The Sun.
London, England, 1845-07-12 00:00:00

THR SUN, LONDON, SATURDAY MORNING, JULY 12, 1845.

the alleptions made against them in a petition, which
he NI presented the previous evening.
Their Lordships then went into a long discussion on
the subject of the proposed New Standing Orders, on
the subject of- Railway Bills, and in the course of it,
The Earl of DALHOUSIE took occasion to explain and
defend the course pursued by the Board of Trade on
this subject.

Lord BRoIIORAN moved that his resolution, requiring
that the promoters of a new railway should pay the
costs of an opposing landholder, be adopted as a new
standing order.
This proposition was opposed by the Earl of Wictuow
and other Noble Lords, and after some discussion it was
withdrawn, for the purpose of being again submitted on
Monday next.
Several Bills on their Lordships' table were then ad-
vanced a stage, after which the House adjourned.

The Commons met at Twelve.
Lord ASHLEY moved the order of the day for the
House going into Committee on the Lunatics Bill.
Mr. T. DUNCOMBE, by moving that the Hoase be
c:;unted, and afterwards by moving the adjournment,
endeavoured to defeat the measure, but without effect.
The Hon. Gentleman then moved the postponement of
the Bill until next session. This amendment was de-
feated by a majority of 65, the numbers being—for the
amendment, 1; against it, 66. It was ultimately arranged
that the Committee should be taken on Tuesday.
The House re-assembled at Five o'clock, when
Mr. HAwEs postponed his motion on the subject of
the Danish claims until Tuesday week.

Sir JAMES GRAHAN moved that the House do resolve
itself into Committee on the Your Law (Scotland)
Amendment Bill.

Mr. HUME thought the Bill ought to be postponed to
next session.

Mr. EWART was also in favour of the postponement of

the measvre,

A long discussion followed, in the course of which the
House was adlressed by Mr. STEWART, Sir JAMES
GRAHAM, Mr. E. ELLICE, Mr. Ross, and other Hon.
Members, but eventually the iiou,e went into Com-
mittee on the dill, and cle,tbes 35 to 55, after consider-
able discussion, were agreed to.

The ether orders of the day were then disposed of, and
the House adjourned at hail past One o'clock.

