The Sun.
London, England, 1845-11-15 00:00:00

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LONDON, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1845.

It has not been denied by the Treasury journals, and we
may, therefore, take it for granted that the general I umour is
correct which says, that Sir ROBERT PEEL has been beaten
in the Cabinet, in an attempt to open the ports. How are
the mighty fallen! "I," the great "I " of the House of
Commons—he who for four years has led his colleagues, as
so many sheep to the slaughter, into every imaginable con-
tradiction to their former professions—he who could even
venture rudely to push aside the aspiring heir of the house
of Derby when he wanted to speak, and the Premier feared
his indiscretion—" the gentleman," as the Duke of WEL-
LINGTON is said to call him with expressive emphasis, who
has managed the Duke, and every one, and everything—
"the gentleman," beaten by his own dummies, is, it must
be confessed, a remarkable, but yet not altogether astonishing,
event. Sir R. PEEL is probably himself the man most sur-
prised. From men who have so long been so submissive be
could not have been prepared for resistance. But every one
knows that dulness is a double-edged weapon. The ass will
work steadily and quietly, till something puts his
back up, and then there is no quieting or managing the
animal. The unreasoning dunce may long be an useful in-
strument ; but if he takes to opposing his master, his master
cannot reason with him either. Sir ROBERT has long found
his account in his Dunciad. He has now come to learn its
dangerous and disagreeable side.
Oh ! what an opportunity has been lost for Sir ROBERT in
this refusal of his colleagues to open the ports. It would
have been the coup de grace of the corn-laws. For none of
his innumerable changes had Sir ROBERT PEEL ever so good
a case as he would have had for this act, and its necessary
sequel, repeal of" the corn-laws by the Legislature. He
would have met Parliament with confidence, defending what
he had done by the will of PROVIDENCE; or, as Sir JAMES
GRAItAm would say, by " difficulties which no human pru-
dence could avert ;" or by the pious Lord AsitLEY as " des-
tiny." To any opposition to permanent repeal of the corn-
laws, he might have answered, " We have repealed them ;
as it has been done, why not stay as you are ?"
Tie might have treated corn law repeal as un
fait accompli The great problem which must sooner or later
be settled—which Sir ROBERT burns to settle himself—which
till lately no one exactly saw his way to the settlement of—
and which is now again, the ports not being opened, thrown
on the wide sea of futurity—would have been solved easily,
and Sir ROBERT would have had a fresh start of power. But
the decision of the Cabinet has changed all this.
Mr. COBDEN, in his admirable speech at Birmingham, did
not overstate the case :
" But for Sir R. Peel, what a critical moment in his fortune has
now passed. I say passed, for let hire do the act at the end of this
month which he ought to have done ten days ago, still he will not
be the same man he would have been had he done it then. There
is not even a child in statesmanship that could not have then told
Sir R. Peel, 'Now is the critical period of your political fortune----this
is the tideof your political life; if you take it at its flood, you goon to
such a fortune as no statesman ever attained in this country before;
but if you miss it—if you allow the flood to pass by you—you will
prove to the world that you have been all your life a pretender, and
a mere hoax on the credulity of your countrymen.—((treat
cheering.) We have all been thinking, for some time past, that
Peel was the man—not the coming man—but the come man.—
( A laugh.) Everybody began to say, Peel is the man for a
practical statesman, to govern a practical people, and 1 have no
hesitation in saying that if Sir R. Peel had taken the course I
have suggested, of boldly bearding the Iron Duke—(A laugh)—
and at once dismissing him and his tail from the Cabinet—l have
no hesitation in raying, so far as Lancashire and Yorkshire are
coacerned, he would have rallied around him the whole of the
mighty population of these counties as one man in his support.
We should have buried Whig and Tory from the moment we found
Sir Robert Peel had abolished the corn-laws.—(Hear, hear.)"

And what will Sir RonEnT do now as to opening the ports
at the end of a month? We may take for granted that they
will not be opened now. At the end of a month we shall
probably have prices that will open the ports to corn.
Nothing done now and the sliding.scale are to carry Sir
ROBERT through the crisis—so his colleagues have ruled ;
and the versatile Premier will now prepare to meet Parlia-
ment with an eulogy on the sliding-scale, and to oppose
corn-law repeal, against Mr. Escorr, against Captain Rove,
against Lord ASHLEY, against " destiny ;" and we shall
have another session of Parliamentary struggles, perhaps
another general election, before this great question reaches a
victorious consummation.

We trust the example of the Birmingham meeting, and
the advice of Mr. VailEas and Mr. CORDEN, will not be
thrown away; and that from one end of the kingdom to the
other the Cabinet policy and the corn-laws will be denounced
at public meetings between this and the meeting of Par-
liament.

