The Sun.
London, England, 1844-05-02 00:00:00

FRA SEWS MAGAZINE.

An intelligent article " On Railways" leads off
th'S Number, in which the cheapness and convenience
of 'this mole of travelling—notwithstanding the
attacks made on it by interested parties—are dwelt
on with much earnestness, and the railway pro-
prietors defended from the ci.arge of being a set of
avaricious, dishonest monopolists, who care nothing
for the public interests, and look only to themselves
Little Travels, and Road-side Sketches" is a diary
from the practised pen of Michael Angelo Titmarsh
one of the most successful magazine-contributers
we
.have had since the days of poor Maginn. The
writer gives an amusing account of hisdeparture by
a stage-coach from Richmond, on his way to the
Continent, in company with one or two noblemen's
footmen, of whom he speaks in this archly ironical
manner:—"The footmen were like the rest of the
fashionable world. I, for my part, felt that I re-
spected them. They were in daily communication
-with a Duke ! They were not the rose, but they
• had. lived bride it. There is an odour in the English
..4iistocracv which , intoxicates plebeians. I am sure
that .any: commoner in England, though he would
rather die than confess it, would have a respect for
these. great, big, hulking, Duke's footmen. We
have then a description of a night voyage by the
lifeam-boat to Antwerp, and of the various prepara-
tionS Made by the paSsengers for their sleep on the
deck of the cabin. There is a world of sly humour
in this description. "An Episode of the Times of
Phillip the • Fifth of Spain" contains one or two
stirring incidents, adroitly strung together, so as to
keep the reader's interest alive through the narrative.
"The :Luck of Barry Lyndon" flags rather this
month, chiefly from want of point and vivacity in
the dialogue. "Marshal Soult" is a memoir, penned
in an impartial, and even favourable spirit, towards
this . meritorious soldier of fortune--the only sur-
viving relic, we believe, of the military days of the
empire. The earlier portion of Soult's career was
one of almost uninterrupted succesg. He was one of
the chief props of the Republic—the terror of the
Anstrians, and the scourge of the Russians when they
entered Switzerland under Suvvarrow ; he was con-
sulted by Bonaparte, who placed great confidence in
his judgment, though he disliked him personally, on
every momentous occasion ; and at Austerlitz he was
one of the principal means of achieving that decisive
victory. But from the fatal moment when he entered
Spain, and measured swords with Wellington, the
star of the Marshal's good fortune waned, and finally
disappeared. Henceforth, he never ordered an attack,
but to be defeated; his best-laid plans were all frus-
trated by the superior tact of his enemy, and at
Toulouse he sustained the most crushing reverses
The biographer concludes by saying that Soult always
talks of his visit to England as being " one of the
brightest events of his whole life." The "Factory
Bill" is written in a languid, heavy, indecisive spirit,
and we are somewhat at a loss to know which side
the writer espouses of this question. We quote the
following amusing anecdote from the article on
Railways :
" We once heard an anecdote of a Quaker of the an-
cient city of N—. His wealth is incredible, and the
liberality which dispenses it not less so.
He received
one day a letter from America, from agentleman of
whom he had never heard, requesting a loan of 1,000/.
The 'writer stated that he also was a member of the
Society of Friends, that he intended with this money to
enter into a commercial speculation in which he was
confident of success, and that, knowing Mr.
_
--'s great
wealth, he had determined on applying to :him. S
with the singularity of this extraordinary request, and •
no doubt inifuenced by the ties of sect which prevail so
strongly in that Society, Mr. allowed his liberality
so far to prevail over his habiti of business as to grant
half the request. The rest the winds dispersed in
empty air. He authorised the applicant to draw upon
him for 5001. The draft was paid, and nothing more
passed for three years. At the end of that time Mr.
thought he wOuld ask..after his money. He wrote
to America, reminding the other of the debt, hoped his

speculation had been successful, and trusted that he
would find it convenient to repay the 5001. • The answer
was worthy of the first request. The American ac-
knowledged the loan, and said that his speculation had
been perfectly successful, and that by this 5001. he had
realised 1,500/. He then begged to rem'nd Mr. -
that the loan he had applied for was 1,000!.. that he had
only received 500/, and, consequently, ha entered into
the speculation to only half the extent vi hich he had pro-
posed ; that Mr. -'s conduct had, therefore, injured
him to the amount of 1,5001, that being the profit which
Mr. had prevented him from making ; he must,
therefore, consider Mr. - his debtor for that sum, and
requested him to remit the balance due as soon as con-
venient. We heard this anecdote from good authority
long before the events occurred which have induced us
to record it ; and we may add, for the comfort of those
who think that such demands ought to be resisted, that
Mr. - recovered his 5001. after all."