The last news of New Zealand will scarcely remove
the impression which so generally attaches to the his-
tory of that colony in the public mind—that it is the
' victim of a singular fatality, or of egregious mal-adminis-
tration. By brief advices that have just reached Eng-
land, we learn that, in a conflict between the bust's
crew of one of her MAJESTY'S ships, in company with a
small party of troops, with the natives, more than a
hundred of the New Zealanders, and from eighteen to
twenty of our own people, had perished. If, after the
massacre of Wairau, we are little surprised at, we do not
the less deplore, this lamentable catastrophe. It would
have been strange indeed—an anomaly offered to the
experience of all European communications with
the barbarous, or even the semi-civilised, tribes of the
Southern and the South Pacific Ocean—if the moral
influence of such a cunningly-contrived and successfully-
accomplished movement as that which resulted in the
caption and murder of the " Nelson" party, including
Major WAKEFIELD and his unfortunate companions,
had not urged on the dusky compatriots of those who
triumphed at Wairau to slake once more their thirst for
the blood of the strangers. However land-jobbing
missionaries, or jobbing laud companies, may qualify the
fact, the fact, we have no doubt, remains an absolute
one, that the New Zealander, though he be a
tall, a stalwart, and even an intelligent islander
is yet a sanguinary savage. Ages have passed away
without witnessing any material mitigation of the
" ferocity" principle, that forms, after all, the fond of his
character. It seems the most unlikely thing in the
world, that more ages should not elapse before they can
be reclaimed from the indulgence of their sanguinary
tastes (to say nothing of their predatory tendencies)—
so long, that is, as they shall remain under the paternal
jurisdiction of the Colonial-office in Downing-street.
But let us speak more earnestly of the matter, meagre
as is the narrative we yet have of it, lest we should be
thought to speak with levity of another
catastrophe at this ill-fated settlement in which
3) many valuable lives, English and native,
have been suddenly and violently sacrificed. We
do most earnestly direct the attention of the public to
the amount of human misery, bereavement of property,
blighting of hopes, and loss of lite, which have mourn-
fully recorded the different stages of the colony's brief
existence. Assiduously excited and wickedly exagge-
rated expectations in the mother country—disappointed
hopes and ruined prospects—poverty, peril, anti death,
in the fertile but inhospitanle solitudes of the island—
these have been the sad alternations through which the
investment purchasers here, and the deluded emi-
grants there, have successively passed. With whom
rests all the tremendous responsibility, the ulti-
mate atonement, for these deplorable incidents 2
The question is more easily asked than answered, more
readily answered than satisfied. The Government de-
partmunt charged with the general supervision, economy,
and management of its state and fiscal administration,
may be prepared with specious grounds of accusation
against the " Monster" Land Company that had set in
motion a vast machinery of contracts for bargain, and
sale, and settlement, without having an ascertained title
of feasible proprietorship to ten acres out of every two
hundred comprehended within the enormous block they
called their own. Ihe Monster Land Company treated
with and petted—favoured and doubted alternately—now
tampered with, and now discarded by the Government--
patronised to-day, and cold-shouldered to-morrow, by the
Downing-street functionaries, and especially by the great
" Lord" of (colonial) " misrule," might turn round with
at least as good a case upon the QUEEN'S Ministers, and
on their beads charge all the mischiefs and destruction,
the bankruptcies and the bloodshed, that have illustrated
in New Zealand the halting, timid, miserable counsels
of successive Governments, afraid to assert the clear and
undoubted title of prior possession and occupancy against
other States ; alarmed at the suggestion of at any rate
extending the shield of British Government protection
over a community of British subjects settled in that dis-
tant region ; and unequal to the laborious but honour-
able duty of upholding the inviolable rights of life and
property for free Britons in any and every part of
the habitable world. The present is not the opportunity
for going into the important inquiry how, and in what
proportions, the distressing responsibility we speak of
should be divided between Downing-street and Broad-
street-buildings. We have already intimated our own
conviction that the defence set up on behalf of the New
Zealand Company by its directors against the charges
of dealing in and selling lands, which subsequent events
have proved that they held by no clear title, if by any
is by no means satisfactory--by no means such as will
even procure them an acquittal at the bar of public
pressed against them of
management.obpadiniofanituhpoanndthewcohrasergesloudly
The Colonial Go-
vernment, as it is more exposed to animadversion in a
case of this kind from its superior and original powers
and jurisdiction, so is it more open to charges reducible
into'precise and specific form than even the malfeasance
of the New Zealand Company. In the infancy of that
concern they ought to have determined finally, and
boldly and distinctly acted upon that determination,
whether they would occupy New Zealand in virtue of
the rights we have mentioned— whether they would
raise it to the rank of a Crown colony—or whether they
would retain it only in the humbler character of a naval
station? If the Government saw its way clearly as to
either of these conclusions, it ought, without hesitation,
to have dealt with the New Zealand Company on terms
and conditions clear and unambiguous—for privileges
and grants positive, limited, and ascertained. If it
did not, it had no right, it was conscious
of no title, it could plead no excuse, for making
any bargain, reserving any conditions, or granting
any charter, in respect of one part of i
the millions of
acres, told by the score, with which it s now, in some
sort, committed to deal at pleasure. But the Govern-
tnent has cm:apt...wised itself irretrievably, by the very
coquetting eo which it obviously resorted for the purpose
of avoiding the very extremes into which it has a, last
fallen, instead of at first menlUlly assuming. The in-
stant they treated with the New Zealand Company on
the letting of a party who had something to pane they
in all legs' eonstruction, took upon themselves the inde-
fensible duCes, as well as right(, of protectorship. That
protection they have not tat) tied to life or limb, property
or person, to our fellow countrymen in New Zealand ;
and, if Lord STANLEY imagines that he has acquit:. a
himself, or his cellesgues in the Government, of the
terrible responsienity that now attache, to them
for all the English blood that has been shed in New Zea-
land, by dexterouslyetrung official common-places in
half-a-dozen epistles from Downing-street, we venture
to state that he is most egregiously mistaken.
We shall really be curious to learn at what point
of hostile collision between English settlers and
native chiefs—at what point of national degradation
or unresented insults upon our national flag, and the
unpunished massacres by wholesale of our distant fellow-
countrymen by these half naked savages, her MAJESTY'S
Government will feel themselves bound to interpose the
authority and the force with which the Constitution has
armed them. It will be seen, from communications
published in another part of The Sun, that the autho-
rities of New South Wales had received timely warning
of the coming danger, which, unfortunately, was not
heeded in time.

