The same continued-a Bill brought into Parliament.— May 19, 1834. FOUR years of melancholy experience have fully confirmed the correctness of our anticipations. At length the House of Commons feel the necessity of undoing their own work, which has nearly undone the morality of the agricultural labourers, and have agreed to the second reading of Sir Edward KNATCHBULL'S Bill, to introduce into the Beer Act the very measures of police which we originally proposed in vain. Again and again did we entreat the Legislature, when the Beer Bill was under discussion, not to depart from the salutary regulations which had been introduced into the Acts relative to public-houses, from the reign of Edward VI., to our own time. We showed that before Edward VI.'s reign the unlimited number of ale-houses in England, which were conducted on the principle of a perfectly free trade in beer, caused great immorality, and public inconvenience. What the Duke of WELLINGTON and Mr. GOULBURN and Sir Robert PEEL did, by their Beer Bill, was but a stupid return to a system that had been long ago tried and abated as a nuisance. The whigs, however, cheered them on, and they sacrificed the morals of the people to obtain a little spurious and transient popularity. The regulations which we proposed to obviate the mischievous consequences of the Bill were, that every person applying for a license to keep a beer-shop should produce a testimonial to character, and afford some evidence that the house was necessary for the public accommodation; and that, to prevent the poor man tippling away from his family, the beer should not be allowed to be drunk on the premises. The latter provision Sir Edward KNATCHBULL, if we recollect right, endeavoured to introduce into the Bill while it was in Committee, but was defeated by a large majority. He has now carried by a larger majority the second reading of an amended Beer Bill, which not only prohibits the drinking of the beer on the premises, but makes it necessary that a certificate of six respectable persons should be produced in support of the person applying for a license. The fact is, the Beer Bill has done more to brutalize the English labourer, and take him from his family and fireside into the worst associations, than almost any measure that could have been devised. It has filled the gaols and fed the gallows, and every where extended the evils of pauperism and moral debasement. In the course of the debate, the CHANCELLOR of the ExCHEQUER acknowledged the error into which he had fallen in supporting the Beer Bill originally. Bill, to amend the Beer-shop Act, rendered nugatory.— THE Beer Bill has been tinkered just in the way that one might have anticipated when Lord ALTHORP took it into his own hands. Like the Game Bill of the same Noble Lord, it is an "amendment" of the law without a reform. Why Sir Edward KNATCHBULL abandoned his Bill to the CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER, who, when previously applied to, declined to bring in any Bill on the subject, we cannot tell. The pernicious beer-shop system ought to have been thoroughly reformed, or not meddled with at all. To think that the rottenness of the system will be purified by limiting beer-shop licenses to houses of £10 yearly value, after April 1836, is to think what is very absurd. Neither that provision nor the certificate will be a protection to society, and to the labouring poor themselves, against the demoralising influence of one of the most stupid and mischievous measures that ever proceeded from the legislature of a civilized country. The only effectual remedy next to the abolition of the whole system, would have been the introduction of a clause, which had been proposed, to prevent the drinking of beer on the premises, and so put an end to that sottish tippling among the lowest and most depraved company, which has greatly deteriorated the habits and the character of farm-servants and agricultural labourers, and brought numbers to the workhouse, and many to an untimely end. How often has the rick-burner on the scaffold traced his crime to the corrupting association of the beer-shop! Thus we make a law to tempt men to crime, and inexorably punish them for not surmounting the temptation which we throw in their way. ** * ** "When the Beer Act was passed," says the Globe, "as it were by acclamation, in 1830, the sole consideration which seemed to weigh with parliament was the removal of a monopoly in an article of commerce. It was forgotten that haunts. of public amusement scattered over the country, offering places of rendezvous to every description of loose character and opportunities of crime to guests of a more desperate class, peculiarly come within the competence of legislative and administrative control, and that the multiplication of such places beyond the consumers' legitimate wants would be an unshunned consequence' of the measure for opening the trade in demoralised and pauperised districts. The injury done by the Beer Act to the peace and order of rural neighbourhoods, not to mention. domestic happiness, industry, and economy, has been clearly proved by witnesses from every class of society, to have exceeded the evils of any single act of internal administration passed within the memory of man. This it is to legislate