ing may be evaded, and the artifice of their inventors be
thrown back and recoil on themselves," and after quoting
farther his avowal that "in subscribing the Articles, ho
renounced no one Roman doctrine," signing them in " a
non-natural sense, proceeds to remark, .that whereas
the party notoriously reputed in the University and
believed to be the author, had obtained the degrees of
B.A. and M.A. on the faith of a subscription which he
cancels by his present avowals—he be required to an-
swer to the charge of having published passages incon-
sistent with good faith, and be degraded from the privi-
leges attacheikto those degrees. The second statute is of
more importance,"und is rendered, it seems, necessary by
the following circumstance :—A statute is already in ex-
istence entitling the Vice-Chancellor to summon before
him a member accused of heresy, and to require him to
purify himself by subscribing to the 39Articles. Most per-
sons will recollect the not very decent sarcasm of the Vicar
of Leeds in his Church Dictionary, when he stated that
an Archbishop of the Church of England had purified
himself from the suspicion of heresy by signing, the
Articles on his appointment to his see. Dr. Hook,
however, was a good judge of his own friends; and so the
Hebdomadal Board seems to think—fur the new statute
proposes to add to the subscription a declaration that the
party subscribing does so in the sense in which they
were "prinutes editi," that is, in 1571, when the impo-
sition of the articles as tests was first made by the joint
authority of a Synod and of Parliament. This is a
plain and intelligible proposal. If you take a pledge,
take it without equivocation or mental reservation—
take it in the sense in which it is meant—in the sense
in which its imposers put it—or--support those by your
example of refusal who object to subscription altogether.
We have no time now for further remark, but shall
rettern to the subject, which, between this and the day of
Convocation (February the 13th), will, we anticipate,
engross much of public interest—and involve the recon-
sideratiou of the whole subject of tests. We hear that
the Tractarian section of the Oxford Convocation are
disposed to abandon Mr. Ward to his fate—provided they
can eject the second statute, which provides a check to
their own practice.
STANDARD.—A great deal of noise has been
made about a few bags of Venezuelan sugar imported at
Liverpool. This noise has been made on the ground
that the sugar is slave-grown—with how much
reason the sugar is said to be slave-grown will appear
from the letter of our old and valued correspondent,
Mr. 111`Queen. Mr. M'Queen, who has visited
Venezuela three times within the last ten years,
and who knows more of the commercial geography
and statistics of the tropical countries than any man
alive, has brought home with him all the' public docu-
ments of Venezuela, as well as of the other countries
that he has visited, and has been kind enough to place
the Venezuelan papers in our hands. We prefer,
however, to the labour of translating these voluminous
documents, to avail ourselves of Mr. M'Queen's own
letter. That letters tells that the territory of Venezuela
—a territory as large as France—has a population
under 900,000, of whom, notwithstanding that slavery
has been long abolished by law, about 30,000 (one in
thirty) are in a state of qualified slavery, for this sole
reason, that the Republic has been hitherto too poor to
buy eut, the liberty of all its slaves, though having made the
best provision it was able to do so. No slave, however, can
be born in Venezuela, for all are born free. No slave can
be inspert4d ; and even the remnant of' the slave population
that lingers, notwithstanding large annual redemptions ;
and manumissions cannot be transferred from master to
master—the thirty thousand slaves—one in thirty of the
population, are thus almost necessarily employed as house
servants, or in the cultivation of gardens and small farms,
and, from the nature of things, cannot be em-
ployed in sugar grounds. The Venezuelan sugar,
therefore, is neither slave-grown, nor the produce
of a country attached to slavery. All the world is
not as rich as Great Britain, and able, like her, to buy
the freedom of the negro; but the Venezuelans are doing
the best they can to imitate our example, and therefore
deserve all the encouragement that we can give them.
Unfortunately, however, we have little opportunity
to encourage the sug it trade, for the country produces
little sugar, and it costs a dollar the hundred weight to
carry it to the coast. To compare Venezuela in any
respect with slave-trading countries, like Cuba and the
Brazils, would be the grossest folly as well as injustice.

AGRICULTURAL LABO URERS.
(Prom the Times.)
