The Sun.
London, England, 1845-09-10 00:00:00

etening

,ONDON, WEDNESDAY. SEPTEMBER 10, 1845.

The " New Poor-law" is one of those melancholy
efforts of human legislation to compensate for the de-
ficiencies of our social system upon which it is painful
to expatiate, owing to the intensity of the admitted evil
and the palpable though, perhaps, unavoidable defi-
ciency of the remedy. Entertaining this conviction of
the inherent difficulties which invest one of the most
perplexing problems that the science of government has
to deal with, we feel at all times reluctant to pro-
nounce a prompt opinion on cases of alleged abuse
in the administration of this law, even when the circum-
stances appear to warrant us in drawing the most dis-
tinct conclusions upon their general bearing. We are—
or desire to be—slow to listen to the impulses of our own
feelings, where these are likely to be arrayed, a priori,
against the more laborious, but more dispassionate
influences of reflection and judgment. On this account
we had determined not to interpose any opinion
of ours on the merits of the remarkable charges of
cruelty, vicious indulgence, and criminal mismanagement
which have been brought against the executive autho-
rities of the Andover Union, until the investigations that
have been instituted into them, and are still in progress,
should have been completed. And to this determination
we contiaue to adhere, so far as the merits of the case
are concerned. But we do not feel ourselves by
any means precluded from animadverting, in
the meantime, on the misconduct of any of the
parties to the pending inquiry, where it has
a direct tendency to prejudice the results
at which, if it were left to its own development, that
inquiry would naturally arrive. Now, such an inter-
ference has taken place, and is, in our opinion, calcu-
lated to produce (if public reprobation be not stre-
nuously directed against it in its incipient stages) not
simply a denial, but a corruption, of justice. If we in-
dignantly protest that this sort of proceeding is oppos, d
to the whole spirit of our judicial institutions, and the
singular equity with which the law provides fur the equal
hearing of both parties in every case which may be
brought for its adj udication, we are so far from desir-
ing to anticipate or to bias the finding of the sort Of
Commission of Inquiry now sitting, that our sole object
is to prevent others from doing so, whose conduct seems
but too well calculated, and too evidently intend d, to
produce that effect. Besides, we must always recollect
that the inherent difficulties we have adverted to as at-.
taching to the administration of an invidious but an in-
dispensable law, will only be allowed for and duly esti-
mated by the public in proportion as it shall perceive in
those who are charged with its execution an honest
intention to act fairly and justly on the spirit of its
enactments. The instant that the public jealousy of
acts performed in that execution considers that such
acts are of a nature to justify its suspicions, all the in-
trinsic difficulties will be magnified tenfold ; and from
the external pressure of the unpopularity that will
then deservedly attach to a law, thus susceptible of abuse
and perversion, it will be found impossible to enforce it
throughput the country, except in direct and dangerous
opposition to the and opinions of the people.
But if there be one law, i❑ the administration of which it
is more important than in another to enlist these opi-
nions and these feelings, it is that which secures a provi-
sion, and the distribution thereof, for the subsistence of
the destitute end helpless poor—a community always
the most costly, and, in the ratio of its numbers, the
most dangerous, to the state within which it exists.
It will be recollected that the pending inquiry
has been instituted to probe the truth or falsehood of
certain extraordinary complaints which had been made
public of the mismanagement and neglect of the paupers
that have prevailed in the Andover Union Poorhouse.
Their food had been describe ,d as being at once so in-
ferior and so scantily furnished, that on the bone crush-
ing mill, on which they were sent to labour, they ac-
tually quarrelled and fought for the putrid relics of mor-
tality which they were committing to the machinery so
often as some remaining fragment of cartillage or mar-
row still adhering to them made them desirable to the
cravings of their famished appetites. Into these and other