The Sun.
London, England, 1829-07-08 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

We have given it as our decided opinion, that
emancipation has accomplished the full measure
of good which it was reasonable to expect from
it in so shalt a time,—namely, that it has sub-
dued every particle of disaffection Which existed
in the minds of the Catholics to wards the Go-
vernment ; and therel'ore,
may'
whatever coarse
and barbarous habits m
prevail amongst the
people in their treatment of
eh other, or of ob-
noxious individuals, the State has nothing to
. fear from them. The multitude'
are not now
kept quiet at the word of command they no
longer look upon self-restraint and disCiplined
obedience as means of baffling the constitits.ted
authorities, and when a foreign enemy of
Fn-
land shall invite them, of eventually breaking off
all connexion with her. The Catholic peasantry
are now dismissed from school, and the natural
tendencies of an elastic, buoyant, reckless, and
impetuous character, have burst out with great
force because of the restraints which had for two
or three years past been galling them. If Ns
change has proceeded from the Catholic Relief
Bill, every man who knows Ireland will admit. it
to be a blessed change, inasmuch as the great night-
mare of disaffection is at once removed, and minor
evils only remain to be progressively encountered.
But such remarks are no further applicable than
to the Catholics of Ireland. If the Catholics
have been won over to the State, and even their
resentments against the old Orange system been
in a great degree obliterated or forgotten, the
contrary spirit prevails, we regret to my, amongst
the partisans of that same old faction, who seem
now to have laid aside all sense of decency to-
wards the King's Government, and all conceal-
ment or qualification of their abhorrence for its
Catholic subjects. If disturbances arise hence-
forth in Ireland, they will be the work of Orange--
men. That infatuated or wicked body are every
where preparing to celebrate by the grossest in-
sults, if not positive outrages upon their Catholic
fellow-citizens, the approaching 12tii of July.
It is not six years since the Orange processions,
shoutings, firings, and flags of defiance to the
Catholics, were pronounced to be unlawful, wider
Lord kVellesley s Government ; nor is it mots
than five years since all such demonstrations were
suppressed by authority, and for the time put an
end to. It appears that they are on the point of
breaking out again. The accounts in our iristi
letter of yesterday were of the most alarming
nature. " Sligo, Leitrim, Cavan, and Mona.
ghan," says our correspondent, " are sounding
the notes of preparation. In Fermanagh, the
means of actual war are collecting." The Orange
" Gentlemen" of that county,—those who ought
to be pledges to the kingdom for the maintenance
of internal peace,—were holding Orange Lodges,
resolving that the Orangemen of Fermanagh
should continue to assemble, for the purpose of
protecting themselves ".against the innovations
of Popery,"—in plain English, for the purpose
of resisting the law of Catholic relief. The
same incendiaries, if not traitors, resolved to
place no further confidence in the King's
Go-
vernment. A clergyman of the faction declared
from the pulpit, that " all ties between thg.
Sovereign and himself were dissolved"—tha4

" he owed him no further allegiance, and that
no Protestant was bound to pay him any !
That the time was coming when it might be
necessary to vindicate their rights," &c. If the
Catholics be provoked by such fury as this—if
Ireland be involved by it in a civil war—if the
throats of Protestant and Catholic be cut in
consequence, whose crime is it ? Is it the
natural or legitimate effect of a law for the esta-
blishment of religious liberty ? or of a villainous
faction, that feels the name of liberty an offence
to its own lust of arbitrary power ? We recom-
mend to attention the spirited and patriotic pro-
ceedings of the independent interest of Cork,
where the election expences of a liberal candidate
are to be supported by a public contribution.—
Times.

Several of our Contemporaries are at this mo-
ment engaged in discussing the merits of the
controversy between the Edinburgh and Ifiest-
minster Reviews, between the Utilitarians and
Anti-Utilitarians. The Westminster Review
at its outset assailed the Edinburgh Review for
its want of principle. The Edinburgh Review,
in its two last numbers, has retaliated by a fero-
cious onset on Mr. Bentham and Mr. Mill, and
the principles which they have advocated. Others
have been drawn to take a part in the warfare, as
is usual on such occasions ; this will in the end
be productive of good. The Scotsman of Satur-
day last observes, with regard to this contro-
versy