The debate on Tuesday night last on the objects, the terms,
and the effect of the Convention recently concluded betwee❑
Great Britain and France for the better suppression of the
slave, trade was opened by a speech from Lord PALMERSTON,

certainly one of the most able that was ever delivered in con-
nexion with the general question of negro slavery, within
the walls of Parliament. It was :by no means faultless
indeed ; for in some essential particulars we must consider it
to have been deficient in candour towards his political op-
ponents; and as to others, in that cardinal excellence of
legislative oratory—political discretion. With these allow-
ances or deductions, it was still a brilliant and masterly ad-
dress, admirable for its comprehensive views—its condensed
statements of facts and documentary evidence scat-
tered through many volumes of sessional papers, returns,
and reports. It gave a lucid but appalling account of the
unmitigated—perhaps, aggravated—atrocities of this hideous
traffic as it exists at this moment, not only on the western but
on the eastern coasts of Africa. It was a generous, elo-
quent, and earnest appeal to the moral courage, the con-
sistent humanity of a Christian nation, not to relax in the
energy with which it had embarked upon, and
hitherto persisted in, the virtuous enterprise of sup-
pressing the most atrocious crime on the most
extensive scale, which one family of the human race can
perpetrate against another. In denouncing the frightful sa-
crifices of life which, year after year, attend the carrying on
of this execrable trade—a trade that, in ten years, depopu-
lates Africa, on a very moderate computation, to the amount
of not less than one million of human beings—in revealing,
by a few casual glimpses, as it were, some portion
of the unimaginable horrors—the previous hunting, capture,
and manacling of these human animals of the chase, and
of booty; their subsequent packing in bulk, their privations,
and the maddening thirst and delirious fury that succeed it—
the unremoved corpses of the dead, from suffocation or inani-
tion, left to corrupt by the sides, or in the laps, even, of their sur-
viving companions of the middle passage—and, finally, the lan-
guid and weakly wretches, whose constitutions, on being disem-
barked, are found too debilitated for the sordid puposes of the
Muscat slave-dealer, and who are therefore left on the burning
beach, just where they have sunk from exhaustion and ill-
treatment, to be drowned by the returning tide ;—in all
these passages of his address the Noble Lord spoke out with
all the sympathy of the philanthropist, and all the just indig-
nation of an Englishman. There can be no second opinion,
we apprelieno, on the spirit and effect with which these
terrible, though necessary, details are touched upon.
It was in enforcing the immediate purposes of
his motion " for the names of the witnesses examined
before the mixed British and French Commission for the
better suppression of the slave trade, and also of
the minutes of the evidence given by them," that the
\oble Viscount, in the heat of his argument, must
be thought to have been betrayed into those expres-
sions to which we have alluded as wanting in candour
and hi discretion. There is no doubt that he was justi-
fied—unhappily justified—in declaring his solemn conviction
" that slave-trading was a crime which desolated Africa, de-
based Asia, contaminated America, from the north to the
south of the settled states of that Continent, and stained
Europe with unpardonable guilt." But, surely, he was re-
proved not without reason by Sir R. PEEL for volunteering a
somewhat exaggerated apprehensiveness of French
insiacerity in its adhesion to the cause of slave-
trading suppression, and for manifesting a disposition to
speak disparagingly of the value of French aid in a common
cause on so righteous an object. We are likewise compelled
to acknowledge that we feel the force of the Premier's re-
proof that it was ungracious in the Noble Lord to seek to
detract from the merit of Portugal (whatever the
past duplicity and contumacy of her conduct) in
respect of the good faith and even vigilance of
her present exertions to put down the slaving
expeditions of her own subjects. Perhaps, too, the Noble
Lord may have somewhat damaged the cause he so very
ably advocated, by accusing the present Government of
apathy in looking to the execution of those conventions and
engagements for the suppression of the slave trade, which the
Government that had the good fortune to reckon among its
most accomplished colleagues the Noble Lord himself, nego
tiated undeishis Lordship's immediate supervision and ma-
nagement. There is as little of political discretion as of
moral candour, we must repeat, in needlessly reflecting upon
the counsels of a great people like the French, with regard
to transactions that have passed, and as such—as being
" faits accomplis "—are, perhaps, no longer within the pale
of useful or fair criticism, because they cannot be conformed
to any rule or proposition, however excellent, that can now
be suggested I

