The Sun.
London, England, 1842-07-08 00:00:00

((it _S Ml*

LONDON:
FRIDAY MORNING, JULY 8, 1842.

The tariff want through a Committee last night
the House of Lords, and is to be read a third time this
day. Compared to the Commons, the Lords have made
'quick work with this complicated law ; but whyshould
they discuss a measure they must not alter ? Lord
STANHOPE, indeed, objected to the admission of cattle
▪ .now proposed, and the Duke of BUCKINGHAM sup-
ported him. On a division, however, only eight Lords
voted against that part of the tariff, and 44 for it. Sir
ROBERT PEEL'S opinion on the point is correct ;. the
landlords alarm themselves very needleSsly. If
they are contented with the protection given to corn,
they may be pleased with that given to cattle, to im-
port which, from any great distance, is, as it were, pro-
hibited by the cost. But some of the Peers do not think
that a sufficient security, and they would willingly incur
the hatred of their countrymen, in order to clinch the
decrees of nature by a decree of their own manufacturing.

There is that in the proceedings of the Anti-Corn-law
Coiference- yesterday which will command attention.
We shall offer no comment on the bold and honest lan-
gaag.,. which was uttered, but only recommend the aris-
tocracy, if they wish to learn what is passing in men's
minds, to study the speeches at the Ali-Corn-law Con-
ference.

Mr. MouittsoN, who spoke in the debate on Wednes-
day evening, is, one of the greatest and most successful of
our merchants. Aithough we are presumptuous enough
to believe that newspaper writers, who have no interest
but the public good; are in the great majority of cases
better judges of questions of legislation affecting the
whole community than any class of merchants or traders,
who seldom see much beyond their own immediate pur-
suit, still We are not averse'to have the testimony of such
ss practical man to confirm our own views.
We have stated, over and over again, that one chief
source of the mischief done by the Corn-laws, is the
putting an end to a foreign market for our goods. Sir
ROBERT PEEL has recently told us -that commerce is
merely a barter of commodities—that is, one commodity
is the market fur another—and consequently to prevent
the owner of a cotton -mill exchanging its produce for
foreign wheat and flour, is as effectual a method to stop it.
as to burn it down. Confirming this view our great
• I
practical merchant said :
" lie believed that there was not • a nation or a people
in the world, who would not be glad to take from us more
of our mannfactureS than they were at present enabled to do.
The great difficulty they laboured under was in finding equi-
Nalents to exchange for the produce of our manufacturing skill.
'This he believed was at the bottom of much of the distress of
Novhich the country now complained." " We were distressed,
ra2t because our prices were too high, but because other va-
tic ns could not purchase snore of our goods, in consequence •
of our laws excluding the importation of the produce they
vent :d- give us in exchange," . . .
.11r' we will not buy we cannot sell. The law says we shall
11604 nil), the very things we most want—namely, food—and
meore the law prohibits the people from selling. To
pry Ihivit them from selling is to prohibit them from pro-
duc hence our mills are idle, and the people out of
ern lo.vriaent, and in distress. The whole mighty mis.
chi g . therefore, which is now filling the land with woe,
is c used by the accursed law which forbids our people
frourc selling their goods for food in any and every part
of tit 2 world.

W hile we thank Mr. MottatFow very earnestly for his
ad nai .rahle dern"str'ti'm of the murderous folly of the Le-
p,is Is "are, we cannot go along with him in-ad vocatinm a fixed
du y on corn. We are persuaded that the public islecom
ing :last convinced that all corn-keeping-out laws are suici-
da 1 ~:and nothing less will satisfy the public mind, or the j us-
th. le of the case, but the total abolition of all such laws'
T be people.have been too long made the victims of fan-
ci ed benefit; to arise from dishonest legislation, to submit
11 such longer to. such miserable chicanery; and though in
)e struggle they should kick down the authority of th 3

House of Commons—a circumstance which now seems
by no means improbable.—they will never be contented
till every remnant .of the system by which they have been
impoverished and actually starved to secure the pre-
sumed greatness of the landowners, have been swept
away.

