The Sun.
London, England, 1845-01-17 00:00:00

and without England she would be as completely
isolated as the little obscure, invisible, and unapproach-
able domain over which Dr. FEANCIA so long reigned.
Even in our foreign policy we oonsult the wishes
of the French nation. When Algeria was first occu-
pied, the French Government gave the most positive
and unequivocal assurance that the occupation would
be only temporary. It has since been declared per-
petual ; yet, though this important aequisition
threatens British possessions in the Mediterranean, no
objection has been raised against the change ; and
these ungrateful journals, so far from being satisfied
by this act of condescension, are eternally denouncing
England because her Consul at :Algiers has not done
what he is not required to do by the law of nations—
taken out his exequatur. As if Spain were an appendage
of France, we have stood by calmly while ESPARTERO
was expelled, the Constitution destroyed, and the
agents of Louis PHILIPPE installed as the des-
potic rulers of the country. Even on the most
tender point England has yielded to France ;
she has sacrificed her missionaries in the
islands of the Pacific, and given up settlements
which had become sacred in the eyes of posterity,
by the primitive labours of these teachers of
Christianity ; and, to sum up our benefits, we
have found a new market for French produce—
given France three hundred millions of fresh cus-
tomers—done what all the other nations of the world
together could not have done—thrown open China,
and created a new world.

To come nearer home, is it necessary to ask what
aid England has rendered to France, in the con-
struction of railroads ? One half of them owe their
origin to English capital ; English engineers lay
down the lines, English labourers make the tunnels
and cuttings ; and not a little of the success attending
the lines which have been opened is owing to English
machinery.
In fact, our kindness to France is beyond
all calculation, and:our disinterested benefits so nu-
merous and so great, that these French writers give
up all hopes of ever paying the debt, and their grati•
tude is turned into hatred :—"Naxn beneficia eo usque
lmta sunt, dum videntur exsolvi posse : übi multum
antevenere, pro gratia odium redditur."

"The Game-laws," we are happy to find, appear to
be attracting in all quarters that degree of attention
which supplies the best guarantee that they will not
be much longer tolerated in their present form, or
endured under their present administration. It is not
a bad beginning in the work of their modification or
repeal which the correspondent of a Morning Con-
temporary suggests—namely, that game preserves
should be rated, by the proper parochial authorities,
to the poor-rate, according to the computed annual
value of their game product. But the finest case
to be made against these laws, we were always sure
would be supplied by any advocate for their main-
tenance who could be brought to commit his views
and his arguments to paper—and print them. In this
point of view we deem Mr. GRANTLEY BERKELEY
eminently entitled to the thanks of the public ; fJr he
has just published "A Pamphlet in Defence of the
Game-laws, in Reply to the (their ?) Assailants; and
on their Effects upon the Morals of the Poor." In
endeavouring to arrive at any sound 'xdgment on the
expediency or inexpediency of upholding such a code
as that which comprises the laws relative to the pro-
perty in, and protection of, game, it has always ap-
peared to us a preliminary of importance to get at
the real animus with which game-preserving country
gentlemen really regard—first, their title to that
property ; secondly, its relations to general principles
bearing on the moral and social condition and rights
of their fellow-creatures. We were curious to learn
whether gentlemen of large landed estate, in their
passion for preserving game, really postponed the
consideration of what might be due to the feelings,
the wants, and the temptations consequent on those
wants of their poorer tenants or neighbours to the
paramount object of securing partridge, pheasant,
and hare from liability to destruction—by uncer-
tificated hands. We were not uninterested about
ascertaining whether, in this age of universal cant,
the sacred cause of religion would be impressed into
the service, even, of the Game-laws. On these and
other such points Mr. GRANTLEY BERKELEY has cer-
tainly enlightened, if he have not satisfied us. To
Mr. BERKELEY we must concede the praise of being
much in earnest with his subject; but, had lie par-
ticipated in the long nap of the Seven Royal
Sleepers, or the fifty-seven years' unbroken slumber
which PLINY pronounces EPIMENIDES to have en-
joyed, he could not have been, upon again awaking,
more behind the spirit and intelligence of his age,
than he has shown himself to be in his notions of the
status of the English labourer, or hind. Mr.
BERKELEY clearly regards him in the light of a mere
serf. He would have drawn up, we should say, had
he been a contemporary of our Norman Princes, a
most acceptable memoir to the hunting Conqueror,
on the extreme utility of the newly afforested dis-
trict for the King's deer and other game, and
"beasts of venery," for whose accommodation—and
his own—a country of thirty miles in compass,
largely sprinkled with towns, villages, and home-
steads, was laid waste—their inhabitants turned out
houseless and ruined on the world, and six-and-
thirty churches levelled to the ground. To judge
from the lachrymose affection with which he deplores
the relaxed protection that that very forest now ex•
periencea, he would have been eloquent indeed, seven
hundred and sixty years ago, in pleading the in-
valuable advantage to the kingdom of the Monarch's
enjoying his pleasure and his sport, at any price, and
in showing how grossly the Saxon ceorles of that day
misconceived the case in supposing themselves at all
agg•ieved, or that their interests were prejudiced by
the institution of a royal preserve on this rather ex-
tensive scale. But we really fear that Mr. G. BERKE-
LEY is not alone in thus projecting his epitome of the
merits of our Game-laws for the year of Grace 1085
instead of the year of our Lord 1845. He is but the
spokesman of a class. The truth seems to be, that
game preservers are so utterly selfish, so absurdly
selfish in the attainment of their one great end of se-
curing to themselves and a few bidden guests the ex-
clusive luxury of this particular class of sport—the
bringing down with their own guns the feathered and
the furry denizens about whom they have spread a
protection, rigorously and wantonly severe, against
all the rest of the world, that they never suffer their
purpose to be ruffled by such unsportsmanlike re-
morse as other men would feel at being instrumental
to the temptation which our Game-laws hold out to
various classes of the community, the old as well as