But having entered our protest against these partial de-
fects, we must do justice to the general tenor, and express
our full concurrence in, the general conclusions of this noble
address. Whilst we fully concur in the opinion avowed by
Sir ROBERT PEEL, that such a convention between the two
nations, as that which has been negotiated on behalf of
the respective Crowns, by the Duc DE BROGLIE and
Dr. LUSHLNGTON, is, in itself, and its purposes, a
political good, and a hopeful augury of a happier future to
the outraged races of Africa, we cannot escape from the
force of the charge which Lord PALMERSTON has brought
against the British negotiator of having admitted allega-
tions into the preamble and certain articles of the Convention,
at once derogatory to the high reputation this country has
justly earned by its abolition of slave-trading eight-and-
thirty years ago, and by the Imperial ransom which its
munificence and its justice paid down, under the self-imposed
conditions of the Act of 1634. for the emancipation of all the
negro slaves within its colonial dominions. To this reputa-
tion, to the truth of history, to the moral character of the
British people, and to the dignity of the British Crown, the
terms of one part of the preamble and the recital
and stipulations of Articles 3 and 8 are most
offensively and palpably injurious. No British di-
plomatist ought to have lowered the moral preten-
sions of his country to a level with those of France
in any record or notice of the proceedings of either touching
the suppression of slave-trading from any date subsequent to
1807. Now this is a distinction to be never lost sight of.
It raises no point of political disparagement that can give
offence to France, to abstain from putting her in the same
category with England, as one of the two Powers
which, by the conventions of 1831 and 1833, were
determined to prevent their subjects from slave-trading
under their flags. The flag of England has been
struck for ever in connexion with slave-trading from the year
1807. In the year 1831 that of France was notoriously
and most extensively and profligately spread over this trade.
Till 1831 the French Government had manifested more than
reluctance to any virtual effort to put down this shame upon
the French people. For the Convention, as a treaty, we
rejoice, as we shall ever do, at any other equally valid
evidence of a good understanding between the two Crowns;
but that Dr. LUSHINGTON should have been inveigled into
such a mode of slurring over unpleasant recollections affecting
France, by degrading England into an implied (but, thank
GOD, most unfounded) participation in the long-protracted
criminality of the French sufferance of slave-trading, argues
great tact and ability on the part of the Duc Ds BROGLIE,
but does not excuse the Learned Doctor for yielding to the
suggestions of his flattered vanity, or his ol er- excited
credulity.

Madrid journals of the 4th instant have been received, but
they bring no news of importance. The Heraldo, a Minis-
terial paper, announces that the French Government have
permitted Don Canr.os and his consort to proceed to Greoulx,
in the department of the Lower Alps ; but it adds that he
will be watched there as closely as at Bourges, and that the
Prince of AsTuurAs will remain in the last-named town,
under surveillance.

On the Madrid Bourse the Funds were flat. The Three
per Cents. closed at 30 for cash, and 30% for 60 days ;
and the Five per Cents. at 20% for 14 days ; Passives, 6%
cash.

