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pearance. The question was, how was the public | lowed 8 or 9,000 organised insurgents to peace to be preserved and the law enforced? A very march upon an important town, without awful responsibility was cast upon me; for it was

by my advice that the counsels of government were a suspicion that such a thing was possi to be particularly governed. I trusted to the good ble; if they had then shot dead, by the sense of the people of Great Britain, and to the old military force, fifteen or twenty of the decommon law of the land. (Loud cheers.) I would luded rioters; if the means of resistance introduce no new coercive measure. I would give no countenance to schemes for the employment of were, as far as depended on the foresight force. But prosecutions were instituted for the sup- of the government,* so feeble and so illport of the established laws; and in every instance combined, that Newport, and probably the the juries did their duty to the country-a verdict was returned vindicating the law. What, then, was whole of South Wales, owed their preserthe consequence? Without one drop of blood being vation to the personal intrepidity of two spilled, tranquillity was restored: Chartism, as re- or three magistrates and military officers, marked by my Lord Provost, actually vanished from and about thirty men, who defended themselves from the bay-window of an innwhat would the Whigs have said of such culpable, such indefensible negligence in a Conservative government?

the land.

On this we cannot help exclaiming, in the slightly altered words of the ballad

'Ah, luckless speech! ah, bootless boast,
For which he paid full dear!
For while he spake, rebellious Frost
Belied him loud and clear!'

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And again in what violent terms would they not have inveighed against the defective institutions of the country, and the gross abuses of its administraIt is quite evident that the gift of second tion,' with which great masses of the insight is lost in Scotland, and that Sir telligent working population could be so James Forrest and Sir John Campbell, so dissatisfied?-Would they not have adfar from having the celebrated Caledonian duced the insurrection of 9000 men as a inklings of futurity, have not even the conclusive proof against the whole concommon cottage sagacity of knowing that stitution of our government-assuming a fire may be covered without being ex-as they always had done, till they themtinguished, and that the spark which is smouldering at night may be a flame before morning.

But ludicrous-farcically ludicrousas is the personal position of the Attorney. General, the tragedy to which he spoke so light a prologue has been deep and bloody; and the most painful part of the catastrophe is not yet over!

Our readers will recollect that all the Whig speeches and publications of the day, and, still more recently, Lord John Russell himself, in his celebrated speech at Stroud, and on some subsequent occasions, charged all the disorders which occurred in the autumn of 1830 to the account of the then ministers.

selves were in office-that every turbulent agitator, and every seditious assemblage must have a grievance fully justifying the sedition and the turbulence? How, on the other hand, have the Conservatives acted? Have they harangued about the Newport Massacres,' and talked of WESTGATELOO?

No; while they unfeignedly pity the deluded victims, and execrate the authors of the delusion-while they lament the former indiscretion and recent negligence of Her Majesty's Ministers, they afford the most unhesitating countenance and support to the tardy vindication of the law from them the disaffected will receive no factious encouragement, and the repressive measures of the government no vexatious opposition:

But Lord John Russell, though he stands pre-eminent in these unhappy transactions, does not stand alone. In every other de

port, that there was some difficulty, at one moment, in procuring ammunition for the troops, and we find in the proceedings on the Coroner's inquest, December 3d, the following deposition:

*It is stated in the letter of the Mayor of New

The general system of government was condemned with wholesale virulence, because the populace were so maddened by the Three glorious Days, and by the inflammatory speeches of Whig and Radical orators, that it was thought imprudent to allow the King to visit the City in a November night, lest mischievous people might provoke disturbances from which the innocent were more likely to suffer Edward Hopkins, Superintendent of Police, sworn-I was there informed that the soldiers were than the guilty. But, let us suppose for short of ammunition, and I went and searched the a moment that a Conservative ministry bodies, and in the pockets of the one who was dying were to show themselves so utterly ig-in the pantry, I found 25 rounds of ball cartridge, norant of the real state of the country as which I handed over to Lieut. Gray, and he immeto boast of profound tranquillity on the diately divided it among the soldiers. very eve of a rebellion; if they had al

We have, however, heard from other authority, that there was no deficiency of ammunition.

partment of the government a similar dereliction of duty, a similar disinclination to exert the power of the law, whenever it might be at all distasteful to Chartists, Radicals, or any other species of agitators, is equally observable. We shall give some further important examples of this general tendency of Lord Melbourne's administration.

shall presently see); but that, when the duty should be lowered to a moderate rate, the law could be, and should be, enforced against all violators.