the young—the well-disposed equally with the pro-
fligate—to dishonesty, to violence, and to the most
fearful crimes. Your strict game-preserver, the
capacity in which Mr. 13EaKELur seems desirous most

emphatically to record himself to posterity, has no
eyes for the ruined peace of peasant families ; no ears
for the wailings of wives and families whose husbands,
brothers, and sons, are torn from their humble hovels

to expiate their offences against the sacred majesty of
game, or the polluting atmosphere of the county gaol ;
no misgivings about the fate of innocent offspring
thus deserted and left to destitution, disgrace, or
death—as the case may be—by the committal t.f their
natural protectors—for, it may be—a first offence ; for
an ebullition of that natural and uncontrollable excite-

ment to pursue and destroy game which in the squire
indicates "thorough-bred" sporting "strain," hut
in the peasant is that last excess of vicious propensity,
known to the rural ethics of country gentlemen,
which they call "the inveterate love of poaching:,
The pamphlet of Mr. G. BERKELEY might be
worth analysing if we should be really justified in

assuming that- there are many English gentlemen
who, at this time of day, can gravely imagine that
they may, with impunity, strain the distinctions of

caste between the gentleman and the labourer, the

game-owning landlord and the small tenant-farmer,
to the extent which this Honourable Member ven-
tures to attempt. But on sober reflection we cannot
believe that Mr. BERKELEY is more likely to find
many abettors of his extravagant notions upon land-
lord prerogative, than he is to be extensively con-
firmed in such conclusions as these, which we extract
at random from his pamphlet :—" .... So far from
having a demoralising tendency, or of (?) being in-
jurious to the welfare of the lower classes, the Game-
laws are founded on sound and rational principles,
and have a beneficial effect in regard to the pro-
prietor, the tenant, the yeoman, and the poor."—
(P. 5.) " I have observed in each of the places I
have rented a great improvement in the conduct and
habits of the labouring population when the Game
laws came to be enforced, and idle, poaching inclina..

