The Sun.
London, England, 1827-11-19 00:00:00

SPIRIT OP TRH PUBLIC JOURNALS.

Among the useful 'labours of the Commi
sioners of West India Inquiry, there is one whit
we have not hitherto noticed, upon the titles t
landed property in the conquered island of Tr'
nidad. It appears that since the year 1815 in
elusive, the minds of the Trinidad proprieto -
have been harassed, and- their possessions . dist
turbed, by attempts of the local Government t
force them into a compliamee with certain fon4s
and conditions—not contemplated, undoubtedly,
by the parties who signed the articles of capitu-
lation in 1797, under which the colony was sue-
rendered to Great Britain,—on pain of having
their estates confiscated if they should refuse to
obey the mandates of their ruler. Private pro-
perty was:guaranteed in the most unambiguous anti
extensive manner by the above-mentioned capi-
tulation, and all contracts or purchases held valid
by the laws of Spain were to be equally so upoii
the British Government. Yet in the very ye4r
next after that during which, at the general
peace, the island was ceded in perpetuity to
Great Britain, dare was issued by the Gover-
nor, Sir Ralph Woodford, a proclamation,
which in effect unsettled, and brought within the
fangs of the Crown or its agents, every estate
of every inhabitant, old or yoting, throughoUt
the whole of Trinidad. It required that all the
cultivated lands in the -island should be " con-
firmed" to their possessors, by certain formal
process on the part of the Government ;. but that
the Crown should be empowered, as often as it
(that is, as often as the acting Governor) pleased
to resume the property so confirmed, on giving
an equivalent in land ; and that for the•confirma-
tions thus obtained a quit-rent of ss. currency
should be paid for ever on each quarre, or 2 1-sth
acres, by the grantee. Now we really cannot
perceive the equity or common honesty of such
an endeavour to place the whole soil of an exten-
sive island. at the mercy of any public officer.
An unlimited power of resuming every man's
estate,- on pretence of finding biro " an equiva-
lent" in some other district, seems to be that sort
of omnipotence over property which, if some-•
times exercised by the Grand Seignor when he
wants to recruit his Imperial finances, we' had
hitherto supposed to.be confined to that poten-
tate alone. Loud and not unjust complaints
having been transmitted to England from the
colonists, three successive proclamations, in 1816
1818, and 1823, were issued, for the purpose of
softening, in some degree the tyrannical provisions
of that of 1815. But enough of.harsliness in the
official reaulations, of discontent. in those to be
affected by them, and' of consequent distraction
and embarrassment in the affairs of the colony,
still remaining, the commission to which we
have alluded, was made out, under which
the gentlemen intrusted with it were di-
rected to embrace . the whole subject with-
in, thier inquiries, and to report what degree
of lave and justice was to be found on either side
of the question. The Commissioners appear to
have gone somewhat further than perhaps Lord
Bathurst or his subalterns would have approved,
by concluding their report of facts with an essay
on principles, and undertaking to lecture the Go.
vernment 'at home ,on liberality, magnanimity,
and so forth, towards the colonistspoints on
which;_ as it strikes our judgments, Mr. Dwarris
and his colleagues were not consulted, and with
regard to which, except for the praiseworthy zeal
which has evidently governed them in all their
inquiries, and no doubt supplied them, under
discouraging circumstances, with nerve and per- ;
severance to proceed to the end, we should say
that a sound view of the limits assigned to their
executive commission would rather have recom-
mended them to be silent. Enough of evidence
is brought forward bythe Commissioners to prove ,
that Government would-actbothharshly and un-
wisely by enforcing, against usage • and general
opinion, the rigorous injunctions of a disputed
law ; and. more particularly where there . are
grounds to suspect that the pertinacious eagerness
with which the loCal Government pressed for its
execution arose :more immediately from an ap-
petite for fees of office than from a desire for the
better settlement of property, or for the advance-
ment of the island.—" Limes.

