The Sun.
London, England, 1844-08-26 00:00:00

4e- b 111114 Pittvt

LONDON, MONDAY, AUGUST 26, 1814.

The Morning Herald declares that it notices, once
more, "with no unfriendly spirit, a charge" which it
distinctly stated, a month ago, against Lord MEL-
BOUKNE and his Cabinet—namely, " that his Lordship
and his Whig colleagues were in the habit of opening
Mr. O'CoNNELL's letters in the Post-office." This
charge our Contemporary "regrets to say" rests on

•-•
1 IP, p such authority as it cannot hastily reject;" for "the
was made by Lord :MELBOURNE himself in
•• t4ent august presence in the country, and in the
presence of too many witnesses of inferior, though
total of'exalted, rank, to be retracted." And it is very
delightful to find the Herald discoursing thus ern-

phatically on the monstrous practice it now repudiates;
.... we are most unwilling to believe, implicitly, an
accusation which, if true, must brand the Whig
Cabinet with an indelible and eternal mark of infamy
and dishonour. To open the letters—of a Member of
Parliament—of a man entrusted by the people with
the solemn charge of their interests—is clearly a high
crime and misdemeanour against the constitution."
We entirely concur in—and have, on many recent
occasions, in specific terms, advocated—these senti-
ments. We denounced, in terms of equal strength
and reprobation, the scandalous offence to which Sir
JAMES GRAHAM pleaded guilty, of having issued
official warrants to authorise the detention and open-
ing of letters in their passage through the Post-office.
But the Herald found no offence on account of this
in Sir JAMES'S conduct. We, too, contended, in sub-
stince, that the practice of clandestinely opening
letters whilst they were within the assumed sacred
trusteeship of the Post-office, was "a high crime and
misdemeanour against the constitution." But that
which the Herald perceives to be manifestly such in
Lord MELBOURNE, it would seem never to have sus-
pected in Sir JAMES GRAHAM. Although it holds
that this species of delinquency in a Whig Premier, if
truly charged, "must brand a Whig Cabinet with an
indelible and eternal mark of infamy and dishonour,"
it cannot see that the same offence, in any way, should
affix to the Home Secretary of State of a Conservative
Administration any such stigma. If our memory
rightly serves us, the Herald was quite facetious at
the idea of imputing that to Sir JAMES, as officially
flagitious, or in itself indefensible, which had been no •
toriously done by all his predecessors in office. But
it appears that, however convenient it may have been
for the purpose of our Contemporary when this grave
charge, in the case of M. MAZZINI and others, was
brought forward against one of its Ministerial patrons
by Mr. THOMAS DUNCOMBB, to shirk the enormity
of the specific violation by falling back on the whole
stream of official precedents (bearing on its tide
Cabinet Ministers of all parties, and all shades of po-
litical opinions, for more than one hundred years
past), it afterwards discovered that it had been too
precipitate. By this generalizing, it had lost an un-
foreseen opportunity of "branding" a special delin-
quency, and this, too, committed by an enemy. Here
was a fault to be repaired at the earliest opportunity.
ft had allowed a whole flight pf butterflies to escape,
in order that one, in which it was interested, might
not be folded in the net of a Parliamentary inquiry.
But it soon found, that among this flight, there was
another, a bigger, a more important individual, whom
it could not afford to lose. It resumes, therefore, in
its own person, the very chace which it had depre-
cated in others. Lord MELBOURNE is an "Emperor"
of the largest class ; and so he is caught, and solemnly
pinned, and ostentatiously displayed, in the Herald's
newest specimens of political entomology, in opposi-
tion (we suppose) to Sir JAMES GRAHAM, impaled in
a similar manner in the "glass" cases of the Opposi-
ti in Collections, as " Papilio fnspiciens—(GßA-
nam)"—a description which we humbly tender for
adoption.