tions restrained; the wholesome fact having also
been placed before their eyes that it would be their
interest as well as their duty to cease from the pur-
suit of game both by night and day. The hitherto
systematic Sabbath-breaker returned to his church,
and 1 have heard it from his pastor's lips that he had
never seen the man so frequently an attendant on
Divine service as he had since my arrival at the
house."—(P. 14.) For our part we do not see
much to marvel at in this sympathy between the
opinions of the parson and the squire—on such a
topic. But we find more difficulty in accounting for
the trip which Mr. BERKELEY makes in his eager
chase after proofs of his favourite theory, that the
strict enforcement of the Game-laws eminently con-
duces to the strict observance of the Sabbath. He
says, in describing that facilis " descensus Averni"
by which his poacher graduates from the evening
relaxation of merely accompanying a friend in the
small-poaching line to see him knock a rabbit over,
to a degree entitling him to a fellowship—with resi-
dence, in Newgate, that—" step by step, the man be-
comes a Sabbath-breaker—a fault declared by crimi-
nals in Newgate to be the origin of all their crimes.
Instead of going to church, he takes his gun or
mare," &c.— (P. 23.) But, alas ! the poor labourer is
not the only Sabbath-breaker. Elsewhere, to write,
" My brother, Mr. MORETON BERKELEY, de-
tected a man in the act of beating for game, with a
lurcher, on a Sunday, during the time of Divine
worship."--(P. 32.) Why was not Mr. :MORETON
BERKELEY there, attending that worship ? Is Sab-
bath-breaking part and parcel of the reserved privi-
leges of the game preserver? Perhaps the gentle-
man was ill that day, and taking a calm contem-
plative walk through his covers, to muse on doctrines
he could not enjoy the happiness of hearing. Alas !
he had a desperate affray with this poacher, knocked
him down, and captured him. And since the man
" was knocked down by the common policeman's staff,
which my brother carried in his pocket," we fear we
must infer that this was a malice-prepense occupation
" during the time of Divine worship" on the part of
Mr. MORETON BERKELEY. We must suppose him
more given to catching poachers on Sundays than to
hearing prayers. But woe to " the man of six days'
labour who was tempted to desecrate the Sabbath."

—(P. 35.) For such an " unpreserving" miserable
offender, neither, like- Mr. G. BERKELEY, a game
preserver on l is own lands," nor " in the administra-

tion of the law, as a county magistrate, over the
estates of others" (p. 6), nor yet " one of us, the
country and landed gentlemen" (p. 48)—to presume
to break the Sabbath is a strong proof that " he must
have been inflamed with the beastly dregs of the pot-
house," instead of having "got himself up" on a
breakfast of kidneys stewed in champagne, or on a
devilled fowl washed down with milk punch.
We quite enter into all the intensity of Mr.
BERKELEY'S reflection on the murder of a
certain gamekeeper by a poacher, that, " in-
stead of the dread of the severity of punish-
ment consequent on capture leading to the deadly
aim, the eye that glanced along the barrel of that
gun was"—what ?—" bleared by the baneful fumes
and libations of the beer-shop." The beer-shop, in-
deed ! Why cannot men, bent on desperate purposes,
decently carouse beforehand in a carpeted private
room, over a magnum of SNEYD'S finest claret, at the
tip-top hotel of the neighbourhood—instead of pre-
senting themselves in gentlemen's preserves reeking
from a Tom•and-Jerry shop, and with their eyes dis-
ordered by the combined pollutions of beer and
tobacco. But we will add, without a word of further
present commentary, Mr. G. BERKELEY'S summary :
—" The Game-laws are to be regarded as laws
founded on sound and rational principles—doing good
to the community instead of harm."—(P. 77.)

We have received Madrid journals of the 9th inst.
The Senate on that day had passed the Bill for the
abolition of the slave trade with only one dissentient
voice, and also a Bill for granting pensions to the
families of the officers killed by the insurgents at
Huesca. Senor Mow, in bringing forward the
budget, made the following remarks, to which we
call the attention of the creditors of Spain, and espe-
cially the second paragraph. It is hard, no doubt,
that the present race should be compelled to pay the
debts of their ancestors, but honest and prudent
people, somehow or other, think this the best way to
maintain public credit. So, apparently, does Senor
Mow, but still his complaints about inherited debts,
and the conduct of Governments that had contracted
debts beyond their means, are ominous.:—

