The Sun.
London, England, 1845-04-14 00:00:00

the same feelings and power as we had ? And were we to
forget that this hypothetical case which he was putting was
actually the case in Ireland ? Mr. O'Connell regarded the
proposition of the Right Hon. Baronet as a " bidding" against
him ; he (Mr. O'Connell) knew very well that if justice were
done to Ireland, Ireland would no longer seek to be divided
from us, but would be our right hand in the time of war,
and our friendly ally in the time of peace. Taking into con-
sideration the religious and moral aspect of Ireland, be would
ask if the proposed grant could be. considered in any other
light than as a donation given to the people in the best form ?
If he were asked the mode in which he could do the greatest
good at the least possible cost, he should say it would be by
educating the Irish priests. It would be a contribution made
in the best form for educating the Irish people. The grant
was objected to on the score of religious principle. These
arguments were difficult to reply to, and for the most part
be could not understand them. They eluded his under-
standing altogether. He was told the objection was that the
teaching at Maynooth was a teaching of error, and they
objected to support such teaching. He had in his hand a
very remarkable report of a speech made at Liverpool.
He wished to call the attention of the Hou.e to observations
made upon the present question, by a reverend gentleman at
Liverpool (as we understood). He really felt it necessery
to beg pardon of the House for bringing upon them a mode
of treating the present question which was in all respects
so objectionable, but yet the manner in which the reve-
rend gentleman discussed this matter was, in its way, very
striking. He said—" Was God's word to be practically
supreme, or not ?" and then he went on to ob,erve,
that though no part of the Bible was ob'cure, cer-
tainly not unintelligible ; yet there were some pictures
of the sacred Scriptures so characterised by extreme dearth se,
that to doubt their meaning was little less than to deny the use
of the Bible itself. The Bible prohibited the bowing down to
graven images, it prohibited adultery, it p ohibi!ed theft.
Then he added that inasmuch as Parliament would not think
of endowing a college for promoting adutery or theft, so
they ought not to endow a college which inculcated the prac-
tice of bowing down to graven images. Now he would ap-
peal to Hon. Members to say, if that was the manner in
which such a question as the present ought to be argued
could he or any Member be fairly called upon to meet such
arguments ? For his part, he should not attempt to do any-
thing of the sort. Neither should he seek to answer those
who affirmed that their views of that which was the truth
ought alone to be accepted as the truth. Who should say
what was the truth as compared with the opinions of other
men? For the reasons, then, which he had stated, he gave to
the grant his most cordial support.
Lord NORTHLAND next rose, but owing to the con-
fusion which prevailed in the House, the few observations
which the Noble Lord made were neally inaudible. He was
understood to say that he felt great regret at being thus
obliged, for the first time, to differ from her Alajesty's Go-
vernment.

On the motion of Mr. HAWES the debate was then ad-
journed.

SPIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS.

PROM THE EVENING PAPERS OF SATURDAY.

