The Sun. — 1840-04-30 (London, England)

HAR. DINGE, or Sir E. KNATCHBULL, when either of them shall be in office, send spies into meetings or committees to promote household suffrage, procure the reduction of the Army, or oppose the extension of the Church ? The blow is now aimed at the Chartists, but it strikes at the professors of every political opinion. It is levelled against the lower classes, but, prostrating them, it will prostrate every other class before the police. There was a time when such facts as we have stated, and such consequences as we have shown flow from our present Frenchified military centralizing system, would have aroused the manhood of the empire. Two-thirds of the press would then have breathed words of fire, and kindled the nation almost into rebellion. But we live in other times, when fear of the masses overweighs every sentiment of confidence, and will make the middle classes, we are afraid, approve of spies, approve of every meeting being subjected to surveillance, and will make them submit to the employment of passports, whenever that shall be proposed, as necessary to the proper working of our police system, intended for the protection of life and property. We say intended, for with the vivid recollection we now have of several murders committed in this metropolis since the police was established, the authors of which have not been detected, we cannot say that it protects life, but to this system intended to protect life and property, liberty, which "lends to life its lustre and perfume," will, we are afraid, be sacrificed.  We copy the following paragraph from the Times of yesterday, which inserts it as from its own Dublin Correspondent :  "The Rev. Mr. Smithe, assistant chaplain of the Molyneux Asylum, preached last night upon the crucifixion of our Saviour, what he suffered and why he suffered, the atonement and its final cause. The Rev. Preacher, after expatiating upon the benefits resulting to society from the dissemination of pure Scriptural Christianity, and showing that such a religion was the best basis of rational government and social freedom, proceeded to comment upon the close connection between infidelity and treason. The man who rebelled against his God was always ready on the first pretence to rebel against his King. The Rev. Gentleman then, after an apology for introducing the shocking anecdote he was about to state, yet said that if it should go forth and convince one unhappy Chartist, who had not as yet renounced his Saviour, the anecdote would not be told in vain. When the three late convicts were on their way by sea to the port where they were to ' he put on board the convict ship, they were overtaken by a storm so great as to excite apprehensions of danger, during which time Jones, the convict, was loudly expressing his anxious wish that they might all go to the bottom together. This might be the frenzy of despair, but the worst remained to be told. Among the papers of Frost, the leader of the Chartists, was found one, a coloured print, representing our Saviour upon the cross, and at the bottom of it this blasphemous inscription-.-" This is the man who was hanged for stealing an ass." Mr. Smithe gave as his immediate authority an officer of the 19th Regiment, a stated member of that congregation, and who had heard it from a brother officer of the same regiment, who had the conduct and custody of the three Chartists to the convict ship." We can comprehend why a zealot—for a zealot has no reason, and no discretion—should, on the mere assertion of one officer, who heard it from another officer, be utterly careless how he calumniates and injures an absent, a very unfortunate, and, we think, a guilty man ; but cannot either comprehend why a newspaper should give insertion to such a paragraph, except to show its baseness, or excuse its insertion. If the Rev. Mr. SMITHE could have produced some authority for the story better than hearsay, we should have blamed his zeal in throwing dirt on a banished man. If the Times possessed undoubted evidence of the correctness of his statement, instead of its being the assertion of a zealot, believed on hearsay at third hand, it would have been cruel to publish such an assertion of Mr.