Now, this allegation was false and hollow, and only made to conceal the real motive of the proceeding, which was the contemptible weakness of the govern ment. It is very true that exorbitant duties on any description of goods render it very difficult to prevent smuggling'in goods of great value and small compass, and undistinguishable in their nature from duty-paid goods of the same species, nearly impossible; and as this had grown into a kind of financial axiom, the government with its characteristic duplicity, thought to facilitate their measure, and conceal their real difficulty, by calling the sale of unstamped papers smuggling-though all the world sees that it is not what the said political axiom means by the word smuggling, which is necessarily clandestine; while, on the other hand, it is equally notorious that a bonâ fide order from the Home Department to the Police, and from the Treasury to the Stamp-office, to stop the open vending of these unstamped publications, would have altogether prevented the abuse-and, even after it had attained its greatest height, would have stopped it in four-and-twenty hours. But in these enlightened days anything that looks like an axiom of political economy is sure to pass unquestioned. The public sale of unstamped newspapers in Piccadilly was voted to be smuggling; and the only remedy for this as for every other kind of smuggling (vide M'Culloch and Co.) was to lower the duty, which we were assured by the Chancellor of the Exchequer would render the breach of the law so inexcusable, that the govern ment,--yea, even Lord Melbourne's pusillanimous and nerveless government,promised to punish, and eventually to prevent, any infraction of the law; and under this plausible engagement, on the part of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the stamp-duty was reduced.

In 1835 the publication of unstamped newspapers had proceeded to a great extent; and, although the government were very remiss in executing the law-indeed it was to their remissness that the great growth of the evil may be wholly attributed-still a considerable number of the publishers and venders of such works had been imprisoned-chiefly, we believe, by the interference of some subordinate officer,-few, if any, by the immediate orders of the Ministers or the Attorney-General, whose early and active interposition would, we are satisfied, have stopped the mischief at once. We need not inform our readers that the general character of these papers was immoral and seditious. This part of the evil-in our antiquated opinion, the greatest-does not seem to have made any impression whatsoever on the government; but they found it necessary to attend to two opposite classes of complainants, with whom the growing extent of the illegal practice brought them into contact. The one were those who were suffering punishment for repeated breaches of the law, whose advocates were stirring the matter in the House of Commons, and becoming very loud in their invectives against the stamp-duty on newspapers, which they, facetiously, one might suspect, called a tax upon knowledge the other were the proprietors of the more respectable proportion of the periodical press, who very justly com. plained that this almost impunity of unstamped publications was a fraud on the legally conducted trade. This also was a body too powerful to be disregarded. Perplexed between these antagonist complainants, the government resolved to make their usual compromise by a sacrifice of the public: the stamp duty was reduced What was the consequence? Not only from 3d. to 1d the Chancellor of the was the smuggling not prevented, but it Exchequer stating, as his chief motive has increased an hundredfold. Not only for this reduction, that as long as the du- does the government not vindicate the ties were so high it was in vain to at-law, but the few prosecutions that used to tempt to counteract the smuggler (so he is reported to have called the publishers and venders of unstamped papers-Deb. 15th Mar. and 20th June 1836-why, we

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afford some degree of check are now never heard of-the smugglers, that is, doz. ens of newsmongers at every stage-coach door, on board every steam-packet, along

every street, thrust into the hands of every passenger dozens of unstamped sheets of the vilest, the most libellous, the most seditious garbage! Where are now the prognostics of Mr. Spring Rice that the smuggling would be extinguished? where the promises of the government that the smuggler should be prosecuted and pun. ished? It would lead us too far from our present purpose to detail the monstrous injury to public morals and domestic happiness which this profusion of obscenity, blasphemy, and libel must inflict; nor could we, consistently with our principles, give any additional publicity to such trash,

which, trash though it be, is working wide, and, we fear, irremediable mischief.