, The Middlesex Magistrates, we are glad to
see, have replied to the public feeling, on the
subject of the erection of a Lunatic Asylum, by,
an almost unanimous adoption of the proposition
—out of between fifty and sixty persons assem-
bled upon the occasion, only one solitary hand.
having been held up against it. The Press, we
believe, may take some credit to itself on this,
occasion :—but for the details which it has pub-
lished, and the efforts it has made to throw every
.possible light upon the subject, many who have
become the most powerful advocates of the mea-
sure would have remained in ignorance of its
paramount necessity and importance, and would
probably have been found among its opponents,
instead of seeing that opposition reduced to one.
No time,,we trust, will now be lost in. carrying this
slow act of justice into effect ; and that many
months will not elapse before we hear of the
,first stone of this edifice, sacred to humanity,
being laid by the venerable and Noble person
who is justly entitled N. be looked upon as its,
author • and founder—rwe mean Lord Robert
Seymour. In the. mean time the Legislature,
must, and will, we trust, do something to miti-
gate the intermediate sufferings of those whose
hard lot it is to be still consigned to the private
receptacles, the exposure of the. state of which
Las led at length to this result. From the
College of Physicians, who inight 'long since,!
have remedied the whole- evil, nothing, we fear, is
to be expected; but there surely is an absolute:
necessity that
.an Act should be passed, esta-
blishing a small Board of Commissioners, half
medical and half
not, for the constant superin-
tendence of these places, with power to limit the
numbers to be taken into each, according to their
view of its capacity. We do not indeed see why
the Secretary of State for the Home Department
might not at once
,adot some such measure as
this, trusting, . as he might safely do, to • Paha--
,ment for his indemnity in so doing. Fearful
indeed will, at any rate, be the moral responsibi-
lity of those who, having it hi their power, neglect,
one moment the application ,of some effectual.
remedy to the foulest stain upon a.natton calling
itself a Christian people which has ever yet been
brought to light.—Morning Herald.
We insert in another column an article from
an able legal correspondent on the subject of
Lord Stowell's late . decision. It appears to us
that it is open to many of the objections urged
by our correspondent. We confess, however,•
that the principle of the decision seems to us to
remain unshaken. If England-recognizes slavery
in her Colonies, the relations.between master and
slave, in one of these Colonies, cannot be dis-
turbed by the accident of the temporary absence
of the slave in the Mother Country, where the
law takes no notice of any such relations. The
master, on regaining possession of the slave, can
put him under the necessity f
the
ex-
tinction of the relations o proving .
between them in some'

mode recognised by the law of the place. Tl 4
Court of Appeal in England must decide according
to the law of the place as much as the House of
Peers in an appeal from a Scotch Court. There
is an analogous case in English marriages dig
-
solved in Scotland. In England marriage i,5
indisSoluble.;
,in Scotland not ; 'and a Scotc ►
Court, without hesitation, dis Solves a marri•
made in England which the parties intended t,
be an indissoluble contract, without regardink
the nature of the contract, on the principle that
adultery and several other sins ought not to be
tolerated in 'a well-ordered state: But, when the
parties married in England and divOrced in Scot-
land, reappear in England, though they may
have been each remarried in the meantime in
Scotland, and many children may have been,born
under such re-marriages, and entitled to succeed
to property in that. country, the English. Law
pays no attention to what has been done.out of
the kingdom, and the relations of husband .and
wife resume their force and validity. The West
Indian Courts pay no more attention to the.re-
lations in which the slave may have been to-
wards his.master in England, or any other coun-
try to which he may have been conveyed, or
• through which he may have' passed, than if he
had passed the intervening time in a balloon in
the air, or as one of the seven sleepers. Our
correspondent has stated the case of the
slave's return to Africa, and being brought
from thence to the West Indies by a slave
dealer. This, we conceive, .does not alter the
matter. If the property of the master he not ex-
tinguished by some means acknowledged valid in
the %Vest Indies, no matter how he found his
way back !to a conntry where he recovered his
original freedom, and how he was re-conveyed
to the West Indies, the master's right revives
with his re-appearance in that region of slavery.
If an Englishman's cow were to find its way into
one. of those regions where cows are worshipped,
and where, instead of cows belonging to men,
men may be said to belong to cows, if he could
lay hands on it again in the . county of Middle-
sex,: it would be to small purpose to plead against
the ownership, that the cow had been for years
acting the part of a divinity in. Asia, when; the
hand that touched her cowship would have been
deemed sacrilegious. So long as blacks arc
held to be chattels in any country, the ownership
can only be destroyed in the manner in which
the ownership of other chattels is destroyed in
that country. The law may be immoral and
anti-Christian, but so long as the law is suffered
to exist it must be enforced.—Morn. C'hronicle.
It has at length been announced, that Austria
.
has joined the and insisted that the Poite
should accede to their
,friendly, ,propositions.
Why, to be sure, if the Sultan be obstinate, and
continue to persecute the Greeks, his capital and
the island of Cyprus may be amicably occupied
by the Allies; 'and as Austria has found out that
she would be excluded from a share in the spoil,
if she continued her alliance with the. Porte, she
now has very disinterestedly volunteered a tardy
adhesion to the victorious Powers. Whether
the rumour prove, correct or not, it, is not our
present puipose attentively-to. enquire ; but
_we
cannot in the mean time help observing, that
from all appearanees it is 'by no means unlikely
that ere long England, will have to reconstruct
'the- POwer which she has so much contributed
t 9 destroy. We can have no
,earthly wish to
see the empire sof the Porte continued as it has
hitherto been; but then it is beyond all con-
troversy absolutely
!necessary that we should
have some power in that quarter, ca-
pable'of impeding any attempts which may be
hereafter made by any one of the Autocrats of
Europe. We never wish to impute bad designs
to any Power ; but we cannot be blind to what
is going forward in the world, nor silly enough
not to prepare for the worst consequences which
may happen, so long as we are able. We are
unwilling to revert to' the painful subject of the
attack at Navarin.; but it has occasioned us no
little surprise to find the leading Ministerial
Journals (lately the most violent of the Opposi-
tion) endeavouring to shift all responsibility and
all censure from the Allied Oovernments—as if,
forsooth, we can imagine for a moment that the
three Admirals acted without specific orders
from their employers. If the attack be so meri-
torious, and- the victory so brilliant, what neces-
sity for excuse, in any quarter ? If so shameful,
and 'in such -direct violation of every-known and
admitted principle of international law, they may
rest assured that the , shifting the ce'isure from
one quarter to another cannot mend the case.—
Mornins Post.