Before the Special Commission for the trial of several
grievous offenders in 'Tipperary had well completed its
work, and just after it had pronounced sentence of trans-
portation and death on several offenders, another murder
has been committed in that part of Ireland :
On Sunday last, says a letter from Dublin, dated the sth
inst., in the middle of the noonday, and :in the populous neigh-
bourhood of Dolla, in the county of Tipperary, a party of four
men entered the house of Mr. William Hardy, and robbed it of
three guns, a pistol, and sword. Mr. Samuel Hardy, the
brother of the proprietor, was in the act of entering the house,
and making some show of resisting their retreat, when one of the
miscreants came behind him, and struck him with a stone on
the head, from the effects of which he died in a few minutes
after. Mr. William Hardy is a respectable farmer, and bears
an excellent character among his workmen and neighbours; his
brother, who has been thus foully murdered., was a mast indus-
trious,.upright, and kind man. A
Without presuming to assert, with the diabolical deeds
of COOPER and Goofs —fresh in our recolleetion, that
the English are more moral than the Irish,
there if, we think, a marked difference in their
crimes, which may suggest different remedies. Most
of the great crimes committed here have a sordid
origin. They spring from a love of money as a means
of gratifying low and sensual passions. The bulk of
the crimes committed in Ireland have their origin in
revenge, or in a struggle for the means of subsistence.
Some dispute takes place about a farm, some tenant is
dispossessed, and another-takes his place; some landlord
infringes. on the customs of tho people, and feuds,
quarrels, and assassination ensue. For these and
all other classes of great crimes springing from very
different sources, the legislator has but one lumping
punishment. He thinks, or has thought, that the gal-
lows is a universal panacea, and he administers it in all
cases with as much deliberate, but much more mischievous
quackery than ever Mr. MORISON prescribed his uni-
versal pill. Such an easy system of generalisation saves
the Legislature, we admit, much trouble, but inflicts on
it indelible disgrace.
With the exception of one or two attempts on the
lives of masters in the manufacturing districts, England
is quite exempt from that species of murder growing
from feuds mid struggling for the means of subsistence,
which take place in Ireland. The source of this differ-
ence is to be
.found, we aro induced to believe, in the
independence of individuals in Ireland,. and their
dependence in England. In Ireland each one of the pea-
santry, little acquainted with the comforts and luxuries of
life, having little or no trade amongst them, supplies
the great majority of his own wants. He and his fa-
mily buy nothing as it were ; perhaps they make a
part of their own clothing, but at any rate they do not
go to the grocer, the baker, the butcher, the brewer, or
the publican for the supply of their daily meals. The
family sows, digs, and cooks its own potatoes:, and sub-
sist on them almnst all the year round. The Irish, for
want of manufactures and trade, live, as it were, isolated
and independent ; and each man nourishes in his own
bosom the evil passions of the semi-savage.
In England, on the contrary, even in the most remote
and most rural districts, there are few or no families
which do not subsist rather by the exchange of their
labour than on it,; immediate 'produce. The great ex-
tent to which division of labour is carried here makes
us all mutually dependent, and has done far more to ex-
tinguish the strong passions of the savage than the use
of the gallows, which has been common to both coun-
tries, and is a relic of the barbarism which division of
labour has done much to extinguish. Thus it is the
difference in division of labour in the two countries
which gives birth to the difference of their crimes.
It is customary, we are aware, with those
who have acquired something of the jargon,
and nothing of the spirit, of the science of
national wealth, to speak of it as merely explaining how
capitalists heap up money; but those who have caught its
spirit are aware that, as in this case, Political Economy is
replete with the highest moral instruction.
The effect of division of labour in making men mu-
tually dependent, and, therefore, mutually kind, indicates
that the true way to put an end to assassination in Tip-
perary and other places in Ireland; is to remove all the im-
pediments which either law or custom has there placed in
the way of extending the different arts and manufactures
which are suitable to the soil and the people, or which
are known to the rest of mankind. When the Irish have
become artisans, and have ceased to live without ex
changing their produce, they will cease to murder men
at noonday for party strife, or strife growing out of the
contention for a spot of ground. The extension of art,
however, will not cure the sordid crimes of the English.
We want sordidness banished from our legislation ; we
want to get rid of the demoralizing example of lawmakers
perpetually legislating with a view to their own profit, and
' setting the horrid example of putting their countrymen and
countrywomen to death by hundreds and thousands, in
order to extend the cultivation of their own estates. An
abundance of food, we are inclined to think, the pro-
duce of free trade, would both check sordidness in
England, and extend division of labour, with mutual de-
pendence, in Ireland. Political economy, in truth, rightly
understood, will be found the best substitute for the
gallows in both countries, if it do not teach us how to
dispense with much penal jurisprudence.