But, passing over the mere morality of the case of which, as we have said, Lord Melbourne's government seems to take no note-can any one doubt what must be the political effect of this unbounded and uncontrolled effusion of sedition and treason? We shall so far break through our resolution not to mention individual pa. pers as to give one example, which has already engaged public attention. We have before us an unstamped paper bearing the following title :—

THE WESTERN VINDICATOR :

A BOLD UNCOMPROMISING ADVOCATE OF THE PEOPLE OF BRISTOL, BATH,
CHELTENHAM, TROWBRIDGE, BRADFORD, FROME, STROUD, WOTTON-
UNDER-EDGE, NEWPORT, PONTYPOOL, CARLEON, CARDIFF,
AND OTHER TOWNS AND VILLAGES IN THE WEST

OF ENGLAND AND SOUTH WALES.

EDITED AND CONDUCTED FOR HENRY VINCENT,
NOW RESIDENT IN MONMOUTH GAOL.

VOL. INo. 40.]

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 1839.

[PRICE TWO PENCE.

not fight with them! Be wary in your movements, ye are beset with spies! Be cautious in your speeches, for anything is sedition. But, in the name of Liberty -cease not to worry your enemies! Your name is

Legion, for ye are many; and your rights must be enforced, if not conceded. Our counsel is-Organize! Organize! Organize!'

This 'HENRY VINCENT, now resident in Monmouth gaol,' is, as our readers will recollect, imprisoned there for sedition: yet he is suffered to direct, and his colleagues are permitted to publish, this unstamped newspaper, which, even if otherwise innocent, is illegal, and, according Agitate, agitate, agitate, is grown luketo the promises of Mr. Spring Rice, ought warm and stale, and treason must now orto have been suppressed. Even if other-ganize, organize, organize: such is the wise innocent- -but let us give one or two specimens of its intrinsic character.

An article on the defeat of the late

practical advice of this paper. Let us add a specimen of its doctrines:

treasonable outbreak at Newport, too long God, oppressors and murderers of their subjects, "When kings or rulers become blasphemers of to be quoted in extenso, after stating the they ought no more to be accounted kings or lawful leading principles of Chartism to be uni- magistrates, but, as private men. to be examined, acversal suffrage,' annual parliaments,' God, and, being convicted and punished by that cused, and condemned and punished by that law of 'ballot,'' no property-qualification,' 'pay-law, it is not man's, but God's doing.' ment of members of parliament,' thus concludes:

Moral force has failed, by the united opposition of Prejudice, Villany, and Physical Force. 'What remains then to be done? How shall the Chartists proceed?

And are we to sit quietly down and relinquish our canse? Are we to become tacit slaves to our oppressors, content with what they, in their mercy, shall be pleased to mete out to us. Never! Chartists, remember the words of Mr. Vincent last week -"Let there be no unmanly shrinking." Desert not your incarcerated friends!

And again,

'The people may kill wicked princes as monsters and cruel beasts.'

The effect which such exhortations and such doctrines must have on an ignorant

and, if they can read such poison, worse than ignorant-population, might be easily imagined à priori, but we have unfortunately a practical and touching example of its deplorable effects. We extract the But to the question-How shall the Chartists proceed? Let them raise the standard of "Resist-case from the report of the inquiry before ance to Oppression!" Beware of soldiers, ye can- the magistrates at Newport :

cause.

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my clothes.

Farewell, dear parents.

Your's truly,

'GEORGE SHELL.

