The Sun.
London, England, 1844-05-30 00:00:00

PACT Ant

LONDON, THURSDAY, MAY 30, 1844.

The South Lancashire election has terminated in
the return of a monopolist, and yet its result is a
decisive triumph of Free Trade. A very large
majority of the freeholders gave their support
to BROWN, but their votes were swamped by the
tenants-at-will, of whom more than four thousand
were brought to the towns in feudal array, marshalled
by the stewards and land-agents, and held in disci-
pline by the threat of a summary court-martial, in
case of desertion. The election has been also re-
markable for a new division of parties; many of
those landed proprietors who usually side with
the Liberals, who became, on this occasion, warm
adherents of the monopolist candidate, regard-
ing the struggle as one between the despotism
of land and the freedom of industry. They
stood by their order, and have thus shown the people
that, whenever proprietary usurpation is menaced, the
landlords, by whatever idle designation of party they
may be called, will be found banded together to
maintain their unjust and injurious class-ascendancy.
This was a lesson which many of the free traders of
Lancashire had to learn ; they have been hitherto
trammelled by old associations, and fettered by feel-
ings of attachment to titled leaders ; but they have
now been taught the real nature of the struggle
in which they are engaged; they now see clearly
that the despotism of land, irrespective of
petty and party distinctions, is arrayed against
them in one compact body, and that they
have to contend against an entire class. The array
of the serfs, for the tenants-at-will are as much adscripti
glebce as ever were the vassals of a feudal baron
would have been ludicrous if it had not been melan-
choly. Among the bands thus paraded were
many whose sons and brothers depended for
subsistence on mills and factories, which furnish
them with the employment which the nig-
gard soil of South Lancashire refuses to an
agricultural population ; these poor fellows followed
their leaders with manifest reluctance, casting a
wistful eye down the by-roads and cross-streets as if
to seek means of escape ; but they were closely
watched by the stewards and agents, more closely
than are bands of slaves by Brazilian overseers.
It is said that a gentleman travelling in the
south of England during the war saw four men
heavily ironed, securely tied on a cart, and escorted
by a file of musketeers. He inquired who the pri-
soners were, and was informed that they were
volunteers from the Tipperary Militia. There was
just as much volition in the tenants-at-will, who gave
their support to ENTWISLE, as in these truly Irish
volunteers.

At no former election did those manufacturers, who
are renegades to their own order, and traitors to their
class, exhibit such suicidal zeal. They clearly proved
the truth of the old adage, that men set them-
selves furiously against reason so soon as
they discover that reason is decidedly against
them. Since the days of Peterloo there has
not been a more thorough manifestation of the bitter
spirit which animates those who are conscious that
they are apostates to the principles of their own natu-
ral order. The names of those who took a prominent
part in the Manchester massacre, and which had for
years, for very shame, been withdrawn from public
observation, were on this occasion ostentatiously pa-
raded, as if such persons were anxious to show that
even in their ashes glow their wonted fires.
The revival of such spectral apparitions of the
worst of times revived many slumbering me-
mories ; but they were still doomed to feel
that they could now only command the votes of serfs
instead of the swords of cavalry. There was treason
in the manufacturing camp—there was union beneath
the agricultural banners; but yet, under all disad-
vantages, the free traders have improved their position
by more than a thousand votes ; they have also learned
the exact force of the enemy ; they have discovered
the elements of falsehood, and therefore of weakness,
in their own ranks, and they have thus learned the
proper course to adopt in order to ensure future
victory.