like gentlemen for the humbler classes-that is to say, without the slightest reference to their real condition, necessities, and temptations." The observations of our Evening contemporary against the folly and iniquity of this Bill are like our own, except in this point, that we denounced the Bill before the fatal experiment was tried, and the Globe not till after all the mischief had been perpetrated. Again we say that Lord ALTHORP's Beer-Act Amendment Bill will no more remedy the evils of the beer-shop system, than his Game Act has prevented poaching, and terminated those deadly conflicts between the nightly destroyers of game and the keepers of preserves, which, if we may judge from what takes place in Courts of Justice, at Sessions and Assizes, have become more numerous than ever. * Poland.-Dec. 16, 1831. [During the struggle of Poland for its existence, in the years 1830-31, many valuable articles on the subject appeared in the columns of the Morning Herald from the pen of Mr. Sydney TAYLOR, which deeply, though unavailingly, engaged public attention. We insert here one of the last of those articles.-ED.] THE great political crime of the nineteenth century—the violent extinction of the last traces of the national existence of Poland-appears about to be consummated. The heroic people who, in vindication of their liberties, ventured to wage one of the most unequal wars of which history has any remembrance, were conquered by the dark machinations of treachery, after the efforts of their enemies in the field had proved unavailing:yet, on the day which closed the struggle of freedom for the present, the capital of Poland-though with treason within itself, assisting the overwhelming masses of enemies that pressed upon it from without-did not submit but on terms of a capitulation, which has been observed by the Russian victor with Punic faith. That capitulation, indeed, like every claim which Poland had we will not say upon the justice or clemency of the AUTOCRAT, but upon the generous admiration of any conqueror who was not a barbarian-has been treated with scorn, and scattered to the winds of heaven! Instead of respecting the lives and properties of the Poles, who laid down their arms under the terms of the capitulation of Warsaw, some of them has he shot, and others has he dragged from their homes to the wilds of Siberia; while the rapacity of his Russian Exchequer revels in the confiscation of the hereditary estates of the noble and distinguished patriots, that were driven to place the last hope of their country in the sword by the intolerable tyranny exercised under the government of that petty Nero, the Grand Duke CONSTANTINE-whose life, with the lives of seven thousand of his troops (which must have been sacrificed to the popular vengeance after the insurrection of last year) those very patriots exerted themselves successfully to save, and obtained for them, through the ranks. of an enraged people, a safe passage to the Russian frontiers. But the question of the fate of Poland affects far more than the interests of that country:-it is connected with the future destinies of Europe. At the congress of Vienna, Lord CASTLEREAGH spoke boldly of the necessity of establishing an independent Polish kingdom, as a barrier against Russia; but, though he spoke boldly, he acted feebly. The Duchy of Warsaw, which, as we have before stated, was created by NAPOLEON, the Allied Powers raised into a kingdom, to be a check upon the ambition of the Russian empire, and gave the sceptre of the new kingdom to the Russian Emperor! Could political folly or treachery go farther than this? It is true the Russian Emperor received the Crown of this new kingdom-not as the Czar of Russia, but as the King of Poland; so that Poland was not, as some of our Journalists suppose, made subject to Russia, but only connected with it in a sort of federal union: yet, late events have shown that after destroying the Constitution of Poland, and setting at nought the treaty on which its independence was founded, the Emperor of Russia was left as free, by the other parties to that treaty, to wield the immense military resources of the Russian empire against that devoted nation, as if it were not of right an independent kingdom, but a revolted province of his hereditary Muscovite dominions. In fact, the marching Russian troops into Poland to put down what was, at least, the Polish government de facto, was as clear an act of foreign aggression upon the rights of an independent State, as any which Europe has witnessed since diplomatists began to amuse mankind with the mockery of non-intervention. Well, Russia has succeeded, first, in driving the Poles, by every wrong and outrage that could sting a brave people, into insurrection; and, next, in crushing that insurrection by her immense armies, and the still more potent agency of purchased treason. She now proceeds to take advantage of her own wrong, and to turn the revolt which she provoked, to the purposes of her ambition. She is about to form military colonies, consisting of Cossacks and other barbarian tribes, in Poland and on its frontiers. If this be permitted, the name of Poland will not only be erased from the map of nations, but we apprehend that at no very distant day,-unless France, anticipating the fate |