" The Edinburgh Review has been of infinite
service as as timulus to thought. The writers were
equally bold and felicitous. They were brilliant
also; although in this respect Candour requires us to
say, that they seemed more anxious to dazzle, or
even to blight, with something like meteoric splen-
dour, than to illuminate a new path with the mild
and steady radiance of a fixed star. It must be
granted that, at the outset, the whole field of
knowledge seemed open to them. If not the master-
spirits themselves, they were in the secrets of the
master-spirits of the age. But they did not keep
pace with the progress which they stimulated others
to make. In the philosophy of mind, they actually
remained at rest, while the world around them was
advancing. They have never reviewed, and, in no
instance, have they shown that they had appreciated
the works of Dr. Thomas Brown. In physio-
logy they have been equally stationary. The minor
branches of literature have been habitually ne-
glected. And, with the exception of some ques-
t►ons which have been attempted to be made
practical ones by a statesman, connected with this
work, to whom his country is greatly indebted, the
Edinburgh Review has committed itself with none
of the great interests of the race. We can accou►►t
for much of this from the circumstance, that the con •
ductor and principal writers had all embarked in
professional or political pursuits, and connected
themselves with existing interests and parties; but,
if it be wished that the Journal should start off
afresh, or even keep its ground, there is a necessity
for its beginning forthwith to deal with much that
has been neglected; and to do this upon large, in-
dependent, and comprehensive principles.
" A remarkable instance of the faulty spirit in
which this work has been too often conducted, is to
be found in the seventh article of the last (97th)
number, which, under the name of a Review of Mill's
Essays on Government, purports to be an examina-
tion—au exposure- or extinguisher—of Utilitarian
Logic and Politics. It is not by the late Editor.
It is trenchant—full of smart things, and well turned
paragraphs. It is clever ; and it is able, as far as any
thing can be so, which is without any leading or
guiding principle. The writer has obviously no re-
verence for age and talent united—for one who, as
soon as he could think, committed himself, heart
and soul, with the great interests of his race, and to
the promotion of which, on views honestly taken,
and supported with high talent, he has devoted a
long life.- We need not say, we allude •o Jeremy
Bentham. There is a radical defect of moral feeling
in the manner in which Mr. Bentham is treated here,
and in his former article on Judicial Evidence, by
this anti-utilitarian. There is another radical defect

which pervades the whole of his article. lie cOll
tends truly that man is not actuated exclusitely by
self-interest; that he has ' tastes and propensities'—

ostentation and affectiou'—' a desire of the good
opinion of others, a sense of shame, a dread of the
hatred and contempt of the public;'—but he lessens
the value of these by suggesting, that our regard
for the sentiments of our fellow-creatures springs,'
not from benevolence, but ' by association, from a
sense of their ability to hurt or to serve us'—or,
in
other words, from what he contends against
throughout as the adversary of Mr. Mill, pure
se!fishness."
The Examiner, two late numbers, entered
warmly into this r.,ontroversy ; and the Standard
of last night allows on the heels of the Es-

winner
" The. subject and state of the controversy to
whir,:.we allude (says our Evening Contemporary)
. V
he seen in our extract from the Examiner; it is
bot, however, our purpose to meditate between the
polemics, but to point to the obvious conclusion
from their schism, which, if we mistake not, shows
both parties in opposition to themselves as well as
with one another. Both are indeed wrong, but with
this difference :—the Westminster, or Utilitarian
school, has been led astray by a primary error, and
has been carried to extreme mistake by the zealous
pursuit of truth in a wrong path; the Edinburgh,
or Pyrrhonist school, on the other hand, has gone
wron,,T, because it never cared for truth, and because
the guides which it has implicitly followed—vanity,
ambition, and self-interest in the lowest shape— have
an intuitive bias towards falsehood. As the oracle
of this school, the Edinburgh Review, is now has-
tening to oblivion, let us, before it is altogether for-
gotten, illustrate the inane doctrine, if we may call
it doctrine, of that school, by one brief question.--
Opposed as the Review was to every existing insti-
tution in government, to every received doctrine in
morals and religion, to all the acknowledged systems
in the philosophy of mind and of matter, did it ever
propose any substitute for any of the objects of its
flippant censures ? No, it never did. The maxim
with which the reviewer set out was, that the
world always give credit for as much talent as is
boldly pretended e and with this maxim—supported
in a barbarous jejune style, measured and squared by
the callipers and tenants of Hugh Blair, the poorest
of all critics—they, the Reviewers, by the mere force
of impertinence and sneering, contrived to disgust
the whole body of fools in the nation, who almost
always are the majority, with all that their wiser
fathers loved, and all that had served as the means Gf
their own happiness.
" It was, indeed, a hungry but an ambitious en-
tertainment—the feast of some very notable pauper,
where the absence of substance was supplied by
management, and where the guests were reconciled
to their penurious and distasteful fare, by bold and
profuse sneering at the uncouth style in which the
more solid and salutary viands of the 'Squire and
Parson were served up. But this could not last for
ever, and the Edinburgh Review, after living to do
infinite mischief, died some ten years ago—died, we
mean, to all purposes of influence; for now, though
it is still printed, as we learn from the Westminster
Review and Examiner, it is as little read as the
Right Hon. Wilmot Horton's last Emigration
pamphlet."
The Standard professes to be an honest in-
quirer after the truth, and to admire the writers
of the Examiner and the Westminster, be-
cause they also arc honest inquirers after the
truth. Now with this earnest desire to discover
the truth to which our Cotemporary lays claims,
it does astonish us, we own, that he should have
been so unsuccessful in his search as his repre-
sentation respecting the Edinburgh Review tin-
plies. Whatever the merits or demerits of that
Review, there can be no question that it is ex-
tensively read and possesses extensive influence.
If our Contemporary only discovered from this
controversy that it still continues to be printed,
he must have optics peculiar to himself. The
rest of the article of our Cotemporary is exceed
ingly curious.

