The Sun.
London, England, 1842-02-23 00:00:00

lation. How can it be ? Legislation is confined to one
political society; it is wholly municipal. Trade is inter-
national, and extends far beyond the reach and bounds
of law. But while the leading Whigs take this sound
and wise view of trade, they will vote against their
own convictions. They will not support Mr. VIL-
LIERS, they throw cold water on his motion, and they
thereby injure their own character for consistency and
sagacity. We believe, too, that they will injure them-
selves as a party. The question mooted by Mr. VIL •
Lizits is the popular question of the day. It concerns
the prosperity of property and the welfare of industry.
It emphatically concerns the millions. In our judg-
ment, therefore, it would have been expedient, wise,
and just in the Whigs, had they cordially supportell the
motion for the total and immediate abolition of the
Corn-laws.

Mr. MUNTZ has placed the following notice on the
books of the House of Commons, for the 24th inst. :
" That at future divisions of the House, neither the
strangers in the gallery, nor the reporters, shall be re-
quired to withdraw, except by special motion for that
purpose." The present practice of excluding all strangers
from the House, including reporters, dates from the
time when the House sought to enshroud all its pro-
ceedings in secresy, by making it a breach of privilege
tocommunicate them to the public. In former times pa-
triotic Members were exposed to the persecution of the SQ-
YEREIGN, and there was then a reason for keeping secret
the share which each individual took in the proceedings
of the House. Those times have long passed away.
The SOVEREIGN has lost her power, as against the House
of Commons, and no Member now runs the smallest risk
of being persecuted for an exuberant zeal in the cause
of the people. The public are now admitted to witness
the proceedings of the House, save and except divi-
sions; and the success of Mr. WARD's motion, to publish
the names and votes of Members by the authority of the
House, has removed every shadow of a pretext for not
allowing the public to see the divisions, when they can
learn from the papers on which side each Member votes.
We are not aware that there can be any feasible objec-
tion to Mr. MuNTz's motion. It will remove the last
remnant of the old secresy, and bring all the proceedings
of the House into harmony. The motion ought, there-
fore, to meet with no opposition and no dissentients.

We referred very briefly yesterday to the immu-
nity of our law-givers, which makes them, in our opinion,
very regardless, considering the importance of their
functions, both of what they undertake, and how they
perform it. There is surely no office in society--no
duty to be done by man—of such pre-eminent. and even
solemn greatness, as making laws for an immense com-
munity, such as is now gathered under the British flag.
Accordingly our ancestors, very properly in our estima-
tion, laid down the rule, that the preceedings in both
Houses were to be begun by prayer.

Like otker ordered observances, however, that has now
lost all its sacredness and its sanctity, and has dwindled,
like most of the practices of the established priesthood,
into a mere empty form—the veriest mockery possible
of the great functions of which it ought to be the appro-
priate commencement. Always to retain its efficiency,
it should be especially adapted to the business of every
evening ; every Member should be required to be pre-
sent at it; and the officiating person should be rather a
statesman than a priest belonging to any of the
narrow and exclusive sects into which Christians tire
unhappily split. The present empty form, generally
attended by Mr. SPEAKER and the Clerks, is suitable
enough, we admit, to the multiplicity of business which
is hurried through without any solemnity, or any due re-
gard to its importance.
It is impossible, indeed, to be present and hear, in either
House, the idle, and sometimes party discussions, on both
,private and public Bills, to mark the continued repeti
tion of, " The question is," "The ayes have it;" to hear
important forms set down by our best constitutional
writers as the safeguards of liberty, mumbled over by the
officers of the House ; it is impossible to be present in
either House during a long debate, and notice the listless-
ness of the Members, their much conversation, the party
and personal objects they have in view, without feeling
convinced that a great reform is necessary in the mode
of conducting the business of Parliament, as well as in
the mode of constituting that Assembly. Above all, we
desire that the Members of both Houses should be im-
pressed with &much more serious sense of their "awful"
responsibility, if we may use Sir R. PEEL'S well known
word, than they now are, Whatever may be a man's
politics, and whatever enactments lie may think advis-
able, he must wish that they should be constructed with
the utmost care, and all the business of making laws
should be carried on with the deepest sense of its im-
portance.