GLOBE.—The-Sugar Duties' Bill was ushered to its third
reading in the House of Lords last night, with a repetition
of much of the transparent sophistry with which it had been
supported in its previous stages. Lord Dalhousie modestly in-
troduced the subject with a repetition of the chief arguments
in its favour—declaring that the measure would cheapen sugar
to the middle and lower classes—that the classification sys-
tem worked well in France, the United States, Sweden
and Java—and that slave-holding Louisiana could not afford
to send her sugar to this country. That the penny
saved on the pound of sugar is to be returned in the income-
tax—that no classification which can be fairly compared
with ours is, or ever has been, in successful opera-
tion, either in the countries referred to, or any
other—and that sugar the produce of slave-labour
has already entered our market for home con-
sumption—the Noble Lord appears to have forgotten. We
cannot be surprised at this. When it becomes necessary
to make short work of facts and principles, wide views and
long dates are excessively inconvenient. No man who kept
a retentive memory would be fit to preside at the Board of
Trade under Si: Robert Peel. The presence of Lord
Brougham gave an intere ,t to the debate, without which we
should probably not have felt tempted to notice it. His
Lordship gallantly volunteered a defence of the Bill; and,
with his usual eccentricity, must needs do so upon ground
untrodden by any one else. The fine distinction already drawn
by the friends of the measure between slave-importing and
merely slave-holding States, is not half fine enough for his
Lordship. There is a vulgar breadth about the sophism
which appears to disgust him. He sees that the work is
but half done, and that clumsily; and with all the skill of a
retired professor, and all the ardour of an amateur, he sels
himself to finish it. Thus, as to North America :—The
slave trade is abolished ; the war-captives of the inte-
rior of Africa are no longer saved from sacrifice or
slavery at home to be sent thither—no longer torn from
their kindred, and dragged through the horrors of the middle
passage, to swell the field-gangs of Louisiana or Carolina.
They are now born and brought up in the land of their
slavery. Yet, beyond doubt. there is something to be said
on the other side of the case. The field labour of the
Southern States still, as of old, kills the slave before
he can produce another to succeed him. Importation
is still necessary. And it is effected through the
agency of the Northern States ; who, employing their
slaves chiefly in domestic offices, take advantage of their
more easy condition to breed slaves for the destructive
labour of the south. Lord Brougham completes the case
previously defective, by broadly stating this fact—pushes
the distinction between Cuba and lArazil and the Southern
States to the extreme verge of the truth—where, in other
hands, it would disappear altogether—and declares that
though he must set his face against receiving sugar of the
tbrmer, 3et when called upon to give his sanction to our
consuming that of the latter, it is " a totally different con-
sideration, and gives rise to different feelings, different argu-
ments, and leads to a different conclusion !" No doubt the
young and mature negroes who are annually selected for the
Southern market by the travelling dealers, chain d in gangs.
and driven seven or eight hundred miles to the marts where
they are to be sold like cattle to the highest bidder, find the
forced separation from their kindred extremely painful ;
they can have no more hope of return than if they were
about to cross the Atlantic; and they undoubtedly go to sup-
ply a demand caused by the gradual extermination of those
who have preceded them. "But he denied that this was as
bad as the slave-trade of Africa. Could any man who ever
heard of the horrors of a slave ship, of the rapine
and murder committed for the purpose of kidnapping
the unhappy slaves, and, above all, of the wholesale
murders committed on board the vessels going the
middle passage—could any man put those horrors on
the same footing with the intercourse between different
parts of the same country?" On the whole, we think it
extremely probable that where Lord Brougham lays down
his distinction, a negro would see no difference. As to
" the horrors of the middle passage," in particular, it
is quite time that we should begin, in the use of this
phrase, to recognise the qualification so indubitably es-
tablished by Mr. Macgregor Laird and others, who have
practically investigated the subject. .At least two-
thirds of these "horrors" are due solely to our attempt
forcibly to suppress the traffic. 'lt has given to it all the
characteristics of a smuggling trade—thrown it entirely into
the hands of the most desperate men—made its profits enor-
mously high—and, by placing every conceivable obstacle
in the way of supplying the unhappy negroes with either
air, water, or food, during their passage, has driven those
engaged in the trade to look for their profit not to the ori-
ginal cargo, but to its miserable remnant when thinned by
suffocation, starvation, and disease. None can detest slavery
iu every form more heartily than we do; but we are not pre-
pared to admit that good intentions excuse either errors in
reasoning or blunders in action. The merit of our labours