" The Westminster Review, with incomparably
more talent than its predecessor, is unfortunately as
much estranged from established principles in ethics
and in state policy as the Edinburgh Review itself ;
but it is honest, which the other never was, and its
honesty gives the votary of true philosophy an ad-
vantage over it as great as that which, through their
total want of talent, he enjoyed before over the
Edinbusghers.
" The Westminster proposes a system of moral
and of state policy, which the Edinburgh never did.
The scope and aim of this is comprised in the sen-
tence, The greatest happiness to the greatest num-
ber;'—rightly understood, a noble object, and
worthy of all acceptation. But, as the Westminster
School urlderstands and treats it, alike unworthy and
impracticable.

" If we do not misunderstand the doctrines of
the Westminster, they would treat man as a mere
mortal, something little, if at all, above the animated
machines of the Cartesians. The happiness which
they would provide for him they regard as referring
to a mere mortal state—the means by which they
would effect that happiness as having relation to
mere mortal sanctions. But man is not a mere
mortal ; he is designed for another state of exist-
ence. And if there be any proposition proved more
certainly than another by the whole induction of hu-
man experience, it is that no discipline can fit a man
for a temporal state of existence but that which will
also fit him for eternity. And this is a proposition
which might have been arrived at a priori, and
which, indeed, was arrived at by wise Pagans—
Cicero, for example, because no worldly sanctions
can be proposed which may not, in many cases, be
outweighed by worldly temptations.
" The consequences into which the Utilitarians
have been drawn by overlooking this eternal truth,
some too disgusting, some too horrible to be more
particularly allude to, present a striking reductio
ad impossibile' in support of the wisdom of the
Gospel dispensation. And here indeed is the tri-
umph of true philosophy—that is, of true religion.
Whenever men set up the conclusions of mere
human wisdom against the precepts of the Gospel,
or against the legitimate deductions from those pre-
cept, they are sure to plunge into errors., which the
voice of nature herself indignantly condemns. Nor
is this to be considered as limiting the will of man,
as to the form of government under which, or the
frame of society within which he would live. No;
the Gospel rule is not so strictly drawn, that an
abundant choice is not open to him who will love
mercy and walk humbly with his God. We are
perhaps writing upon this subject out of season ;
but we can assure our readers, among whom we hope
we shall have the writers of the Examiner and the
Westminster, that we do not write angrily. They
are, like ourselves, honest inquirers after the truth;
and against which we can never feel resentment;
nor of them can we ever despair that they will come
into the right path at last. In truth, we think we
see, in the schism of which they are the leaders,
something like that controversial spirit of the old
philosophers, which opened in no small degree the
way for the light of truth, and therefore to our re-
spect we almost add gratitude. And with this ac-
knowledgment we would take our leave, but we wish
to subjoin compendiously the result of all our in-
quiries and considerations upon this subject That
religion is not merely an essential ingredient in all
schemes of civil polity, but the one essential element
out of which such schemes, to be effectual, must be
wrought; and that not merely projects against reli-
gion, like that of Mr. Malthus and some of those of
the Utilitarians, but even those without religion,
like Messrs. Peels and Hortons and Slaneys, must
even, without a direct visitation of Providence, lead
to temporal ruin.' "

We have always understood that the supe-
riority of the Christian religion over every other
consisted in its enjoining nothing which does not
tend to promote the temporal happiness of man.
We are taught to consider the Deity as delight-
ing in the happiness of his creatures ; and that
wiiiL-h adds to. their happiness in this world can