THE CHARTIST TRIALS. [From the Times, October 3.]

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume V, Issue 371, 21 February 1849, Page 4

THE CHARTIST TRIALS. [From the Times, October 3.]

The Chartist trials are over at last, and the conclusion is of a more decided character than we are apt to expect from a protracted inquiry. Lacey, Fay, and Cuffey have been found guilty, and, together with Dowling, the young Irish portrait painter previously convicted, have been sentenced to transportation for life. This is a severe sentence, but a mostjust one. The guilt of these men is about as great as could be imagined, and if they have provoked a degree of ridicule, and so far a trivial way of regarding their crime, that is owing to the ridiculous insufficiency of their means to their end. Whatever may be thought of the witnesses, no sane person can doubt after reading their evidence that these four men did really attempt to raise an insurrection against her Majesty's servants, authority, people, and person ; and that the three latter, at least, attempted to take possession of a part of this metropolis, and defend it by conflagration and slaughter against any force that could be brought against them. After a trial properly conducted tins moral certainty has been attained. There could, therefore, be no doubt as to the verdict or as to the sentence. Transportation for life is thought a slight punishment for ordinary cases of arson or attempted murder. The whole metropolis was aimed at in this instance. If the crime vastly surpassed the ability of the criminals, it is not the less heinous on that account, or less to be punished. There is already some controversy, and there is likely to be more, about the character of the chief evidence for the prosecution. It is the evidence of approvers and spies. The private motives and sentiments of spies is a point which must be left to themselves and to public opinion. Whether Powell, Davis, and the others felt a perverted curiosity and a hankering after a guilty mystery, whether they did really feel a sort of patriotic impulse to sacrifice themselves to the state by a very dirty piece of public service, or whether they looked simply and solely to the 20s. a week till the conviction, and after that to a good outfit to the borders of civilization, it is impossible and most unnecessary to decide. The use of spies, however, in such atrocious conspiracies as these, is a disagreeable necessity. There is no help for it. We need not imagine an instance to prove this, for instances abound. In the spring of 1829 a club of small farmers met from nighl to night at a public house in Doneraile, in the county of Cork, to concert the redress of their grievances and the enforcement of an agrarian code by assassination. They solemnly tried the gentry of the neighbourhood one after another. Such as were | found guilty were sentenced to death and arrangements were forthwith made for the execution of the sentence. But every night they sat there was a spy in their number, who met the necessities of his horrid position by playing the murderer as fiercely as the rest, but who reported everything to the police. In the morning half the gentry of the neighbourhood read at iheir breakfast tables the arrangements for their assassination at the earliest opportunity. They took care to disappoint the murderers, accepted beds after dinner parties instead of coming home, varied their routes, and went opt well attended, Would they not

have been absolutely insane to close their ears against the information on which their own existence hung ? Would they not have been equally insane to let the affair run for erer on that perilous footing, always dodging « conspiracy and fencing with murder ? They had no possible choice but to use the private information, and eventually the public evidence of the spy. The conspiracy in the present instance was only more extensive, more destructive, and more murderous. But if the spy is generally a viler character than the men he betrays, whose fault is that ? The Chartists reckoned on the assistance of 40,000 thieves and rogues. They were assisted by one scoundrel more than they bargained for. The most agreeable aspect of these trials is that suggested by the French parallel. Instead of four miserable, wrong-headed fellows, with perhaps a few more to follow, the French Government has to dispose of some eight or ten thousand convicts. What it is to do with them nobody knows. To crowd them into hulks within sight of a sympathising population, Co let them loose on Algeria, or send them to sure death by fever on the western coast of Africa, are alternatives presenting only different forms of inconvenience and hardship. But to pursue the contrast. With us, a mere room-full of riiiscreants stood on one side, and 200,000 men on the other. The trials of the past week record the triumph of the latter over the former. Both England and France, it may be said, are expelling their revolutionists. But in France the subjects of this transportation en masse are the very men who did the work in February. Republican France is forced to stigmatize and banish her own socalled deliverers. Who are the men who re* volutionized France, who provoked the fatal discharge at the Hdtel dcs Affaires EtrangZres, who paraded Paris with cries for vengeance, who massacred the Municipal Guards, who attacked and devastated the Tuileries, who invaded the Chamber, and denounced the Regency as " too late," who elected the Provisional Government, who surrounded the Hotel de Ville and extorted its decrees ? Who are they but the very men whom France is now obliged to banish from her soil, with the disagreeable certainty that many more such are at large waiting their opportunity to revolt? The Republic and its authors are parted. The institution remains at home; the men are on their way to Algeria, to Senegal, or wherever the sum strikes from above and pestilential vapours from below. With us, it is the nation that ejects one or two unnatural exceptions to the universal sentiment. France exhibits the result of a civil war. A moiety of the Parisian people, after a desperate conflict, has overcome the other. Ten thousand prisoners of war attest the painful and perplexing victory. What will strike most foreigners is the utter absurdity of the Chartist military calculations. Any dozen French children playing at soldiers in the gardens of the Tuileries or of the Luxembourg, under the surveillance of their bonnes or their elder sisters, would do the thing better than the desperadoes of the Orange Tree public house or the would-be insurgents of the Seven Dials. The east end of London was to be divided against the west by means of a gun, bought at a sale, and raffled for at a shilling a ticket ; by some pistols picked up here and there at 2s. a-piece ; by a few hundred cartridges tied up in pockethandkerchiefs ; by some pike-heads and various preparations of gunpowder that might possibly have set fire to a house if they should happen to go off near a bed curtain. How a barricade was to be made and how defended, was another question. These amateurs did not even consider what purpose was to be answered by firing a dwelling, and whether a conflagration might not do them more harm than good. In the faubourgs the houses were occupied by the insurgents, and stormed with cannon by the army. Throughout all th« tactics and preparations of the Chartists theirs was the frivolity of children and the malice of men. Danger to the public peace of coarse there was, seeing that for many months this year the whole European society has been in such a state that a spark might fire or explode it. But the epidemic has passed, and with it the peril. " Physical" Chartism is now nothing more than the blackened remains of a squib on the morning after a Fifth of November, trodden under foot and sopped by the rain. It has had an opportunity such as it could nsver have expected ; it has done its best to profit by that opportunity, and has utterly failed.