on behalf of the negro race must be estimated not so much
by what we feel for their sufferings, as by what we do for
their diminution ; and by this standard, whatever Lord
Brougham may say, neither our naval operations on the
African coast, nor the recent modifications of the sugar mo-
nopoly, will bear a very critical examination.
ST aNDARD.—The debate in the House of Commons
last night has, we own, disappointed us. It is true that the
best speeches—for those of Mr. Colquhoun and Mr. Grogan
were incomparably the best—were opposed to the conclu-
sion which, upon most painful and deliberate considera-
tion, we have ourselves arrived at, and therefore we
are incompetent judges of their. merit. These speeches
would have convinced us if anything could—but they
have failed. Mr. Gladstone's speech is, however, the
great occasion of our disappointment, though with the full
knowledge of that able gentleman's views on Church and
religious questions, which he has so candidly given to the
public, the speech ought not to have disappointed any
one. Wishing, however, to commend where we can one
whom we most highly respect, and whose weakness, we
may remark, is rather the weakness of his position
than proper to himself, let us acknowledge that Mr.
Gladstone put forward three points with fairness
and with effect—the implied contract to support a
college in which Roman Catholic priests might be educated,
the utter fallacy of the notion that any restitution is due
to Roman Catholics, and the large share which hostility
to the principle of an established church has in provoking
the present agitation. The failure in Mr. Gladstone's
argument arises from the peculiar views which he
holds on religious policy. Rejecting the exercise of
reason and the appeal to private judgment in religious
inquiry, he can of course see no prospect of an ad-
vance towards religious truth in the general advance of know-
ledge. Regarding Protestantism, with Mr. Palmer, of Mag-
dalen, as a simple negation, he assumes that whatever footing
is for a moment allowed to Romanism, Romanism, as not
being a simple negation, but something positive, must make
good, and even make more extensive. The testimony
of history is against Mr. Gladetone's notions in
this respect, but a better answer is, that Protestan-
tism is not a simple negation—it is the Gospel, and
the whole Gospel ; aird it we are Christians we must believe
that, with the aid of enlightened inquiry and the appeal to
honest judgment, the Gospel will in the end prevail over
all error, though error may be for a time pro-
tected by ignorance or tyranny. We hope that there
is nothing either ridiculous or visionary in this opinion.
We do not attempt rashly to measure the proximity
of the consummation, but we submit that, according
to all human calculation, the extension of knowledge must
be hereafter, as it has been hitherto, the means. Again,
Mr. Gladstone speaks of the success of the Bill before Par-
liament as removing all religious objections to the general
endowment of the Roman Catholic clergy (so at least we un-
derstand him). It would be difficult to imagine an argument
more calculated to impede the progress of the measure than
this. For ourselves, if we believed the present Bill likely to
produce the suggested effect, we should at once renounce it.
We do not, however, see the slightest connexion between
the measure before Parliament and the threatened endow-
ment. What is the measure before Parliament? The State
finds an institution in which are educated four hundred and
forty persons, hereafter to exercise an influence over a large
proportion of the people, which influence the State cannot
control. These four hundred and forty persons are
educated imperfectly, lodged and fed miserably, and trained
in sordid habits, which, because they are sordid, are sour, and
such as, by excluding them from good company and its
sympathies, make of them enemies to all above them. The
State gives money to provide better education, better food
and lodging, and to elevate the habits of the 440.
What religious scruples are comprised by this that would
not be compromised as much by giving the means
of instruction, frieze clothing, dry lodging, and habits
of order to a still inferior class of Roman Catholics ? The
question seems, indeed, to resolve itself into this—are we
forbidden to render any act of kindness to our fellow
citizens, if they happen to be Roman Catholics ?
But we may be answered, these persons are in
preparation for the Roman Catholic Church. What,
we ask, is that to us ? We do not enjoin upon
them to study Roman Catholic tenets, or to hold such tenets.
We make no condition that every Maynooth student shall
become a Roman Catholicpriest. We distinctly disclaim all
interference with their religious studies. There is nothing in
the Bill before Parliament to prevent the trustees, professors,
and students of Maynooth joining the Church of Eng-
land to-morrow. We give them so much money, the
greater part of it to be applied to provide lodging, food, and
raiment for four or five hundred of our fellow-subjects—
in this surely no religious principle is compromised—the
rest to be applied, at their own discretion and upon their
own responsibility, to provide the means of education. If
they misapply the gift, every one sees that the sin rests
with them, not with us. While we maintain the Pro-