The address of the Sussex labourer which we insert
in another column is one of those genuine utterances of
fact and feeling which are sure to make themselves heard
in the greatest din of human voices. It is far too touch-
ing not to move the kind, far too substantially true not
to inform the candid. True, the feeling may be mixed, or
rather that mixture of feeling which all mortal griev-
ances give rise to, is here very little disguised. Or,
again, the philosophy may not always be sound. The
Sussex labourer may not have a very exact and definite
view of our social system, or of political economy. He
takes things in the lump. The landlord, the farmer, and
the clergyman are, in his ken, the gentlemen who make
the laws. He does- not appreciate what are called the
great prizes of industry, whether parks or parsonages.
lie is for putting his spade into every bit of waste laud
in the country, and in the very face of unlimited foreign
competition would trench up the whole island from
Land's-end to John o'Groat's House. He does not make
due allowance for the lax economy and irregular hospi-
talities of gentlemen's honseholds. To such objections
his address is doubtless open. But its main purport is
undoubtedly true, and confirmed by the experience of
everybody who has the means and the heart to inquire,
or even to notice what he sees.
The poor man admits, that in the present state of the
market, his labour is not worth more than five shillings
a week. More than this, therefore, he certainly will not
get, as farmers do not give for labour more than its
worth; or rather they do not give seven shillings for
work which they can got done for five. Here, then, is
a simple fact. A man, his wife, and three children, five
persons, are to be maintained on five shillings a week,
there is nothing to modify this fact, no indistinct out:
line, no elastic feature of the case ; excepting only the
pickings to be got out of the wages of the two
boys, who have each to find everything on half-
a-crown a week. Out of that half crown of course
they pay for their lodging and washing, and an occa-
sional sight of the cottage fire. But you cannot make
a park in a flower-pot, or a coal-pit in a coal-scuttle; so,
after a working troy has been half-fed, and half-clothed,
there wont be much over out of half-a-crown
a-week. When, therefore, a shilling a-week has gene
for rent, and another shilling for about as much fuel as
is burnt in an ordinary drawing-room fire, at this sea-
son of the year, by luncheon time, there remain three
shillifes., thirty-six pence, for five persons. This is a
penny e Ly for each of them. It wont stretch a bit.
If the i..ther, to sustain the severity of the weather, the
weakuesa of his constitution, and the long pull of a day's
work, takes twopence a-day :out of the store, the little
ones must pay by a further halving of their half plates
of potatoes. The mother is in the like evil case. Then
there is the clothing of the whole five, a doctor's bill
now and then, and twenty other inevitable expenses. All
this is to come out of the extra wages of harvest, we
suppose ;---harvest ! which perhaps, after weeks of
exhausting toil, leaves just thirty shillings towards the
discharge of long arrears I
But this simple fact does not depend on the Sussex
labourer's testimony. It is an inevitable fact, a law of
the labourer's present state. If the farmer cannot or
does no: choose to give him more than five shillings a
week, he must be content with it, or go to the work-
house, where he still will not see his wife and children,
except occasionally in the presence of the governor or
his deputy. Wisely or not, the old system provided for
such a case. Besides its general effect in raising the
wages to a living standard, it provided specially for ex-
treme degrees of poverty. It helped a man in so dire a
strait as having to house, feed, and clothe five wretched
beings on a crown a week. Now, on the contrary, there
are tens of thousands in thi3 strait, unhelped, uncared-
for, unseen, unknown. There they must remain. What-
ever the commercial or political rights of the question,
such is the shocking, undeniable, unalterable fact ; and
the nation which has brought things to this pass, and
made the fact, is answerable for it.
Often and often have we heard at the lips of the rustic
housewife the very counterpart, the very words of the
" English cotter's Saturday night," as related by the
Sussex labourer. Some half-dozen scales of weekly ex-
penditure are before us, ascertained by careful inquiry a
dozen years back, on the disastrous eve of the new law.
We thought them searcely credible at the time, but they
contain not a few articles of comfort or customary neces-
sity, which have no place in this newer Sussex budget.
One by one, we suppose, they have dropped out of use,and
ceased to be necessary.
We shall be told that the Sussex labourer has the
same chance as thousands who are burdened above their
hugs a
strength. Perhaps we shall be told of the Irish cottier
or the Hungarian peasant ; perhaps reminded that a
fellow with so ready a pen can get more than five shil-
week in Londbetter man hawks abouto
opreacdeo,esaniadigrhuint winogrk nor Manchester ; that many a
the public
oranges, disturbingNvers a nab-stand,
his own prospects, by writin4 let- I