The Sun.
London, England, 1842-05-13 00:00:00

SPIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS.

FROM THE EVENING PAPIMS OF YESTERDAY.

GLOBE.—Time—the infallible test of sincerity—
has effected the object of Tory hopes, by placing the
powers of government in Tory hands. The New
Poor-law, which at the last two elections was used
by the Tory candidates as a topic of inflammatory in-
vective against the Whigs, on whom they charged
not only its original authorship, but the severities
which incidentally arose out of its administration—
this much-maligned law was about to expire just
as the Tories possessed themselves of the Govern-
ment. One of their first acts, as a Tory majority,
was to consent to a Bill for continuing the law in its
pristine form until the 31st of July neat. This the
public were assured by the Tory organs was only to
enable the Cabinet of Sir Robert Peel to mature those
comprehensive changes in the law that were in con-
templation, by which the Bill would be so completely
deprived of every stringent test and severe provision,
that when it came forth from the Cabinet to the House
of Commons, and was exhibited to the country, it
would be a monument of praise to the new, and a
standing reproach to the old Government ! It has
been, we doubt not, carefully and anxiously con-
sidered. We do not question that each of its leading
provisions has been the subject of deliberation, not
merely by the department of the Government on which
more immediately devolved the duty of preparing the
nexßill, but by the entire Cabinet. With what result?
With the exception of the bastardy clause, which is to
be somewhat modified, the machinery and operation
of the Bill are to remain substantially the same as
under the present law. In the language of the
Times, Sir James Graham's Bill is a mere copy of
that brought in by Lord John Russell. The occu-
piers of the Tory benches, who had vituperated the
law and its authors from the hustings, now listened
to the announcement of a similar measure from
her Majesty's Government with perfect acquiescence
in its wisdom and humanity ! As though to afford
a demonstration of the perfect subjection to which
the loudest clamourers against the Bill have been
reduced by the discipline of the Tory Premier,
the " Gilbert Unions ' are swept away by the
proposed Bill. Thui the united parishes, which
possessed the powers of local government by the Act,
generally known as the " Gilbert Act," and which
powers were claimed for the parishes of the entire
kingdom by those who advocated the abolition of the
Central Commissioners, are brought under the general
law. The invidious distinction between the " Gilbert
Unions," and the " New Poor-law Unions," which
was employed for the purposes of instituting compa-
risons between the treatment of the paupers under the
two systems, and the powers of out-door relief to able-
belied paupers given to the guardians of the former,
and withheld from the latter, will now no longer
exist. The law will be, as we think it ought to be,
universal in its operation.
STANDARD.—The draft of the New Poor-law
Bill, and the speech by which Sir James Graham in.
troduced the measure last night, place us in a very
painful situation—a situation which, we believe, will
be equally painful to all the honest supporters of
Sir Robert Peel's administration. The Bill, will,
doubtless, pass, because men will prefer any alterna-
tive ,to a return to Whig-Radical government; but
it will pass at a fearful cost to the Conservative
party. All the declarations against the vices
of the New Poor-law, which turned so many
elections last summer, will be set down as sheer
hypocrisy, and the charge will derive counte
nance from too many manifestations of selfishness,
made in opposition to the Corn-laws, the Income-
tax, and the Tariff. It will be said, and plausibly
said, that the poor are thought of only on the hustings.
We do not disguise from ourselves that the Ministers
are placed in a position of great difficulty with re-
spect to the Poor-laws. They find a law in existence
which has been long enough in force to have struck
roots, branching through all the orders of society :
to tear up this law at once by the roots would produce
little short of a social revolution. That the law has
utterly failed of all that was promised for it ; that, in-
stead of raising the price of labour, it has lowered
wages ; that, instead of improving morals, by its bas-
tardy clauses, it has greatly corrupted the mo-
rals of the lower orders ; that, instead of di-
minishing the number of paupers, it has fright-
fully augmented that number—for who will ven-
ture to say that eight years ago every six-
teenth Englishman was a pauper, absolutely
and totally dependent upon the poor-rate ?—that
these have been the effects of the new law is noto-
rious, and even confessed. Equally notorious is it
that the condition of the pauper class, now aug-
mented to more than one million of our fellow-citizens,
has been made infinitely more miserable. And what
has been the counterbalancing good ?—a saving in the
poor-rates of a sum less than used to be wasted in liti-
gation under the old law, and which, therefore, might
have been saved without touching the legitimate autho-
rity of the ratepayers, or the condition of the poor ;
which might have been saved by the erection of a cheap
tribunal to determine settlement cases ; or, better still,
by a comprehensive reform in the administration
( f the law, rendering all law proceedings cheap.
This is the history of the working of that law
which Ministers have inherited, and which we
acknowledge it would be dangerous to extirpate by
a summary enactment; but surely between its con-
tinuance in all its vices, and a summary extinction,
there might be found a better mean than that which
Sir James Graham appears to suggest—some mean,
corrective of the principle of the law, for there is
its greatest vice. That principle is to treat poverty
as a crime, punishable by death, or the pains of the
workhouse. That out-door relief has been allowed
proves nothing against the principle. Relief may
mean anything—half-starvation, or three-quarters
starvation, or whatever else falls short of suffering the
object to die of famine; but that the out-door relief
spoken of must be something worse than the work-
house treatment and dietary must be plain, for, as
Men do not love imprisonment, were not the out-
door relief worse than the workhouse, every work-
house in the kingdom would be untenanted.
COURIER.—Sir Jam-es Graham, ably prepared
and courageously primed, ventured last evening to
approach the most momentous question of all the
Session. After a speech of unquestionable power,
and remarkably disciplined temper, he asked and
obtained leave to bring in the Bill long talked about,
yet ever shrinkingly postponed till now, for the con-
tinuation and amendment of the new Poor-law. He
preluded the motion and the main argument of the
measure by a laboured dissertation on the history
of poor-laws, and he cited carefully, as the chief au-
thorities in support of the new system, two names of
very opposite character, of opinions very dissonant in
general, of talents strangely contradictory, and of weight
in the mind's eye of the nation most unequally dis-
proportioned, but who yet, on this one most important
question of questions were singularly unanimous in
accord—we refer to the Great Duke and exsLord
Chancellor Brougham. On almost any subject to
which he may.apply the extraordinary acuteness of
his comprehensive mind, we need not say that we
are disposed to bow with almost unquestioning de-
ference to the conclusions of the Duke of Welling-
ton. Therefore it is always with the deepest re-
gret that we feel ourselves conscientiously compelled
to withdraw, as it were, our allegiance on the pre-
sent, as on all occasions, where the new Poor-law and
its administration are the order of the day and of dis-
cussion. Our own minds have long been made up on
the fact that the new Poor-law system is neither
more nor less than an unconstitutional abrogation of
the rights of the subject, for, in despite of Lord
Brougham, we hold that the right to relief's abstractedly
a right as sacred at the least as that of property,
however practically it may be abolished, or cut,
carved, and crippled in its proportions by legislation.
And the new system moreover is as unchristian in
its provisions as it is unconstitutional in principle.
And what does the argument of Sir Janies Graham,
amount to, when labouring to show that the sys-
tem has not worked with the unvarying hardships
charged upon it, but that in, truth the system, as a
whole, has not been applied in all its naked hide-
ousness of uniformity. Why, such being the
fact, one of the great and leading features of the
new Poor-law, one which in Lord Brougham's
eyes, and in the eyes of all its eulogists and
advocates, constituted its chief recommendation, has
been abandoned, vitiated, violated, at will or dis-
cretion, by the very authorities to whom its enforce-
ment was delegated. That leading feature was its
boasted uniformity ; its chief beauty was said to be;
that by one simple law, and by one uniform and un-;
varying administration in practice, the 12,000 hete-
rogeneous and differing systems prevailing in as many
parishes
anodf the kingdom, would at once, with all their
abuses
be remedied and harmoniously
replaced.