We quote the following paragraph from the Liver-
pool Albion, for the purpose of making one or two
comments on it :—" An Irish girl, aged seventeen,
who had borne a good character, was lately tried at
Stafford, for having stolen a gown and petticoat, and
was sentenced to seven years' transportation. It is
now believed that she merely took the goods to wear
on some particular occasion, without any intention of
keeping them. She heard the judgment, and remained
stupified ; in twenty-four hours she was a lunatic,
and is now in the infirmary with no hopes of reco-
very. She was a remarkably handsome girl, but
from the period of her sentence her health visibly
declined, and her hair has actually turned grey."
llad the punishment of this poor creature been duly
proportioned to the offence she had committed, and
the mitigatory circumstances of her case been taken
into consideration by the magistrate who tried her,
she would not have been in the distressing—the hope-
less condition in which she now is; the ends of jus-
tice would have been quite as satisfactorily answered ;
and the girl herself—wretched victim of the undue
severity of magisterial law—would, most probably,
have been reclaimed—for she is specially described
as having " borne a good character," up to the un-
fortunate moment when she yielded to temptation—
and, warned by humiliating experience, have become
for the rest of her days an irreproachable member of
society. But the opportunity of retrieving herself
was not afforded her; her first offence was visited, as
if it had been her twentieth ; no distinction
.was made
between her case and that of the most hardened
veteran thief; but precisely the same punishment
was awarded to her, as would have been awarded to a
BARRINGTON, or a Major SEMPLE, had they been
convicted of the same theft. This is no solitary
instance of the injudicious and impolitic harshness of
magisterial decisions. Scarcely a week passes, but
some case or other occurs in our metropolitan police-
courts, or our provincial quarter-sessions, illustrative
of the undue severity of, or the undue lenity of, those
who sit in judgment. Not unfrequently it happens
that raw lads, who have scarcely yet entered their
teens, are subjected to the dreary horrors of a gaol
for offences, for which a good flogging from their
parents or guardians would have been quite punish-
ment enough; and when the term of their imprison-
ment expires, and they are turned loose once again on
the world, what with the humiliation they have en-
dured—inflicted on them at a time of life when the
feelings are most exquisitely sensitive—and the polluted
society they have perforce kept, when they have heard
principle and honour laughed to scorn, as the mere
idle dream of fools and visionaries, they have become
callous to all just and generous impulses, and quit the
prison in a far different frame of mind to that in
which they entered it—namely, as desperate, deter-
mined reprobates. It is incalculable the mischiefs
that are done to society by this indiscriminate mode
of punishment on the part of magistrates. Many a
poor wretch, who has been banished for life, or ex-
piated his crimes on the scaffold, may trace his utter
ruin to the injudicious harshness with which he was
visited for his first offence, and which precluded all

chance of his reformation. As exercised by too
many of our magisterial authorities, law makes
almost as many rogues as it condemns, and never fails
to cut out a prodigious deal of work thrice a year for
our going Judges of Assize. " Nemo repente fuit
turpissimus," says the old Latin proverb, and there is
much wisdom in this aphorism, for in the great ma-
jority of cases it is by degrees only that men become
hardened criminals ; and were they to be treated for
their first offence with consideration and humanity
by their Judges, and allowed an opportunity of
reformation, the whole complexion of their subse-
quent career might be altered, and instead of becoming
the pests of society, and ending their lives on the
gallows, they might become honest and industrious
citizens, and, night and day, find cause to bless the
judge who treated their first fault with so much dis-
crimination and considerate forbearance. But magis-
trates seldom think of these things ; they do not
trouble their heads with nice distinctions, but con-
found all shades of guilt together; and seem to ima-
gine that their duty begins and cads in awarding the
same measure of punishment to the hardened as to the
inexperienced offender.

It does not seem to be the Premier's destiny to be
more fortunate in dealing with the silver, than he has
hitherto been in meddling with the gold element of
our currency. In former articles we have demon-
strated—(to those of our readers who had not already
arrived at the same conclusion by the light of their
own experience and judgment)—on the authority of
the "Enquirer after Truth," that the Premier was
" hurrying on the measure " now before Parliament
" with indecent haste." We have showed, from the
same pamphlet, the confirmation of our previous
charges against the Right Hon. Baronet:-Ist. That
he had really exhibited an incapacity to understand
the nature and properties of " money" in the larger
and more legitimate sense, wherein it is necessary to
consider it, in reference to any scheme for regulating
the general monetary system of a country. 2d. That
he has essentially misstated the history of" one pound"
in attempting to trace it from earlier periods of the
monarchy to the present. 3d. That he has com-
mitted a double mistake in saying that "subse-
quently to the reign of WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR, a
great alteration was made, not in the name, but in the
intrinsic value of the pound sterling, by debasements
of the currency ;" for, the " debasements" of our
currency have been probably less than those of any
other European State in all that interval ; and the
alterations of the coin, which have diminished its
" intrinsic value," have been produced by the diminu-
tion of the weight of that coin. 4th. That his asser-
tion that the pound sterling means a definite quantity
of the " precious metals of certain weight and fine-
r ness," is refuted and disproved by the very historical
data which he had adduced to establish that assertion
affirmatively. 5. That the allegation of Sir ROBERT on
the 7th inst., " that it was not until a late period of the
reign of ELIZABETH that silver, being then the stan-
dard of value, received that determinate weight, which
it retained without variation, with constant refusals
to alter it, till 1716," is utterly overthrown by the
fluctuation in the relative value or proportion of silver
to gold, in that lapse of more than 200 years, from
10.095 to 1, to 15 to 1.6. That subsequently to the
late period (namely, 43d year) in the reign of ELIZA-
BETH, this "determinate fixed value" ascribed by Sir
ROBERT PEEL to " the gold pound of the value of
20s. of our present money, was so little determinate,
so far from fixed, that it was altered, in 1604, to a
gold coin of fineness and quantity value 253.; in 1625,
to 225. 9d. ; in 1675, to 215.; and in 1815, to 20s.
It is curious to turn from blunders of fact, and
misconceptions of principles, like these, to this petu-
lant and contemptuous notice of that bold measure of
PITT'S, which, far unlike that paralysing Act of 1819,
restored the public confidence, gave energy to our
commerce, vigour to our finance, development to our
capital, and enabled us to sustain eighteen years of
subsequent warfare (intermitted only for some fifteen
months), against the combined strength and resources
the navies and armies, of all Europe, confederated
under the vigorous directorship of France. " Gold,"
said Sir ROBERT PEEL, "continued to be the measure
of value, legally and practically, until 1797, when
that fatal measure for restricting cash payments by
the Bank was passed, enabling parties to issue paper
money at their own discretion, without its being con-
vertible into coin."