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Shell, the Pontypool leader, who was killed by the illegal and seditious press into one the soldiery in the passage of the Westgate Inn, in view,-the original reduction of the stamp the very act of thrusting his pike at the breast of the mayor, evidences the traitorous objects [of the in- duty on the pretence of extinguishing surgents] in the following letter, written to his father, smuggling,' the subsequent impunity and having, it appears, a melancholy presentiment of his hundred fold growth of that same ' smugcoming death:gling,' the uninterrupted continuance of Pontypool, Sunday Night, Nov. 4, 1839. 'Dear Parents,-I hope this will find you well, as this smuggling,' by a prisoner in MonI am myself at present. I shall this night be engaged mouth gaol, its certain connection with in a struggle for freedom, and, should it please God the fatal insurrection in Wales, and its to spare my life, I shall see you soon; but if not, natural effect in perverting, possibly thougrieve not for me-I shall have fallen in a noble My tools are at Mr. Cecil's, and likewise sands, of honest and loyal and respectable men, like poor George Shell into traitors thirsting for the lives of others and prodigal of their own-whether, we say, such a case, beginning in fraud and ending in blood, ever before stained the annals of a civilized government? And what answer will the ministers under whose misrule these facts occurred-what answer can they give concerning their respective shares in these lamentable transactions? We cannot doubt that some explanation will be wrung from them on the very first day of the meeting of parliament. not by the imprisonment of one victim or the execution of another that these questions can be answered. Unhappy men! whose fate will be a new exemplification of the melancholy observation of the Roman moralist-

This young man, endowed with a courage and devotion worthy of a better cause, was, up to May, 1839, a special constable, universally respected, and possessing the confidence of the magistracy. He then, unfortunately, listened to the fallacious reasonings of Frost and Jones, and the melancholy result has been a traitor's death at the early age of nineteen. I have been informed by the bereaved parent of this youth that he ascribes his ruin to the scandalous publications of the day, and to the "Vindicator," edited by the notorious Henry Vincent.'-Times, 18 No

vember.

And, after all this, will it be believed that the unstamped and seditious 'Vindicator' was still allowed to diffuse its poison with impunity, until the Mayor of Cardiff, in the name of the magistrates of the county and borough, was driven, so late as the 5th of December, to remonstrate with the Secretary of State on its uninterrupted publication, to which they attribute the rebellious spirit in those districts? This appears so incredible, that we insert the representations of the ma gistrates:

TO THE MARQUIS OF NORMANBY.

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Committunt eadem diverso crimina fato :-
ILLE crucem, pretium sceleris tulit, HIC diadema.
One is rewarded with the gallows, and
ANOTHER with a coronet !

But it is not by mere connivance alone that the government appears to encou rage the abuses of the press. We believe that the present is the first ministry that Cardiff, Dec. 5, 1839. 'My Lord Marquis,-The county and borough ever permitted itself to be publicly idenmagistrates, who have this day met at the Town Hall tified with any newspaper, except the here, for the purpose of investigating charges against London Gazette. All governments have persons connected with the late outrages at Newport, being fully persuaded that a paper called "The occasionally given more or less of their Western Vindicator," published for Henry Vincent confidence to a particular paper, but even (now a prisoner in Monmouth gaol) by Francis this to a very limited extent, and never Hill, of No. 14 Northumberland-place, Bath, has avowedly: indeed, the prudence of gov been one of the principal causes of such outrage, have caused to be intercepted a packet of these paernments and the independence of editors pers, of the date of the 30th November, directed to have alike disclaimed any such copartnerMr. Davis, Newbridge, Glamorganshire (12 miles ship. As to the personal countenance and from Cardiff,) a district in which Chartism has very interference of the Sovereign in any such widely spread, earnestly beg leave to call your lordship's attention to the extensive circulation and mis- matters, we will venture to say that no man chievous tendency of the said paper, and herewith ever imagined anything so wild and so transmit to your lordship the intercepted_packet; indecorous-never-before the present and I am authorised by John Bruce Price, Esq., and hour. The Observer,' Sunday newspathe Rev. George Thomas, county magistrates, and Charles Crofts Williams, Esq., late Mayor of Cardiff, to add their names to mine in making this communication to your lordship.