THE SUN, LONDO►N', THURSDAY EVENING, MAY 2, 1844.

the history of the corn-law of 1815, they would find
that it was passed avowedly for the purpose of keep-
ing up war prices. That law was literally passed
at the point of the bayonet, for the Members who
went down to the House to vote for it were protected
by the soldiery. That law was passed without
giving the people time to petition against it. One
petition against it was rejected, because the first
name of the signatures was not written on the same
piece of paper on which the petition was inscribed.
That must he useful for them to know, should they
petition the House on any other subject. It was very
little use to petition it on this, as their petition would
only go into the bag under the table.—(Hear, hear.)
That law was hurried through Parliament with in-
decent haste, and Mr. Homer said of it, at the time,
that it was an endeavour on the part of ,the land-
owners (who then, as now, commanded an unreason-
able majority in both Houses of Parliament) to save
their rents from an unavoidable fall. Then, as now,
we were told that so much capital had been invested,
that it would be a great injustice to do away with it.
So that because an injustice had been once committed
it was always to be continued. Now, many farms
in Scotland were taken at war prices, and the conse-
quence was that many of the landlords were owed
large arrears of rents. When he came to his property
he thought it was unpleasant to have one's head thus
always under water—he, therefore, had all the land
valued over again.—(Cheers.) Those arrears could
be of no use to a landowner unless they were in-
tended perhaps to be used at an election.—(Cheers.)
But there was a great outcry made by his neighbours
when he made this valuation ; they said he was
damaging the value of land. But he always asked
them what was the use of this nominal rent if they
did not get it ? It was only deceiving the farmers,
and deceiving themselves. And what was the case
in England? If they looked at the Morning Post,
they would see paragraphs chronicling the great
liberality of this landlord and that—of the wonder-
ful example he had set of indulgence to his tenants,
in having, at his audit, remitted them ten or twenty
per cent. on the amount of their rents. Why, this
only meant that the landlord could not get it
(Cheers.) But the consequence has been, that the
landlord, being under the belief that he had a larger
income than he really possessed, lived in a manner
far beyond what he was able to afford. And it was
a very remarkable thing that the same journal did
not now contain so many announcements as of old,
of fetes, and entertainments. There had been a
great reduction of establishments, and he (Lord
Kinnaird) who had been behind the scenes,
knew that one-half, or two-thirds of the agricultural
landlords were in a state of great embarrassment, and
that they were mainly anxious to maintain these laws,
as a drowning man catches at a straw, in the hope
that they would enable them to get out of their dif-
ficulties. But he could tell them that it would only
get them deeper into them. He had ascertained, from
the same person who valued his land, what was the
state of the land in England, and he stated that
he thought that the land of England was universally
underlet, and that it did not produce the same quan-
tity or the same profit as it might be made to yield.
The landlords then were like pigs swimming down a
stream, cutting their own throats. The landlords
were clearly not benefited by these laws; the prices
were going down. There might be one or two good
years fur them, as they were called—that was to say,
years of scarcity, when the poor man could not procure
fond for his family. But it was a miserable state of
things to consider, that when Providence had blessed the
country with an abundant harvest, it should be looked
on, as Lord Castlereagh declared it to be—a cause of
distress. An evil was made out of what ought to be
a blessing. They always saw that the seasons ran in
a kind of cycle ; they had a good harvest last year,
and, by the blessing of Providence, it seemed likely
there would be a better one this ; and perhaps they
should have the farmers crying out fur a Committee
of Inquiry into the causes of their distress. There
must be something wrong where this was the case,
and the people's mind ought to be turned to in-
quire into it. But now for the farmers. Perhaps
some might think that the corn-laws benefited them.
But if they inquired of a farmer how the times went
with him, he would say very bad indeed, there was
no trade going. There must be something wrong in
all this. Nothing was so productive, nothing ought
to give so good a return, as the land. Yet he knew
that many farmers had been reduced to abject poverty
who had expatriated' themselves, or were obliged to be-
come labourers on the land where they had held farms.
this did not arise from improvidence on their pert,
but from this reason—that by the law they were pro-
mised a certain price for their corn. They calcu-
lated, on taking their farms, on getting that •price.
They believed what their landlords and their agents
told them. But they did not get it, and they knew
what the consequence was, and what would be the
consequence so long as they continued any law so
uncertain in its operation as the corn-law. lie had
visited several agricultural counties of England, and
he confessed he had never seen such bad management
