The Sun. — 1845-04-12 (London, England)

PUBLIC JOURNALS. FROM THE EVENING PAPAIORS OF THIS DAT. GLOBE.—The Sugar Duties' Bill was ushered to its third reading in the House of Lords last night, with a repetition of much of the transparent sophistry- with which it had been supported in its previous stages. Lord Dalhousie modestly introduced the subject with a repetition of the chief arguments in its favour—declaring that the measure would cheapen sugar to the middle and lower classes—that the classification system worked well in France, the United States, Sweden and Java—and that slave-holding Louisiana could not afford to send her sugar to this country. That the penny saved on the pound of sugar is to be returned in the incometax—that no classification which can be fairly compared with ours is, or ever has been, in successful operation, either in the countries referred to, or any other—and that sugar the produce of slave-labour has already entered our market for home consumption—the Noble Lord appears to have forgotten. We cannot be surprised at this. When it becomes necessary to make short work of facts and principles, wide views and long dates are excessively inconvenient. No man who kept a retentive memory would be fit to preside at the Board of Trade under Sir Robert Peel. The presence of Lord Brougham gave an intere,t to the debate, without which we should probably not have felt tempted to notice it. His Lordship gallantly volunteered a defence of the Bill; and, with his usual eccentricity, must needs do so upon ground untrodden by any one else. The fine distinction already drawn by the friends of the measure between slave-importing and merely slave-holding States, is not half fine enough for his Lordship. There is a vulgar breadth about the sophism which appears to disgust him. He sees that the work is but half done, and that clumsily; and with all the skill of a retired professor, and all the ardour of an amateur, he sets himself to finish it. Thus, as to North America :—The slave trade is abolished ; the war-captives of the interior of Africa are no longer saved from sacrifice or slavery at home to be sent thither—no longer torn from their kindred, and dragged through the horrors of the middle passage, to swell the field-gangs of Louisiana or Carolina. They are now born and brought up in the land of their slavery. Yet, beyond doubt, there is something to be said on the other side of the case. The field labour of the Southern States still, as of old, kills the slave before he can produce another to succeed him. Importation is still necessary. And it is effected through the agency of the Northern States ; who, employing their slaves chiefly in domestic offices, take advantage of their more easy condition to breed slaves for the destructive labour of the south. Lord Brougham completes the case previously defective, by broadly stating this fact—pushes the distinction between Cuba and Brazil- and the Southern States to the extreme verge of the truth—where, in other hands, it would disappear altogether—and declares that though he must set his face against receiving sugar of the former, yet when called upon to give his sanction to our consuming that of the latter, it is " a totally different consideration, and gives rise to different feelings, different arguments, and leads to a different conclusion !" No doubt the young and mature negroes who are annually selected for the Southern market by the travelling dealers, chained in gangs. and driven seven or eight hundred miles to the marts where they are to be sold like cattle to the highest bidder, find the forced separation from their kindred extremely painful; they can have no more hope of return than if they were about to cross the Atlantic; and they undoubtedly go to supply a demand caused by the gradual extermination of those who have preceded them. " But he denied that this was as bad as the slave-trade of Africa. Could any man who ever heard of the horrors of a slave ship, of the rapine and murder committed for the purpose of kidnapping theun committed slaves, and, above all of the wholesale murders mitted 'on board the vessels going the same footing with the intercourse between different tmhieddi e passage—could any plan put those horrors on