'I have the honour to be, &c.,

'R. REECE, Mayor of Cardiff.

We now appeal to the country at large, whether taking the whole of this case of

per, has of late been a kind of accredited organ of the ministry of that, however blameable particular articles may have been, no complaint is to be made; but for some time past it has publicly assumed a new and absolutely unprecedented character. It now dignifies its columns by

the following programme, which we copy | illustration should be equally asinine with exactly:

THE "OBSERVER" IS PATRONISED
BY HER MAJESTY, AND ALL
THE ROYAL FAMILY.

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DIEU

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This is sufficiently unusual, and, we think, indecent; but what can we say when we find, as the leading article of this very same newspaper, the following abominable libel, which also we copy exactly:

LONDON, SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8.

Great secrecy has been observed by the Conser. vative Journals respecting the mission of Lord Stuart de Rothsay to the King of Hanover. His Lord. ship has returned; and, although his report is kept secret, we hear, from good authority, that no direct attempt to dethrone her Majesty will be sanctioned by Sir R. Peel, notwithstanding the traitorous declarations of his agents at Canterbury and Ashton.

the text the royal arms affixed to this announcement of the Queen's patronage' happen to be, NOT her Majesty's distinctive arms, but those of the King of Hanover, if he were to become King of England! The blunder is much more piquant than the libel.

It is one of the specious sophisms of the day to charge tumults and sedition, as well as all other crimes, to the ignorance of the people; and this has been, and is now, and will be again, used as an argument in favour of the government and other sectarian schemes of public education. This is not an occasion in which we could enter at large into that important question; but so much we will say, that, although ignorance in the more extended meaning of the term is indeed the prolific parent of crime, it is not by such ignorance as can be cured by a poor smattering of what my Lord Lansdowne calls secular instruction-that riots on the contrary, it has been proved in and other political offences are excited; every case in which the fact could be tested, and most fully in all the late disturbances, that the low degree of education-not, indeed, deserving that namewhich teaches the poor to read without accompanying that gift with such moral and religious instruction as may regulate and purify the use of it, is an infliction worse than ignorance; it is like giving children razors for playthings, and arsenic We will not throw away a word in ex- in sugar-plums. It was not the being posing the flagrant falsehoods, monstrous unable to read that made poor Shell a absurdity, and infamous calumnies, accu- traitor, but the unfortunate capacity of mulated in these half-dozen lines of the reading those infamous and seditious leading paragraph of a paper patronized publications which are everywhere corby the QUEEN.' We will only say, that if rupting our population; and against it be not imagining' and imputing high which there can be no guard or barrier, treason, we know not what is; and that in but by inseparably combining the rudiall the annals of libel we do not recollect ments of secular education with the great so foul a one. We admit that, as against and vital-but easily taught and easily the personages whom it intends to vilify, learned-lessons of morality and religion. it is wholly innocuous-to them it can do The author of a work whose title we no harm the real insult is to her Majesty, have prefixed to this article seems to atwhose name is thus abused, and to her tribute 'popular tumults' to social ignoministers, who permit it. But this inde-rance. But that is only an ad captandum cency is rendered, if possible, still more title: he does not mean, so much, ignocontemptible by the bungling folly with rance in the ordinary sense of the word, which it is executed: for, first, this libel as anti-philosophical prejudices, ignorance on the second member of the Royal House is said to be under the patronage,' not only of the Queen,' but of ALL the Royal Family, as if that member of the royal family patronised these libels on himself, and that his illustrious brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, all concurred in the calumny; but, secondly, that the graphic

of political economy, and so forth-a species of ignorance which may certainly be said to produce popular tumults of one class, such as burning corn-stores, breaking machinery, and so forth but long before the people can be taught right principles on these subjects they will have learned other things, which, we

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