Now, there is something, in all this, more than
amusing, though the fun is not small of seeing politi-
tical disingenuousness reduced to the shameless incon-
sistency of decrying in its opponents, to-day, as " a
high crime and misdemeanour against the constitu-
tion," that very offence which, yesterday, in its
friends, is not only considered venial, but almost
went out of its way to vindicate. There is, beyond
this absurdity, a legitimate moral to be deduced from
such party-serving tampering with principles. It is,
that the attempt to compromise truth is sure to entail
the discomfiture of him by whom it is made. The
practice so loudly and universally complained of is
right, or it is wrong. There is no halting between
its justification and its condemnation. Even if its
defenders rely on the miserably humble plea of ex-
pediency, that plea is consistent—intelligible so far as
it goes. But it is not intelligible or consistent for
one man to-day, and neither consistent nor intel-
ligible for another to-morrow. If the Herald had
had the frankness and the manliness to admit, on a
recent occasion, that the opening of sealed letters was
a gross and detestable perversion of official privilege
in Sir JAMES qatiliAbi it might now, with perfect
tion—a gross and detestable proceeding in Lord
MELBOURNE. The difference between us is this
that, writing under no trammels of party, or inte-
rested feeling, we as indignantly and distinctly pro-
test against the constitutional misdemeanour in Lord
MELBOURNE, as we have protested against it in Sir
JAMES GRAHAM. But the Herald, after overlooking,
or palliating, or defending this course of action in its
political client, the Right Hon. Baronet, turns round
upon it, and holds it up to public execration, when
resorted to by its political adversary, the Noble Vis-
count. The fact is (for reasons which, having urged
in former articles, we will not press again upon our
readers), the: power of sealed letter-violation, whe-
ther authorised in the Secretary of State by the Act
of ANNE, and continued by Mr. LABOUCHERE'S Post-
office Acts Consolidation Bill—or not—is morally
inexcusable in theory ; whilst for reasons of sound
policy, as well as on the ground of immutable rights,
and national honour and public faith, and even on
the much-relied one of political expendiency itself, it
is absolutely indefensible. The accident of Whig or
Tory connexion cannot affect, by one jot, the strength
of the principle. What was thus tainted with wrong
and fraud in the official acts of Lord MELBOURNE,
cannot have been more pure or less to be execrated in
Sir JAMES GRAHAM.
But it may be that the Herald's emphatic instance of
the letters " of a Member of Parliament," is meant to
suggest a difference between the case of Mr. O'CoN-
NELL'S correspondence and that of M. MAZZINI. Be
it so. The " difference " is even then worthless, for
it leaves the cage established against Sir JAMES
Catanam untouched. It was charged by Mr. DUN-
COMBE that his own letters had been opened at the
Post-office. The charge was not answered, but it
was not denied. Mr. WALLACE stated, in the broadest
terms, that his letters for some time met with the same
treatment. The accusation was not repelled, for it
was true. Besides, it was admitted that diplomatic
correspondence of foreign Ministers had been, shall
we say, habitually opened, under a Conservative Go-
vernment. The Herald surely does not mean to in-
timate that it was a greater crime in a Whig Go-
vernment to have violated Mr. O'CostsiELL's corre-
spondence ? Again, we say—in few words—the
whole practice, from beginning to end, with its sta-
tutable authority, Ministerial precedents, and official
usage, is in all respects base, pitiful, and inexcusable
—a degradation to the Minister who resorts to it, a
reproach to the country which tolerates such a
Minister.

We perceive in a recent number of the London
Medical Gazette some sensible observations on the
pernicious tendencies of certain societies (exceed-
ingly common in the most densely-peopled localities
of all great towns, but more especially in those which
are situated within the manufacturing districts),
called " Burial Clubs." The scheme of those clubs
assures to the parents of an infant child, subscribing
from the period of its birth a few pence per week to
the society's funds, a certain large amount in the
event of the infant's death, to provide—in nomine ex-
pensarum—as it were, for its funeral. The rate of
the subscription and the amount of the reversionary
suns thus assured, vary, of course, with the circum.
stancess of the case, the amount of the latter being
determined, in most cases, by such considerations as
whether the subscription was commenced immediately
after the birth, or at a later period, the rate of the
weekly premium contributed, &c. But, at any rate,
it would seem that where one or both of the parents
are in constant employment, they frequently sub-
scribe to two, three, four, even six different clubs of
this nature. On the death of the child who has been
thus " entered " of such associations, the parents may,
in this way, become entitled to—and may actually re-
ceivc—sums varying in the aggregate, from 101. to
50/. even. Thus in these parents there is created and
vested an unnatural money interest in the death of
their own offspring. Are the most precious ties of
kindred always strong enough to bear and resist the
terrible force with which the iron-grasp of avarice, or
the gloomy energies of hopeless poverty, will occa-
sionally attempt to rend them asunder? Here is a
dreadful question for their consideration, who devote
themselves to the patient study of the causes of great
crimes in combination with great poverty, in town
populations. There is no disguising the appalling
truth that must form the answer to the question we
have asked. Infanticide, on a scale of fearful magni-
tude, is the result of this organized, though unin-