IThe Members of the Government are exceedingly
anxious to throw upon Providence the responsibility of
the present distressed state of the country. To get rid
of a charge of robbing the poor of the fruits of their
honest labour, they have recourse to blasphemy. They
charge the benignant, bountiful Creator of the world with
the evils resulting from the operation of iniquitous laws,
made for the express purpose of enriching the land-
owners at the expense of the toiling operative and me-
chanic. Lord STANLEY had the audacity to tell the
House of Commons last night, in the course of the de-
bate upon Mr. WALLACE'S motion, that there was much
in the present distress beyond the reach of human legis-
lation ; and he went oa to instance the deficient liar-
vests of the two last years. We ask the Noble Lord
was there any deficiency of grain in Bel-
gium, in the German States, or in America,
the last two years ? If we wanted corn, who
but the monopolists, like Lord STANLEY, prevented us
from being plentifully supplied with it ? If it was the
will of Goo to visit this country with a deficient harvest,
it, was likewise His will to grant a superabundance to
our neighbours, and to dispose them to supply our
wants, provided the wicked men who controlled the
kindly operation of the Divine laws by selfish legisla-
tion would permit them. Got) gave the human race
this beautiful world to live in, making it the common
property of all. But wicked and cruel men seized upon
tracts of if, divided it amongst thbmSelves; and reduced
to slavery all who were weaker than they. Lord STAN-
LEY has himself depopulated some fifteen miles of beau-
tiful country to form parks and shrubberies for the pro-
tection of game. The peasants are driven forth to die of
hunger, in order that pheasants and other descriptions
of game , may be protected for the amusement of the
aristocracy ! By abolishing the latter system, by
which every poor peasant could support his family
without becoming a burden to the parish, the poor are
• driven into large towns, where thousands of them annu-
ally fall victims to the starving operation of the Corn-
laws. And yet the men who pass these laws—the men
who refuse the poor labourer the occupation of a rood of
ground upon which to grow food for his starving C. iildren,
—the men .who will not suffer the famishing cutler of
Sheffield to exchange his wares for a sack of foreign
flour—these men have the blasphemous audacity to
charge Providence with the misery of the poor ! No,
the great and benign Giver of all Good never
imposed a prohibitory duty upon human food,
the real cause of , all the misery to which the
working • classes of this country are now sub-
jected. The Government declares itself unable to
relieve the public distress. Why then maintain any law
which the public regards as the cause of that distress ?
The landlords pretend that the Corn-laws wore
passed to protect the poor equally with the
rich. Now when it is . proved that they starve
the poor, by keeping up the price of bread and dimi-
nishing the demand for our manufactures, why
are they not abandoned ? We regard• the declaration.
of the Government as absolving the starving poor from
all submission to those iniquitous laws of which they ,are
the victims. Government has failed in its first and most
essential duty towards them. It declares that it can neither
protect their labour, which is their property, by allowing
them to exchange it for food, nor their life which is
jeopardied without such protection. What claim then,
can such a Government have upon the obedience of the
people ?• None that we can conceive, net derived from
bt•ute force.

Madrid. Journals of the E3tli ult. have reached tut.
The Chamber of Deputies voted on that day the first
article of the project of law, which fixed at 90,000
men the active force of the army, by a majority
of
Go to 22. _ _

Two bargains were concluded in the Three per Cents.
with the present coupon, at 221, at 30 and 45 days- and
24 in the Five per Cents., with the 11 coupons, at 314 H
for cash, and 32 31i at 60 days, for 21,600,000 reals.

The French Journals are all filled with elec-
tion nows. The friends of Ministers calculate upon
a majority, but our impression is that it will be an ex-
ceedingly =all one. M. GUIZOT is very unpopular
though why he is so is not khowu to one-tenth of his

opponents. They follow in the m ake of the Press
which is all-powerful in France.
The news of the attempt of the wretch BEAN to
frighten the QUEEN sxeited universal disgust in Paris.
The Corlespondent:of Nuremberg publishes a letter,
dated Berlin, the 26th ult., stating that on the 24th ult. an ac-
cident occurred on the Potsdam Railroad which had nearly
proved as fatal as that on the road to Versailles. The sparks
of fire from a locomotive set fire to one of the waggons. The
persons inside perceiving the smoke, endeavoured to open the
doors, but they were locked. At length the conductors having
heard the screams of the passengers, succeeded in extinguishing
the fire.

A letter from Malta, of the 26th of June, says :--
" Admiral Owen's squadron does n,t move ; all the ships
are, however, ready to pit to sea: It was at first in contem-
plation to send some vessels to the Levant, but it was judged
that there were fully sufficient there already to balance the
force under Rear-Admiral La Susse. Admiral Owen doubt-
less remains here to observe the movements of the squadron
under Admiral Hugon, the destination of which is not known.
" The packet-boats are continually in motion ; they are
often despatched to Tunis, Tripoli, Constantinople, and Mar-
seilles, and so suddenly, that the me chants are not informed,
and cannot send any letters by them."—Commerce.
A letter from the frontiers of Catalonia says a house, between
la Jonqaiore and le Perthus, was attacked by a band of insur-
gents on the night of the 24th. The owners repulsed the
assailants.