Our readers will have perused with mingled feelings of
horror and astonishment the details we have published of the
preliminary examination of sixteen prisoners before Mr.
BRODEBIP, the Magistratediktithe Mama rolice-coura
!Ir

charge of mutiny on the high seas. It is usually our course
to abstain from offering any remarks on cases that are still
pending, in those stages which immediately precede their
remission before the superior law courts Of criminal jurisdic-
tion. Of course such abstinence isgenerally desirable, in order
that the case of the accused may be as little prejudiced
as possible by its being brought under the consideration of
the public in a garbled and incomplete state, as to the evi-
dence which mast finally determine the fate of the charge.
It may, however, and occasionally does, happen that there
are circumstances connected with this preliminary stage of a
case which are calculated to compromise, eventually, the
great ends of justice, irrespective of the particular case of the
prosecutor or the accused. It then becomes our duty to in-
dicate at once the point from which a result every way so
prejudicial to the course of law and the welfare of society
may be likely to ensue. Such a point, we think, clearly
occurs in the proceedings before Mr. BRODERIP against the
sixteen prisoners so charged with mutiny on board the ship
Tory.

The master of that vessel in his statement enters into
details so confused and unsatisfactory, that he is repeatedly
remonstrated with, in the course of it, by the Magis-
trate, and only excused by his own counsel on the score of
his not having yet got over the protracted excitement he had
sustained, on a long voyage from Ascension Island, through
the avowed determination (and certain overt acts of his
crew tending to confirm it) of the mutineers to take away
his life. The statement having been gone through,
the master is questioned by the Magistrate—first, whether
he intends to charge the whole of the prisoners with mutiny ;
and his answer being assumed to be in the negative (for it
is difficult to determine whether or not such is the fact), he
is asked, secondly, whom he does mean to charge by name ?
It then appears not only that he has not made up his mind on
this important matter, but he is actually uncertain whether
one of the men, whom he had already described to the Magis-
trate as standing by him and assisting him to make head
against the mutineers, be not the individual who had been
among the most guilty of the offenders; and be so distinctly
abandons the case against another, whom his previous state-
ment had proved a prominent actor in the scenes of mutiny,
that that accused is desired by the Magistrate to stand out
of the dock; though being otherwise inculpated, he is to " be
looked after" by the police. Now, when the prisoners are
called on for their defence, one of them enters into a narra-
tive--amply confirmed by most of the others—of the conduct
of this very master himself, the most brutal, the most re-
volting, the most demoniacally ferocious which, we verily
believe, was ever disclosed in an English court
of justice. Of the crimes involved in that terrific
narrative, murder, and the indulgence of the most
inordinate revenge, are the least in degree, the least
appalling in their development. The mutiny is shown
by the narrative of this witness, a man named YELVERTON,
to have been—if we credit his evidence—the actual and in-
evitable result of the ferocity of the master. Inflamed by
habitual intoxication to a pitch of blood-seeking frenzy, to
which the history of such monsters of piratical cruelty and
wickedness as TEACH (or Blackbeard),• or Sir WILLIAM
Mono.kx, or any of the buccaneers, French or Spanish, or
Dutch or English, of the seventeenth century,
supplies no adequate parallel ; this very master is
accused by YELVERTON and others of crimes that,
even to contemplate, thrills one's imagination with horror,
and to the bloody details of which a female in the Court, who
had been a passenger by this ship throughout the various
dreadful tragedies whereof it was the theatre, listened with
a degree of attention only interrupted by the sobs and the
tears which their recital occasioned—she volunteering her
testimony) in confirmation of that of YELVERTON, as an eye-
witness of many of the dreadful facts deposed to. A brave
man, the chief mate, stabbed at, cut at, hewn, hacked
' and pursued by the drunken maniac of a master, was
stated' by YELVERTON and another to have jumped over-
board, preferring, haply, to rush upon his fate in the surg-
ing boSom of the deep, than to linger out a few more
hours of insult, torture, and mutilation under the weapon
of his. savage persecutor. A less to be lamented individual,
was a seaman—first goaded to mutiny— (according to the
defence of the accused,—for the reader will excuse our anx-
iety to impress npon his attention, that we treat these state-
ments not as facts, but as portions of the statements made to
the Magistrate)—and afterwards induced by the master to join
him an intimidating, maiming, and insulting the other sailors
and apprentices, finally became the victim of his implacable
cruelty. Hacked to pieces, while yet living, an inch of the
man cut off every hour, or so, then hauled down to the
masters's cabin with instruments of torture, suffocated or
strangled there, as it is affirmed—and in that condition
brought up on deck and there placed opposite the human
fiend whom his murder could not satisfy, in order to be con-
templated, gloated over, and made a mark for his naked
cutlass ! The name of this victim is given as MARS. Another
charge against this captain, for there is still another horror
yet but partially unveiled, imputes to him, by construction,
the poisoning of another of his mates. But we will not run
the risk of disgusting the public, by dwelling longer on a
tale of " savagery " which if it be true, but in the main,
sufficiently proves how immeasurably the guilt of human
actions may sometimes exceed all the invention of the most
prurient imaginations. Our purpose is to ask, (1), why Mr..
BRODERIP, having put the prisoner CORDOVIALLO out of the:
dock, and thereby established his competence to give evi-
denceagsinst the master, did nct put the master himself in
the dock, and take the Italian's evidence to any matters
which bad been deposed to by YELVERTON (2), why
Mr. BRODEItIP did not pursue the same course with
regard to the female passenger who tendered her evidence?
(3), Why Mr. BRODERIP, with so extraordinary a case, r re-
sumptive and circumstantial as was before him, did not reel
himself imperatively called on to commit Mr. CLARKSON'S
client—the accuser, Captain JOHNSON, master of the Tory—
to Newgate, or at least to strict confinement and security in
one of her MAJESTY'S gaols, until the day on which all the
prisoners stand remanded, instead of simply contenting him-
self with the undertaking of a police inspector, that ,:the
captain shall be forthcoming? Such an indulgence, under
circumstances of so grave and suspicious a character, liras
surely never extended by any other magistrate to a party in
the master's position. What there was in JOHNSON'S case
to merit, or even to excuse such an indulgence, we are
utterly unable to comprehend!