or such imperfect calculation ; the land was not made
to produce one-half of what it ought to do.
—(Hear, hear.) Even within ten miles of
London, he had asked the letting price of land, and
had been told 30s. per acre, for what was worth 3/.
He had been Old, also, that there were Scotch far-
mers who, on the same kind of land, we:e making
fortunes at the latter price, while the English
farmers were being rui▪
ned at 30s. But the Scotch
were an industrious and acute race of men, who did
not al ways believe all that was told them. But much
of their superiority was also due to the Scotch agri-
cultural labourers, who w•ere much more intelligent,
as a race of men, than the Englishmen of the same
class. They did not look upon machinery as an evil ;
on the contrary, they considered it as a great boon.
The reason why the Scotch farmer did better was
because.he had a worse climate to contend with than
the English farmer had, and a so much shorter time
for putting seed into the
of a crop. if the Eng-
ground, that even a delay of
contend with, so as to
be much better off.
eloi
hee
rdayfarmere hp ri his
vhi
aendnd tuaesdlt
irttythl, ee
heulg eo trwti
e on
tugo d
l
The Commissioners that were sent lately into the
agricultural-districts to inquire into the state of the
agricultural labouring classes, had furnished' reports
t, ion, and immorality, that
of the state of those poor people in Dorsetshire,
Hampshire, and other purely agricultural comities, of
their ignorance, destitution,
would harrow up ones soul. He had visited the pro-
part3r of Mr. Bankes, who had boasted so much in
the. house of Commons of the happy, prosperous con-
dition of his tenantry, and anything more miserable
than the condition those people presented, one could
not conceive. True, there was not so much misery
compressed together in a small space as in localities
in the manufacturing di▪
stricts; but, in their detached
cottages, one could see disease brought on by want of
proper food. He had an inetance of that being the
case, which came under his own observation. To one
of those wretched families he allowed an order on a
butcher for meat for six or eight weeks, and the
change which took place from the improvement in
their food in the appearance of this poor family, was a
proof to him that if they had got good food they
never would have been in the miserable condition in
which he found them.—(Cheers.) So much
for the boasted prosperity of the agricultural
labourer. He did not want to abuse the landlords
individually. He bad travelled through many coun-
tries, and he knew of none in which the landlords
were so inclined to do good on their estates as they
were in England. But no individual charity could
de good to any large extent. Employment was what
the poor wanted—not charity. In Sussex, in the
neighbourhood of a great corn-law man, who was
pretty well known, there were schools, which that
person lied established there ; and yet he (Lord Kin-
naird) saw several children at their homes, who did
not frequent those schools. He asked why the chil-
dren were not sent to school, and the reply he always
got was, their parents' earnings were too small to
admit of their paying for their educati▪
on—that they
amounted only to 6s. per week in winter, and 7s. per
week in summer; and a woman, showi▪
ng him a loaf,
which she said cost Bd., asked him if he thought that
sufficient to furnish food to three children and two
full-grown people per day, and if the 2s. Bd. per
week which remained was sufficient to purchase other
Was
articles, and also pay for education ? it, then,
any *cinder how they lived, or rather how they
starved, for they could be scarcely said to live ?
(Hear, hear.) It was strange to hear the arguments
to which the protectionists bad recourse to support
t
their doctrines. They would have it that they were
most numerous body in the State, and therefore
were entitled to the greatest measure of protection.
They set down every one who was not a manufac-
turer as an agriculturist, ladies and all.—(Laughter.)
In the Economist newspaper he saw a report
relative to 27 counties, including the great •majority
of the purely agricultural counties, such as Essex,
Norfolk, Lincoln, &c. In those 27 counties were not
included Yorkshire, Lancashire, Staffordshire, or War-
wickshire—all manufacturing or mining districts.
When Mr. Brotherton, in the House of Commons,
quoted that report to show that in those 27 counties,
instead of the numbers of the agricultural population
being 7- 9ths out of the whole population, it was not
1-10th, they cried out, " Oh, oh," which meant that
he told what was not true, and that they
it
not be-
lieve him. Now, by the official returns, it appeared
that not 1-Bth per cent. of those employed an those
agricultural counties were engaged in agriculture,
even including children ; and the persons occupied in
other trades, amounted to 28i per cent..; and it was
for that small fraction of the community- they were
cursed with protection laws to keep up the price of
food. It was a fact that, according asthe
increased the proportion of it employed in agriculture
diminished. In 1811, out of every 1,000 persons,
population
increasedon
there were 352 employed in agriculture, while there
were 648 engaged in other trades. In 1821, the
agriculture engaged, out of every 1,000 persons, 322 ;
other trades, 678. In 1831, agriculture engaged 281
out of every 1,000, and other trades 719; and as to 1841,