At present, because our law-makers are never called
to account, because they enjoy complete immunity,
because-they have no reckoning to give to man—and we
fear few of them think of reckoning with GOD-for their
Parliamentary conduct, they treat•the great work they
are engaged in with the utmost indifference, and pass a
law which dooms perhaps thousands of the people to
misery and privation, with no greater emotion than they
experience when at bretddltst they throw the grouts out
of their tea-cup into a slop-basin. Young Members and
old Members share this indifference, and. a youth hot
froni College and a veteran in Parliament, alike desti-
tute of all sense of _the . importance of their task, are
equally ready to heap restrictive and penal laws on the
community.

We need not dwell on the consequences of this want of
a feeling of responsibility in our law-makers. They are
equally palpable in a statute-book encumbered with fri-
volous vexations and contradictory enactments, and in a
community almost riven asunder by distress and discon-
tent, for which the law-makers carelessly say that they
know of no remedy. Men and things now alike cry
aloud against the cruel conduct of the Members of both
Houses of Parliament. And one great step towards ef-
fecting improvement, must be to inspire them if possible
with a feeling of the awful responsibility of the immense
task they have undertaken.

The Whigs, with all their faults, have one claim on
the gratitude of the British nation,. which, though occa-
sionally forgotten amidst the noise of party contests, and
the " finality" fits of Lord JOHN RUSSELL and his party,
can never be effaced from the public mind. The Tories
of the old school ruled the people with a rod of iron.
Imprisonment, flogging, banishment, and, above all,
death, were their most approved means for repressing
liberty, or checking crimes often committed through
want, or that deplorable ignorance in which the
wealthiest Church, and the wealthiest aristocracy
of the world left the great mass of the middle
and lower classes. A hungry man was hanged for
stealing a sheep, for stealing from a dwelling-house after
a certain hour, and for uttering a forged note of the value
of 20s. Scarcely any offence, indeed, which amounted
to a crime, was omitted in that awful catalogue which
'ended with the words " he shall be hanged by the neck
till dead," During the assizes, for some three months
every year, the savage disposition of the ignorant multi-
tude was ministered to by brutal exhibitions in every
county town, while the humane Christians, the tender
mothers of families, and their rising offspring were hor-
rified by the destruction of human life for offences which
are now regarded as of the most venial description. The
Whigs, to their eternallonour, led the way in effacing
this national disgrace. In Parliament and out of Parlia-
ment; by writingS arid speeches at public meetings, they
e xcited the attention of Englishmen, and still more the gen-
tle feelings of English women, till with one voice the
nation cried "Shame" on our barbarous, land, jurymen.
forgot their oaths in the course of mercy, and twenty or
thirty bloody statutes became obsolete, before the stern
dispositions of our lawgivers were moved to abrogate
them. This noble trait in the character of &MILLI',
MACKINTOSH, BROUGHAM and JEFFREY, with many others
of the same party, covers a multittide of sins, and will be
remembered by a grateful nation when their eloquence
and their political deeds are forgotten. A return just made
to the Ilouse of Commons, moved for by Mr. EWART,
places the result of their labours in a striking point
of view. This return gives the total number of persons
executed in London and Middlesex for the last twenty
years, divided into triennial periods, and though con-
tained in only one small sheet, furnishes greater
subject for congratulation than ninety-nine out
of a hundred Parliamentary documents. For, the
three years ending 1821, ninety-eight persons
were executed in the metropolis , alone ; and
during the triennial period ending with 1839,
the number was reduced to three; and for the three
preceding years the return is marked—nil. But this
is the least gratifying result, for it appears that the
humanity of the law has humanised the public mind.
The number of persons committed for murder from
1821 to 1833, was about 14 every year, while for the
remaining periods up to 1842, it averaged only
five. What a noble contrast these returns
furnish ; and were they carried farther back the con-
trast
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Mr. MONCKTON MILNES is a better poet than debater,
and if he were to write more and speak less, it would,
we think, be greatly to the advantage of his reputa:
tion. He should remember that loose, haphazard aser-
dons are not arguments, and that flowers of fancy, how-
ever pleasing, are but sorry substitutes for facts. On Mon-
day night, in his speech on the Corn.law question, he had
the r-shness to assert that the whole discussion was a mere
battiing about a shadow—or to use his own more ornate
expression—" a vain and fruitless sciomachy." So a debate
involving in its issue the best and dearest interests of the