The General Steam Navigation Company's vessel,
the Giraffe, from Rotterdam, arrived off the Custom-house this
morning, with the Dutch papers of yesterday. They contain
an account of the conflagration at Hamburgh, which, however,
does not come down later than that already published in The
Sun. A letter from Vitteaux, in France, appears in the
Journal de la Haye, which gives a lamentable description of a
storm of rain and hail that occurred there on Saturday even-
ing. The whole place was suddenly deluged with natei,
reaching to the tops of the houses, so thatthe country appeared
like one large lake. The storm broke with so much rapidity,
that no assistance could be rendered to the inhabitants, the
greater portion of whom took refuge in the highest lofts and
garrets, but several were afterwards found dead in their houses.
One of the bridges was carried away, together with some of
the adjoining houses. Two similar storms have occurred in
this place, one in 1789, and the second in 1832.
BRUSSELS, MAY B.—A person who has just visited
our communes on the frontiers of France, has observed with
regret that emigration to a considerable extent is taking place
anions the families of our weavers. In the little village of
Templeuve alone there are more than 100 houses of emigrants
to be let. It was at Tureoing, Roubaix, and other places in
the department of the north that they found employment and
subsistence. A workman who could not gain more than Bd. a
week in Belgium, by working 15 hours in a day, gains 3f, in
France in a week by working only 12 hours a day. It said
that if this continues 25,000 Flemish families will have passed
the frontier by the end of the year.