tended, temptation ! Some months ago, in comment-
ing on the important matters comprised in Mr. I
CHADWICK'S very interesting Report on the Sanatory
Condition of large Towns, we pointed out the evi_
dente given as to the wilful destruction—the
positive murder—by processes more or less sum-
mary, of infant children who have been made the
objects of subscription in burial clubs, by parties re-
siding in the cellars of Manchester or Glasgow, and
the squalid alleys of many other towns. That Re-
port was prepared under the instructions of, and
addressed to, the Right Hon. the Home Secretary ;
yet, up to this moment, no step (so far as we are
aware, at least) has been taken to put down, or
even to subject to the most stringent regulations and'
control these burial clubs. Nor is this all. The
highest medical authority has confirmed the reports
and sanctioned the opinions of Mr. WALKER'S inva-
luable testimony to the deleterious effects of our pre-
sent system of sepulture on the health (perhaps,
also, on the morals) of thickly populated
c: ties, &c. The crowded and disgraceful condition of
many of our church-yards and burial-grounds, as well
some belonging to Dissenting proprietory chapels, as
to chapels and churches of the Establishment, after
impregnating the atmosphere with noxious and
loathsome vapours, generating virulent fevers, an d disse-
minating disease and death wherever the ventilation is
imperfect of the street and neighbourhood in which the
putrescent gases are exhaled—compels the parties in-
terested in the fees upon interments to close their
grounds, or to become accessories to the offence
against society of poisoning the living, by subject-
ing them to the fatal influences given out by the
corrupting dead. As a middle term—a compromise
of some sort, between their duty to their species, and
the claims of their own purses—they permit their ser-
vants to violate those decent observances which the
precepts of education and religion, not less than
the instinctive prejudice of our common nature, con-
spire to make us regard as sacred. Long before
the work of decomposition has advanced to that point
at which the buried body is resolved into the dust of
its original elements—it is exhumed, chopped up,
mutilated, dishonoured, shovelled and thrown about
and mixed up with all other masses of undistinguish-
able mortality—vile and revolting in the general
hideousness of its decay, indeed ; but once—and that
perhaps recently—organised in all physical beauty,
instinct with life and passions, informed by intellect,
and embodying immortal souls. The relics of mor-
tality are thus torn from their last resting place, and
thus desecrated by the grave-digger or the sexton,
who 13 so to economise the capacity of the Golgotha
of which he is the steward, as to find the means of
making it swallow up more coffins, although their
over-accumulation has already upheaved the sepulchral
soil a foot or more above the surrounding locality.
Let those who may imagine this description to be
exaggerated peruse the Commons' Report on the
means of preserving the health of towns, &c., the sub-
sidiary report of Mr. WALKER, or the able article
contributed on this shocking but most important
subject, about two years ago, by the Westminster
Review, and the much more recent narratives in our
own columns of proceedings at the ground in Por-
tugal-street. We would refer more particularly to
the horrors proved on the evidence of witnesses, but
too competent and too credible, as to such practices
in the church-yard and the burial-ground of St.
Clement Danes, and the disgusting receptacles in
Drury-lane and Portugal-street. And yet, on
the face of that evidence, of those reports, of
the dreadful experience supplied at intervals, pre-
cisely in these localities, according to Mr. WALKER,
and the sextons or grave-diggers examined, of spotted
and other malignant fevers, consequent on the open-
ing of graves in ground saturated and still absolutely
reeking with the corruption of death, we see that
graves are still opened every week in the most
crowded part of the Strand,—for example, in Saint
Clement's Church-yard. We remember it was given
in evidence either by the able surgeon, whose name we
have mentioned, or before the Commons' Committee,
that there was one remarkable family vault, even—
within the walls (however), of that Church,
which had never been opened within the
memory of any inhabitant, without consequences
ug OFrltildi Gr 4 AgnalAwithin
Now, we cannot help thinking that the practices we
speak of, as incident to these attempts to keep up the
"busying business" in grounds, long since become,
and still acting as, pestiferous nuisances to their
neighbourhoods, must have a baneful effect upon the
moral perceptions, and the natural feelings of those
po,xrer and more hard-faring classes of the labouring
community with whom the workmen employed in
such outrages to the dead are most likely to come
into contact. The finer sympathies which may well
subsist, and are so generally found, in the bosoms of
the humblest of eur fellows, are soonest worn out by
collision with more callous natures. A medical prac-
titioner, examined before the Committee we have