It will be seen from an account given in another pat of
The Sun that the controversy between the Press and the Bar
has been brought to the only termination that could II ave
been anticipated. The question was discussed on Wedn es day
at a meeting of Queen's Counsel, held for the purpose, and
the meeting came to the resolution " that there was no• ob-
jection to the practice of circuit and other reporting by me tu-
bers of the bar." This will enable the gentlemen of ;the
Oxford and Western Circuit, who passed the "exclusion bit,."
to get out of their difficulties without much dis-
grace, but we hope the result will be a warning
to them and to others for the future against
any similar attempts to inflict an act of great injustice on
the most industrious, though not the most wealthy members
of the bar, and to cast a stigma on every one connected with
the newspaper press. They might easily have seen that such
an invidious, unfair, and uncalled-for distinction would na-
turally excite the hostility of all persons connected with
newspapers— a class by no means to be despised—and that
in a very few months the names of the leading members on
the two expurgated circuits would be entirely forgotten by
the public. We do not rejoice over the victory as a matter
for triumph ; but we rejoice that these gentlemen have seen
the error of their ways, and that they acknowledge the ne-
cessity of doing to others as they would wish others to do
unto them.

Accounts from Madrid of the 7th state that the disturb-
ances at 'Valencia had been completely put down, but that
symptoms of insurrection had been manifested at Saragossa.
Several officers bad been arrested, but no outbreak had taken
place. The resignation of General ConnovA had been
accepted by the Governmen
The Three per Cents. sold for 36141 a at GO days, and
30% % at shorter dates; the Five per Cents., at 25; and the
Debt without Interest, at 81,4 % for time.

The only article of interest in the Paris papers appears in
the Journal des Debate. It contains an able and impartial
character, though tinged, perhaps, with a little flattery, of
Marshal Sow', on his final retirement from the War-office.
The veteran Marshal, whether as regards the length of his
services, or the able manner in which be conducted the
armies of France, or latterly his employment under both the
Bourbon and Orleans dynasty in important places of trust, is
the most remarkable man, excepting, perhaps, the KING
himself, now living in France. By his skilful generalship
at the close of the Peninsular campaigns, and the courage
which be thereby inspired into his troops, it is admitted
on all hands that he gave WELLINGTON more trouble
and caused more bard fighting than any other Gene-
ral during these long and harrassing campaigns.
When in this country- full justice was done to him by the
English nation and to his honour ; even when he spoke to un-
willing auditors, be took care to let his countrymen know
that a sense of it was indelibly impressed on his heart. We
have therefore much pleasure in extracting this eulogium,
written by One of his own countrymen :—"The K. 12.70 and
the Ministry have yielded with regret to the wishes of Mar-
shal SOULT to quit the War Department. For the last five
years no person bad perceived that age had in the slightest
degree lessened the activity of the illustrious Marshal.
He alone, from scruples which must be respected whilst they
are deplored, has imagined that the time was come to
leave to others functions demanding a vigilance and
assiduity, without any respite. We believe that the youngest
men would End it difficult to equal the zeal and energy of the
old Marshal ; his capacity, which entered into all kinds of de..
tail ; that firm will, which foresaw or decided every difficulty
that vigour of command, which is the first of qualities in a
Minister of War ! Therefore, in the choice of the suc-
cessor to the Marshal, the KING and the Cabinet have
been particularly guided by the desire to find men formed in
some measure under the eyes of the Minister whom the
country and the army were about to lose, who might have
been the depositories of his traditions, and who considered
it a merit to preserve them intact. It was not wished, and
very properly, that the retreat of the Minister should cause a
revolution in the War Department. It is a difficult task to
replace Marshal SOULT, and it will be no so small honour to
cause his retirement to be as little felt as possible. Age being,
besides, the sole motive that determined the Marshal to close
his remarkable and laborious career as administrator, nothing
prevented his preserving the Presidentship of the Council.
His colleagnes do not conceal the urgent manner in which they
insisted on keeping him at their head; on the contrary, they
consider it an honour to have done so. The Opposition may