The Sun.
London, England, 1827-05-21 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

An interesting account of a meeting held last
Saturday, for the purpose of opposing effectually
the nefarious and cruel plan of enclosure, by
which 700 families of poor Welch cottagers were
to be pauperized and ruined, will be found in
another portion of our journal. On the scheme
alluded to, The Times has already remarked ;
and its interference has not passed unnoticed by
by the friends of those threatened sufferers in
whose behalf it was exerted. The fact is, that
these barbarities must be checked, and the spirit-
which engenders them rebuked and crushed, or
there exists no hope of saving us, as a people,
from the most humiliating destruction. Enclo-
sure Bills have already, in numberless cases,
proved themselves but expedients for sacrificing
the poor Englishman to . the rich one—for ex-
tinguishing the peasantry and yeomanry of Eng-
land—for robbing them of all those little subsi-
diary comforts and indulgences arising from the
various uses of common lands, which helped to
diversify the sameness of a life of local drudgery,
to sweeten its irksome toils, and to eke out its
scanty remunerations. It has often shocked our
reason, while the consequences of the doctrine
shave filled our hearts with dread, to witness the
stern, but complacent and supercilious coolness,
with which every moral attribute and excellence
of a country is set at naught by the technical
sophistry which resolves the living man and
his enjoyments into the greater or less quantum
of production on a given spot. Because a cer-
tain monied capital, vested by an individual in
what is termed the " scientific" improvement
of a particular surface, may show up a longer
string of loaded waggons, bearing produce to a
market-town ten miles off, than if the same sum
were dispersed into 20 hands, and its several por-
tions employed at the will, and after the taste; and
to the health, and gratification, and well-being,
moral as well as natural, of as many separate families,
all these families of independent, inoffensive, con-
tented people, are to be unroofed, and offered up to
the unclean beast of " production." More may be
produced, we deny it not—more food may be sold ;
but to whom ? To the manufacturing inhabitants
of cities. And at what expence ? By the conver-
sion of yeomen into weavers ! This is not accord-
ing to our unlearned feeling. We wish to see fewer
sickly manufacturers, uncertain of their next week's
work and food, and a restored majority of robust,
and simple, hearty, and well-nourished peasants.
There is not a cottage in England to which there
ought not to be at least half an acre of garden-
ground appended. For reasons which relate to
domestic industry, sobriety, and enjoyment, this
ought to be, if by no other means attainable, the
care and object of the Legislature. When men
talk about capital in machinery and money, let them
reflect that such things are but means to an end, and
the most fruitful and enduring capital of all is in the
individual excellence and happiness of mankind.--
Conceiving, from what has been represented to
that the enclosure above referred to is a direct blow
at the moral existence of a large cottage population
in the Principality, we earnestly hope that the per-
nicious attempt may be defeated.—Times.

We would suggest with all deference and
good-will to Mr. Huskisson, as not unworthy
his serious attention, a letter addressed to that
Right Hon. Gentleman by name in The Times
of this morning, on the subject of the arbitrary;
narrow, tormenting, and mind-shackling system
under which the Excise Laws, in their actual
operation, are made a very powerful instrument
for checking the growth of British art, and
giving to countries where they are unknown a
sensible advantage over Great Britain, in the
career of manufacturing and commercial im-
provement. The short statement which illus-
trates the eagerness of an officer—the author
might say with truth, a Board—of Excise to
pounce upon every new invention, in the mode
of describing or designating which recourse must
be had to certain words, such as " spirits,"
" stills," &c. &c., although the thing signified
by any of such words may be altogether remote
from that which was in contemplation of Parlia-
ment when the laws were enacted, is at once
amusing and provoking to every man who can
relish an absurdity and lament a national misfor-
tune. We believe that a gentle application of
that talent for simplifying the complex, and
generalizing the minute, which has already dis-
tinguished Mr. Huskisson's treatment of the
Customs branch of the law of England, would
materially add to the public benefit, and to the
fame of the Right Honourable Gentleman if he
would extend it to the Excise.

TO THE RIGIITHON. WM. HUSKISSON,

Sir,—ln your admirable exposure of the fallacy of the
opinions entertained by the opponents to the removal of
restrictions on trade, I find the following passage,---" Will
honourable members please to declare whether they woultt
have the House revive the 1500 statutes which I have
within these few years had the good fortune to persuazde
Parliament to repeal ?—(Hear, hear.)—Would they have
the complex, and oppressive, and vexatious code of laws
re-enacted, that formerly regulated the customs and naviga-
tion of the country ?—laws so absurd and intricate, that it
has well been said, that the most astute anil experienced
merchant always required to have his lawyer at his elbow
for fear of contravening them, and that even with that as-
sistance he could not get on even without feeing the custom-
house-officer, not so much with any sinister views in exer-
cising that species of bribery, as with the view of preserving
himself from those difficulties and embarrassments into
which, under such a system, he must have been every trio-
ment in danger of being unwittingly. entrapped."
Now, Sir, I beg leave most respectfully to remind you;
that the excise laws place the manufacturer precisely—at
this moment—even at the present enlightened period—in
the state in which you have truly described the British
merchant to have been before you so ably advocated his
cause. Whilst all other branches of the commerce of the
country have had their fetters taken off, trid, thus eman..
cipated, have bounded forward in the career of improve..
went (perhaps rather too fast), that part of tha arts of life
subject to the excise laws is still surrounded by torpedos
whose touch withers and paralyses all attempts at improve-
nient. In France, not only have manufactures been
brought to perfection to rival the West Indies in the pre,
paration of sugar, but brandy is obtained from indigeneus
roots and vegetables which enter into competition, with
that obtained from grapes. Emulation there, unfettered
by any excise restraints, is every day exts nding the empire
of chemistry applied to the arts--every sort of vegetable is
made a Proteus in the variety of shapes which it is caused
to assume--as a beverage, old productions are drawn from
new sources, and vegetable chymistry is much better
known than in any other country.
Here the public manufacturers are circumscribed in all
their operations, the excise laws are perpetually interfering
to check every improvement : they are the incubus which
subdues the genius and superior industry of an Englishman,
and permits his neighbour of France to excel him in draw-
in, from the vegetable kingdom especially, new resources
of riches.

I beg to adduce a few instances, among hundreds which
can be pointed out, of the injurious tendency of these laws
as they are at present interpreted.
A new mode of refining sugar is proposed, with the aid -
of rectified spirits; but the word " spirits" is a talisman
which, in an instant, would " call from the vasty deep"
of the excise laws, penalties and forfeitures innumerable,
upon any one who ventures to use the article in the man-
ner required•
Stills have been invented and put in practice in Franre
which completes the whole process of distillation in one
operation, requiring no more fuel than the quantity neces-
sary to raise the liquor to the boiling heat : here they are
stilled by the Excise laws.

Starch is a substance which differs from sugar in ED
slight a degree, that a simple chymical process will convert
the former into the latter, in a liquid state of great purity,
and thence form the basis of wines and brandies of British
manufacture scarcely inferior to the foreign; but " starch"
is another stiffener Ohms which would bring spies and in..