The Sun.
London, England, 1842-11-09 00:00:00

ruE SUN, LONDON, WEDNESDAY MORNING, NOVEMBER 9. 1842.

colonies increased 444,047 tons between 1839 and
1841. This increase in the quantity of the ship-
ping, combined with its increased efficiency, in
the face of a much restricted and almost stag-
nant trade, is the chief cause of the want of
freight and the fall in the value of ships.
In the slang language of the anti-free-traders,
it will be said that the shipowners have over-
traded. They have produced a glut of shipping.
Thus the improvement in building and navigat-
ing ships, and the application of steam to navi-
gation, some of the proudest triumphs of human
skill, come by an erroneous policy to be the
misfortune, or even to be reckoned as the
faults or errors, of those who adopt or achieve
them. Bad men are those, according to this
theory, who facilitate navigation. At present
those who endeavour to improve agriculture
must share this reproach. The value of its pro-
duce has fallen, and notwithstanding Gur people
are famishing, and notwithstanding the tendency
of population to increase, there is a glut of agri-
cultural produce as well as of 'shipping. In
truth, what happens to the shipping interest
may be assumed as a type of what happens to
every producing interest. It is everywhere de-
sirous to produce as much and as cheaply as pos-
sible. The competition amongst its own members
introduces exertion and stimulates invention.
New contrivances, new machinery, new manures,
greater skill in draining ground, and in sailing
ships, continually tend in every branch of busi-
ness to produce every thing useful to man which
cart he made by labour at a less cost. As ma-
chinery is improved, mills are multiplied ; as
ships are more easily navigated, the number of
them is increased; as the ground is better under-
drained, a greater breadth is sown with corn. Thus,
through every branch of business, competition
stimulates both invention and exertion, and all
the producing classes, without any exception
continually labour to supply commodities at a
cheapening rate and more of them. There is a
universal striving to this end, and if it be not,
therefore, a law of nature that men should pro-
duce commodities as cheaply as possible, neither
is it a law of nature that streams should flow to-
wards the sea.

The theorists, however, those who convert the
proudest triumphs of skill into misfortunes,
maintain that it is a folly and an error to produce
commodities at a cheap rate, and they make laws
to prevent the accomplishment of that for which
all men in business strive. Corn-laws and similar
enactments in England, Tariffs in France, Ger-
many, and the United States, one and all, have
for their object to prevent commodities becoming
cheap and abundant. The trade policy of every
Government is in opposition to the struggles of
mankind. It defies the laws of nature, as a man
defies them who throws himself from a house
top, and is bruised and maimed for his folly.

When HENGIST and HORSA, or when any of
the other ancient German or Saxon Chiefs, led
forth, from the too narrow abode of their people,
some great swarms in search of a new home,
they obeyed the necessary tendency of society
in those days when art was little advanced, and
the earth but scantily peopled. They were the
real leaders of men, and were willingly honoured
and obeyed as such. But modern Governments,
pretending to be the leaders of the people, set
themselves up in direct opposition to the tendency
of society, and will be obeyed by force. They
make barriers of themselves to prevent the pro-
gress of mankind, instead of leading them on. It is
the conflict between their restrictions, prevent-
ing the free exchange of goods between one na-
tion and another, and everywhere preventing
the increase of population and wealth, which
causes a glut of shipping, a glut of manufactures,
a glut of agricultural produce, and which turns
the skill and ingenuity of man into curses. On
the one hand we have all the producing classes
everywhere striving to make commodities cheap
and abundant; and on the other, we have Go-
vernments, under the guidance of a theory that
cheapness is an evil, striving to prevent things
becoming cheap. Everywhere, therefore, the
bulk of society in its practice, and legislation by its
enactments, aims at accomplishing contradictory
and incompatible ends; and the producers of every
description find their exertions foiled, and their
prosperity endangered.
Though there are many complaints of the ship-
ping being out of employment, we are pleased to
see by the last finance accounts that the number
of seamen had steadily increased from 191,232 in
1839, to 210,198 in 1841. As long as their num-
ber increases, we should care little for what ship-
owners might suffer in pocket; but they cannot
suffer without ultimately fewer seamen being em-
ployed. A more narrow-minded set of politicians
generally speaking, and a less generous race of
men, than the shipowners we are scarcely ac-
quainted with. We can never forgive them for
continually allowing their servants (the sea-
men) to be impressed without making one
honest, bold, and united exertion to put an end
to such an iniquity. Had they had the least care
for the men who had make them wealthy they
might, long ago, have put down that national
disgrace. But they are accused, and we believe
the accusation, of tolerating this abuse, because
it placed the seamen somewhat more in their
power, and somewhat at their mercy. They
would rather be served by men who may be en-
slaved, and therefore kept humiliated and de-
based, than by free men. Till they exert them-
selves to put an end to impressment—till they
forbid it, which they have the power to do, ice
shall lose no Opportunity of reminding them of
their ungenerous conduct, and of recording their
dishonour.

The triennial Charge of the Bishop of LLAN-
DAFF to his Clergy, though generally displaying
that ability and good sense for which his Lordship
is distinguished, is very equivocal on the impor-
tant subject which now agitates the Church, and
must have left. his hearers in doubt whether he
regarded" The Tracts for the Times," as tending
to evil or to good. While he blames the Pusey-
ites for designating the " Pora's usurpation " an
ordinance of GOD, and calls upon diocesans and
clergy to resist a doctrine so dangerous to their
power, he bestows the highest commendationi on
other portions of the " Tracts." In one part of the
Charge he says there is in the writings of
the innovators a tone of fondness and indulgence
for " Holy Mother Church," showing what
lurks beneath the garb ot amiability; and in ano-
ther he declares that the " Tracts" had displayed
the nature of the Catholic Church, and had raised
an awful sense of the history of man's redemp-
tion. " These," he adds, " were principles
which were never absent from the teachings of
the Church, which he could not but admit were
dormant when those publications appeared."
This is blowing hot and cold in the same
breath. The Bishop seems disposed to
allow those teachers to proceed to any
lengths with their Popish rites and doc-
trines, provided they do not desert in a body to
the " Holy Mother," and in order to deter them
from such a rash act, of which, however, there is
no great fear, he points out the false teachings of
the Church of Rome, which had destroyed the
principle of unity, by substituting a spurious
earthly dominion—by teaching that to obey one
chief was unity. This is inconsistent language,
and only shows to what shifts even the ablest
of nien are driven when they abuse rivals in re-
ligion as well as in trade. We believe it is
generally allowed that in no Christian Church
whatever is there such unity of faith as in the
Catholic Church, and that this arises from
the very circumstance which the learned
Prelate condemns ; nay more, the Epis-
copal Church of England is founded on the
very same principle. Each Bishop is looked up
to as a minor Pope in his own diocese ; some of
the Right Reverend Fathers claim almost equal
power, both spiritual and temporal; and occa-
sionally threaten to rebel against the earthly
head recognised by the canons of the Church.
But has the Anglican system, which the Bishop
r7ztols at the expense of a rival establishment,
been effectual in preserving unity ? Are there
not more dissensions now than at any former
period, and a greater variety of sects than ever
existed in any other country, all taking their
rise from some great defect in our Established
Church In commencing the Charge he ad- ,