We cannot quite blot out of our minds some school-
boy recollections associated with iEsor and the fable
of a dead lion, kicked by a quadruped of a different
race from that which, in a moment of post-prandial
excitement, last autumn, the Premier was betrayed
into a promise to purchase for the Tamworth
farmers, at Birmingham, at whatever price. To
read this flippant allusion to the daring experiment of
1797 and its wonderful author, does awaken recollec-
tions which it would be highly disrespectful not to
dismiss. We return, therefore, to the conclusion of
the sentence.

The " fatal measure" of 1797, was one, it seems,
" which disturbed not only the speculations, but "
(Oh horror of horrors ! Here we have the true
ground of quarrel on the part of the bullionist-
Minister with the Bank Restriction Act)—"the
theories and speculations of men with respect to the
standard of value." Happy had it been for this em-
pire had it scared Sir ROBERT out of his wits, or at
least his theory of the standard of value out of his
head ! We should then have been spared the monster
production of 1819. How bewildered Sir ROBERT
himself is in the expression of his own notions about
this "standard "—whether he means simply " mea-
sure of value," or " standard measure of value"—is
shown by the "Enquirer after Truth," in his admir-
able tract, of which we this day give a further notice.
We had intended to advert, in detail, to the Pre-
mier's plan for regulating the future circulation of
banks of issue, by an average most unfairly taken on
their issues during the last two years. Those years
were, notoriously, seasons of agricultural, and, in
most respects, of manufacturing depression. The
average is, therefore, an unfair one, as selected to
govern the extent of this future business. But we
protest against the whole principle of the proposed
interference with the joint-stock and private banks, as
to their issues, as an unwarrantable, impolitic, and most
mischievous intervention with the first element of all
trading and commercial property, namely, the unfet-
tered investment of private capital. The same inter-
ception, though contemplated with much more favour-
able intentions towards the Bank of England, is cal-
culated to work not less detrimentally, in the long
run, on the interests of that establishment. In the
disastrous disorganisation of the State Banks of the
United States we have had recent and irrefragible
evidence to the dangerous results of the mania of na-
tional legislation on the appropriation of private capital.
We are willing, albeit against hope, to suppose that
the House of Commons cannot allow itself to be led,
unresistingly as it were, into the full adoption of the
crude fancies which Sir R. PEEL has advocated, as
grave conditions that ought to be recognised for those
which shall hereafter regulate the relations of a fixed
and an inexpansible currency with a commerce per-
petually in movement, and exercising its tendencies
to expand and advance. The data on which his pro-
positions are founded have been disproved and dis-
comfited usque ad absurdum. The propositions are
not less to be distrusted than the data on which they
proceed. To affirm, in its present shape, the scheme
which the Premier has manufactured out of such ma-
terials, would be an act of folly and recklessness the
enormity of which can alone obscure, by rivalry, the
recklessness and folly of the Premier, whenever he
ventures so much beyond his depth, as he is sure to
do in the troubled waters of " banking and " cur-
rency !"

The accounts from Madrid are to the 21st. On
the evening of the 20th the Royal Family had safely
reached Quintanar. The Carlist Chief, long a faithful
adherent of Don CARLOS, and two of his officers, had
heen at last taken prisoner, and shot. The Funds
continue to fall. On the 21st, the Three per Cents.
were done at 27f 9-16 for cash, and 28 at 60
days ; and the Five per Cents. at 20 for cash, and
20i for 60 days.

The Paris papers of Monday announce the death
of the celebrated banker and politician, M. JAcctuEs
LAFFITTE. The melancholy event took place on Sun-
day evening, at seven o'clock. He had been suffering
for some time from a pulmonary complaint. A
favourable change had taken place in the morning,
and some faint hopes were entertained of his re-
covery, but soon disappointed. He was born in the
year 1767, and, consequently, bad attained his