We entertain a lively hope that the reign of
George the Fourth, signalized as it has been by
a series of events most glorious and advantageous,
to the nation—distinguished already by the most
extensive and successful undertakings under the
patronage of the Monarch and the direction of
his excellent taste, for conferring beauty and
dignity upon the exterior aspect of the Metro-
polis—is yet about to bestow a still greater and
an imperishable benefit upon the present age and
upon posterity, by the foundation in London of
an University under the, united sanction of the
Crown and the Church, baying,for its object to
promote• literature and science, and to promote
them in conjunction with religion, loyalty, and
virtue ; without which literature and science can
only serve , to render their possessors more power-
ful and more disposed to inflict evil upon so-
ciety. It would be an injury to the great and
good men who are now exerting themselves to
obtain foe London and for England an. insti-
tution so.acellent, and in all the circumstances
of the case, so essential to the security of the
Constitution, to entertain for one moment the
idea that they can he discouraged or retarded
by any. dread of the imputation of :illibera-
lity. This imputation,. they may be asSured,
will be cast upon them most unsparingly; but
they may and will despise it ; for it will proceed
only from the Infidels, the Revolutionists, and
the Joint Stock speculators, who have presumed
t 9 give to an institution they are about to form,
and which will no doubt be in all respects con-
genial to the character and wishes of its founders,
the proud title of The London University,"
and that without having the least connexion with
any of the constituted authorities, as such, Muni-
cipal, ecclesiastical, or monarchical, of the Me-
tropolis. We do not of course mean to say,
that every one whose name appears as a Share-
holder, or even as. a Committee-man of the anti-
religious day school for grown gentlemen, which
is now-building, must of -necessity be an infidel
or a reyolutionist. There may be, many that
arc neither, and of such it can only, be said, that
they are helping forward the designs of men who
are much longer-sighted than themselves. It has
astonished us not a little to find that men having
pretensions to science, or even to respecta-
bility of character, should have been gUilty of
the mountebank trick of assuming in advertise-
ments and title pages the name of Professors;
upon the strength merely of having been nomi-
nated to read Lectures in a building not yet'

erected, to ClasSes Who' may never assemble- —b,
the agents, for the council of this non-descript
institution are no more, of a Joint Stock Com•
pany. Every man is henceforth we suppose to
be called a Professor, who delivers a lecture ti
an audience contributing sixpence a head froiti
the benches of an ale-house, or who travel
through the
.country to astonish the rustics
by pretty little chemical or hydrostatic expel-
riments exhibited in a barn. If, however,
there, were nothing to deserVe particular nci-
tice in this Institution except the presump-
tion of its founders, and the silly vanity or un-
necessary artifices of those upon whom'the 0--
tronage of its founders has fallen, whatever diFi-
crust these things might have 'excited, they could
0
not have, given rise to any serious apprehension
in the minds of the friends -and-guardians of the
Religion and Constitution of the land. But the
case is far otherwise. The object of this Insti-
tution is to ' denounce and discredit religion i,
hap essential part of public education., It
,ser -
rates itself from all the public establislimen4
which have ever been known in England ; froiii
our venerable Universities ; from our useful gram=
mar schoOls, attached to and under the inspection
of the national Church ; from the respectable se-
minaries established by the Protestant Dissenters
in various parts of the country ; it boastl
of the great and palpable distinction which se;-
parates it from all these,—the utter. rejection Of
religion. To be consistent, the conductors o'
this' establishment ought to inscribe over its no*
tal certain deep, and gloomy, and-terrible Ather
istical characters; and thus show..themselves td
the world as they really are, the pretended vow;
ries of science proclaiming aloud, that ,which
~the fool bath" only " said in his heart." Au
institution of such a character, bearing the ni,nie
of " the London University,"_ would be a foul
stain and a deep calamity. to the . country.---,
We are therefore happy to believe, that the
country will he -protected from this injitry and
r reproach by the establishment of a Christian In•,,
stitution, which, under the highest patronage;
and with every legal sanction, will deprive the
Anti-Christian one of the name it has so pre-
sumptuously usurped, and stunt the growth at
least of the venomous monster, if not stifle it at
its birth.—lbirL . •