In the French Chambers of Peers the Bill for increasing
the number of French cruisers on the African coast was
taken into consideration on Wednesday, when the Marquis
DE BOISSY first addressed the Chamber. He considered the
new treaty of a very satisfactory character, and far superior to
those of 1831 and 1833, but at the same time maintained that
the Government had consented to concessions that were to
be regretted. He wished to know why no stipulations had
been made with regard to the eastern coast of Africa. Was
it with a view to favour England, that the slave trade might
be carried on there for the benefit of the East India
Company. He declared also that a secret treaty
existed, by which France could not send more than 3,000
men to the Indian Seas. He should, therefore, be glad to
have some answer from the Government on these points.
The Duke DE BnoGuE said no such exception existed. The
French Government could send on the eastern coast any num-
ber of vessels it pleased, but it had not entered into any obli-
gation on the point, because the right of search was not exer-
cised in that part of the world, the slave trade being only prac-
tised there under the Portuguese flag, over which England
possessed certain rights, iu virtue of ancient treaties. The fact
was, that the eastern coast of Africa had not been included
in the treaty because slavery was abolished in all the British
possessions. M. GUIZOT denied the truth of the assertion of
the Marquis Botssy relative to a secret treaty stipulating
not to send more than 3,000 men to the Indian Seas. No
such treaty, he said, existed, or had ever existed. The Bill
Was passed by a majority of 94 to 8. The intelligence in the
papers is without interest, if we except the following ex-
tract from the Quotidienne, which relates to the forma clanwsa
raised against Vic-ron HuGo, with which our readers are
already acquainted. The name of the married lady is not
mentioned :

"We have spoken with all the reserve prescribed by public
decency of an event which has caused, and still causes, great
sensation in Paris, atm respecting which a grand trial before an
exceptional tribunal was expected. The affair is arranged. A
high functionary who, when he was Minister, had never a very
decided taste for the policy of conciliation, has, it is said, in-
duced the complaining party to decline prosecuting. The Peers
will not, therefore, be retained in Paris after the close of the
session. The only justice that will take place will be that of public
opinion."

The Sud of Marseilles contains the following intelligence
from Algiers, dated June 21 :

" M. Leon Roche returned last night from Larache, with the
Emperor of Morocco's ratification of the treaty concluded between
that Sovereign's Minister and General Delarue. The arrival in the
roads of three French ships of war, the Veloce, Titan, and Cygne,
has promoted the arrangement, and seasonably seconded the intel-
ligent effbrts of General Delarue, our Charge d'Affaires, M. do
Chaseau, and M. Leon Roche."

It is stated in a letter from Beyrout, of the 12th of June,
that the Pacha was expected there on the 13th, and fears
were entertained that as soon as he left the mountains the
war between the Druses and Maronites would be renewed.
On the Paris Bourse, on Wednesday, the Three per Cents.
closed at 83f, 30c. ; ultimately the Three per Cents. closed
at 83f. 30c.; the New Loan at 'B3f. 65c. ; the Five per
Cents. at 121 f. 50c. ; Orleans Railroad Shares, 1,1456 ;
Rouen, 1,035 f.; Vierzon, 741 f. 25c. ; Havre, 840 f. ; Avignon,

957 f. 50c. ; Basle, 250 f. ; Belgian Two-and a Half per Cents.,
601.

The following are the quotations for the new lines :
Orleans and Bordeaux, 1751. premium ; Boulogne, 115 E
ditto; Troyes and Montereau, 21f. 25c. ; Paris and Lyons
(Laffitte), 20f.; ditto (Calon), par; ditte (Ganneron), sf. ;
Northern Line (Laffitte), 32f. 50c. ; ditto (Rosamel), 61.
50c. ; Tours and Nantes (Mackenzie), sf. ; ditto
(Drouillard), par; ditto (O'Neill), 31: 50c. ; ditto (Jacques
Lefevre), par; Lyons and Avignon (Lecointe), 11f. 25c ;
ditto (Talabot), 30f. ; ditto (Compagnie Meridionale),
; Bordeaux and Toulouse (Mackenzie), par. ; ditto,
and Cette (Espeleta), 4f. 50c.; Creil and St. Quentin, par ;
Paris and Strasburg (Ganneron), 10f. ; Dijon and Mul-
hausen, par; Dieppe and :17ecamp, 261. 50c.