The Sun.
London, England, 1827-06-22 00:00:00

armies which enabled him to earn his distinction.
But the law cannot protect men against their
own vices or wickednesses, which cause them to
he held in contempt. If the Peers do or say
what merits contempt (God forbid that we
should attribute to them acts or sayings of such
a character__we are merely making a supposition.
for the sake of argument), how is it possible to
prevent, in these days of tniversal publication,
the existence of the feeling ? If, as several
Peers hinted the other night, the publishers of
newspapers, containing reports, of which the ten-
dency is to bring either the House of Parliament,
or its individual Members, into contempt, this
would be at once effecting a revolution in the
established system of the country. nesides, if
what we have stated be any thing near the truth
—that men are the authors of the contempt with
which they are treated—what an extensive field
for interference would be opened ! The worst
of the matter would be, that every Peer, in kind-
ness to his neighbour Peer, would be discover-
ing, even in those speeches which gave the ut-
most satisfation to the utterers, matter calculated
to excite contempt, and would be for wreaking
his vengeance on the unfortunate publisher of the
report. Who knows if even Lord Londonderry
and Lord Ellenborough would be safe from this
impertinent friendship, and might not hear of the
reports of some of their most brilliant efforts in
the House branded as being calculated to excite
contempt ? Law, then, cannot secure men from
becoming objects of contempt. We may lament
their Lordships have not that power over
minds which they have over their fortunes ; but our
lamentations will not alter the mature of things.
We may lament that the Duke of Wellington is
not held in such regard by the public as a Politi-
cian, as his friends cciuld wish; but his Grace must
trace the cause to ilinixelf and not to the people. A
clever 'English traveller (Hogg), speaking of the Ita-
lians, said, he could not believe they were such
rogues as they thought they were. We suspect
most r:'eople are now inclined to believe that his
(.'"ace is not so cunning as he thought he was. He
allowed himself to be too much elated by the success
which attended his Amendment to the Spring-gun
Bill, in order to make it include market gardeners,
which Amendment, he afterwards admitted, when
cross-questioned, he proposed with a view to ensure
the loss of the Bill; and with the best disposition
in the world to give an advantage, by similar means
in the case of the Corn Bill, he has only earned the
reputation of having been a tool in the hands of
men more skilled than himself in similar stratagems,
and disposed to avail themselves of his eagerness to
act a slippery part, and his want of penetration to
discover the foolish part he was acting, and the posi-
tion in which it would inevitably place him. As an
instance of the impossibility of securing men against
the feelings which their acts have a tendency to
excite, we may notice the controversies in which
we have been involved ourselves, by our disposition
to place the conduct of the House of Lords in a
favourable light. We admitted some time ago, as
our readers may recollect, that their Lordships were
evidently more ignorant than other people, but we
contended that they were not worse in other
reeepects. " The Members of the Upper House of
Parliament," we said, " from the defectiveness of
their education and the absence of motives for ap-
plication, may, generally speaking, be more ignorant
with regard to politics and legislation, than men
placed in circumstances which demand from them
diligence and application; but it will hardly be con-
tended that they are also mere selfish than other
people."—Now while our admission of incapacity
has been readily received, we find a great un-
willingness to receive the accompanying apology.
An able contemporary, The Manchester Mercury,
contends that they are more selfish--
'We think that, speaking of them as a body, they are, and
that the causes of their being so are obvious. They are
4707asenarate vaw fr
*isn g4i4-1-15thirerractextensi;e privileges,
pre-
sumed to be hereditarily endued with wisdom, and there-
fore specially and peculiarly appointed as Counsellors to the
King. They are thus led to entertain very extravagant
notions of their own importance, regarding their peculiar
interests, opinions, and feelings, as infinitely beyond those
of tlse rest of society, although it would be difficult to as-
sign any good reason why they should be so highly esti-
mated—why they should be rated at any scale above the
numerical proportion which the nobility, as a class, may
bear to the aggregate number of the community. Legis-
lators should have no interests apart from those of the
communities for which they legislate. Our legislators,
however, unfortunately have, and they take special care to
legislate for their own advantage."
Having demurred to our observation, our contem-
porary then proceeds to contrast the unwillingness
of the landholders to consent to any measure from
which they apprehend a fall of prices, with the rea-
diness with which the cotton-manufacturers agreed
Lo the change from absolute prohibition of import
duties, to a simple protecting duty of 10 per cent.
ad valorem. We trust our exertions, however un-
successful, to uphold the estimation of their Lord-
ships throughout the country, will be properly ap-
preciated. If a critical hour should conic, may it be
held in remembrance when the word is banishment;
for it is hard, at our years, to be compelled to seek a
new home.—Morning Chronicle.

Surely it would be better that public men
should abstain from saying unseemly things of
each other in Parliament, than that the Press, as
the faithful organ of what passes there, should
be made responsible for its very faithfulness.—
The Press is at once the bugbear which seems to
haunt, and the receptacle which seems to de-
light, all public men. To be noticed by it, and
recorded in its pages is to most of them the very
pabulum of life—while, on the other hand, it no
sooner offends by its too scrupulous accuracy,
than, like other faithless lovers, its warmest
admirers become its most inveterate, unrelenting
foes. There are two extraordinary facts con-
nected with this subject which few persons can
have failed to observe—the one, that it is for its
truth, not for its misrepresentation, that the
Press is generally reprehended ; the other, that
it is, for the most part, those who make the
greatest fuss and parade about their attachment
to it, and to all kinds of liberty, who are the
. .

first to arraign and bring it into jeopardy. As
a proof of this, almost every political
attack upon the liberty of the Press of
late years has come from the Whig party—that
very same party who, when it suits their pur-
pose, proclaim it as " the air we breathe, and
without which we die !" We mean no offence

to either House of Parliament when we say, that
though the promulgation of their debates is still
called, technically, a breach of privilege, the
practice has become so sanctified by custom,
and so manifestly beneficial in nearly every point
of view, that it may, in fact, be considered as

part and parcel of the Constitution, and what
we apprehend no Legislator or Statesman would

now take upon himself to advocate the suppres-
sion of. To be sure it may be very awkward to
men of too ardent or too irritable minds, or to

those who find it necessary to publish in another
form the speeches which they did not make,
that the daily press should give on the instant,
to the world ~ words that burn" more intensely
than the cooler judgment of the titterers would
approve ; but surely it is for those who run
into these extremes to check their own exube-

ranee, and not to attempt to visit their own of-
fence as a fault of others. What, for instance,

would have been gained by calling to the bar of the
House of Peers the publishers of all the newspapers
in London (for, as they agreed in their statements,
no one in particular could, with justice, hare been