" The good faith of the Government is above all
pledged to satisfy the claims of both foreign and do-
mestic creditors. It is not our fault if we have inherited
debts incurred by former wars, nor are we to blame for
the conduct of Governments that contracted engage-
ments greater than their means, leaving to us the task
of paying them. To begin by paying something, and
speedily, and in the amount supplied to u.s by our sacri-
fices, and in a progressive mariner, in order that that
payment be no longer interrupted, and that our creditors
may receive each day new proofs of our anxiety- in their
regard, of our good faith, and of the an ielioration of our
public fortune—such are our objects, and to .attain
them great prudence and peraeverenice are required
from the Government, and support and confidence
from the Cortes."

The Three per Cents. closed on the 'Madrid Bourse
on the 9th instant, at ni for cash, said 3] at 60
days; and the Five , per Cents. at 23 for cash, and
23i- at 60 days.

In the French Chamber of Peers orr Tuesday' the
Count de MONTALEMBERT made a speetth in favour
of the claims of the Church in opposition to those of
the University, asserted that the clerg y were the
most ill-used class in France, and that th e Conserva-
tives would one day find out to their cos t the great
error they had committed in treating with contempt
the only body that had known how to respect the
temporal power by keeping it within proper bounds,
and which had always shown itself the faithful ally
of authority. " However," said the N.o ble Peer in
conclusion, " the Catholic Church had a certain re-
venge, which was to pray for them, and a victory not
less sure, of surviving them." The Minister of Public
Instruction, M. MARTIN (du Nord), defende d the
course pursued by the Government, and believed
the general feeling was that the clergy would
obtain all the authority; they had a -right to by
the Education Bill of last session. A b,,ie f discussion
then ensued on the dissolution of the Polytechnic
School, when Marshal SOULT said the a ;fair was not
left to Government. Commissioners we re appointed
to inquire into the state of the school, 'sad their re-
port had been followed. Baron CHARLE:; DVPIN and
Count MONTALIVET expressed great regret that
clemency had not been shown towards t hose seven-
teen pupils who had been expelled. The latter said
he had been a member of the school II imself, with
many of the Noble Peers he saw aroa tnd, among
others the son of Marshal SOULT; many •of them had
at times been led into youthful acts of 'indiscretion,
and as such subjected to the rigid disc spline of the
school. They had not, he felt assure r 7, been the
worse citizens on that account; and he a submitted to
the Government that an act of clement! y might be
performed, without being in any way it ijurions to
the necessary discipline of the institution.
On Wednesday the Prince DE Moscoi 'A, son of
Marshal NEY, called the attention of the C lumber to
the Morocco war, and blamed the policy a f the Go-
vernment, which M. GUIZOT defended. 'r he discus-
sion was going on when the post left.
We find little additional information in the papers
respecting the Ministerial crisis, but M. ; UIZOT cer-
tainly gains character in public estima t ion, when
contrasted with Count MOLE. Not one jtt urnal cor-
dially supports the latter. The real Con servatives
denounce his policy; he is only endured 7 the Op•
position because he works with them for the time,
and even one of the journals belonging to. the latter
party gives Me preference to Gutzo a:. The
following 'extract from the Nations P.4' places
matters in a true light :—" We she gild feel
repugnance in coming forward to add to the load
cast upon Use Ministry, whom all the world: is aban-
doning. On Monday it was Count MOLE —yester-
day the Count DE MONTALIVRT ! The first. at least
showed an openness and candour in his atta el; but
I.E. DE MONTALIVET'S was made with apt rfidious
politeness. How wretched was this conflict ! Can
Count MoLE, who dared to tell M. Canzor that he
must suppose that the country had lost its n ten tory—
can he have a right to rely upon the benefit of .time ?
Can Otsheite make us forget the enact tatiot.' of
Ancona ?—the partition of Belgium ? Can the c.
or-
ruption of the Ministry of the 29th of Octahi ‘r obß-
terate the audacious corruption of that of th e 15th
of April ? Have the electoral manoeuvres re -veand
by the ingurry amnestied the public frauds denc unced
by the Chat nber after the elections made by 1 U. DE
MoNTawvEg ? And it is between men thus con 'pro-

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