The Sun.
London, England, 1855-05-02 00:00:00

(From the Times of this day.)
We nften hear of men whit are;over-educated for their
in lsrstanding, and, indeed, it is of such persons that
;he bores, the praters, and the sciolists of society are
ee-posed. Such persons have furnished themselves
vith an instrument which they cannot apply, and that
ditch aas meant to bettteir honour has become their
-eproach -that which was desigued for their aid ha,,
eaegme their hindrance.
Such would seem to be the position occupied by
nodern Governments. ' Inductive philosphy has ran-
auked the storehouses of nature—has fumed her secrets
rem her, and wrested fr an her hand her hidden and
.iysteritgue powers. We can send our fleets over the
eater winged with a steed rind p,seseing a poser of
-areisge which the !colds'-t butts :ire-ion nsver-couid have
ticipated. We can send a message with the rapidity of
,glitning, and outrun, if not time itself, that revolutiac
a the earth by which we measure it. All these are vast
seilities for cultivating an 1 improving, the arts of
'eace, alai equally mighty agencies for affecting
lie rapid combinations of war. Yet the result
las shown that these magnificent agencies, so suberdi
late i to our will, are in a great measure neutralised, if
egt
,rendered positively hurtful, by the want in our
tatesmen of an intelligence able to deal with their
;owers—able to foresee and effect the combinations the
ontrol over which is placed in the r weak and unskilful
rands. Our steamers have carried our troops out so
rapidly to the seat of war that preparations for their ar-
seal lagged far behind them, and our wondrous electric
.elegraph has been the source of endless confusion asitl
usatifieatiena disappointment, annoyance, aim slitter'
!minty. Take but the latest instance. We have, at
anormous expense, carried the electric wire under, no
',considerable portion of the Black Sea, and made Bala-
lava, for the purposes of intelligence at least, into
so nething little more remote than a suburb of London.
Are have done all this, but one thing we have omitted
—we have omitted to supply ourselves with a General
willing to avail himself of the instrument, we have pro-
vided, or with a Ministry disposed to give us the benefit of
the information they receive. Therefore, the electric
telegraph to Baiaklava has turned out of no value to the
nation which paid for it, and has even added to the per-
plexities of those whose business it is to draw such con-
sligsions as they may from the fragmentary intelligence
which arrives.
We have news by way of St. Petersburg and Berlin,
by Vienna, by Marseilles ; but all these sources of infor-
ination are discredited when we remember that the more
rapid source of communication is silent, and ba the con-
jectures to which we are driven in order to account for
that silence. First, we hear that the key to the cipher
in which the despatches are written travels by steam,
while the cipher itself runs with the feet of the light-
ning ; and, next, that though the messages are decipher.
able, they consist of nothing but frivolous questions or
unmeaning acknowledgments. Still out of al' this con-
fusion there is some glimmering
of light—something out
of which one may form an estimate, though far from an
exact one, of the real state of things. First; there is the
steamer airs, which brings us intelligence from Balaklava
up to April 17. The narrative is a checkered one.
General Bizot, the Commander of the French Engineers,
died of a wound received by bins in the trenches, and
was buried on the 16th. On the 14th the French ex-
ploded three mines under the Flagstaff Battery, with
only partial effect ; and, though the Russians appre-
hended an assault, the injury was not sufficiently great
jusCry the operation. On the night of the 13th a
sortie took place, which cost the French 300 men and
six officers, but was repulsed with more than ordinary
success and more than ordinary slaughter. On the 16th
two of the Russian ships were burnt—a statement which
seems to derive some confirmation from a report drawn
from a Russian source, which states that the enemy's
fleet had advanced from the iignern,ot harbour in order
of battle, and had plaCed themselves near Fort
Nicholas, the work which, as our readers will re-
member, defends the southern side of the harbour of
Sebastepol. By the Shwas we learn that the Eng-
lish have ta!ten by assault the ambuscades in -front
of the Tower of Malakhoff, and that the Russians
have found themselves obliged to abandon one of their
batteries. In the mean while the Russians appear to be
drawing their lines more firmly around our pos'ation ;
and the concentration of force is, if we are to believe
the reports of deserters, snsrmous. Over and above all
this, the hlloniteur publishes a despatch of the 28th, to
the effect that the besiegers have momentarily su-pended
their fire to await reinforcements, and to spare the ex-
penditure of ammunition.

Putting all the-e things together, it would seem that
we have certainly made some progress in our operations',
that we are gradually drawing nearer .to the object of
our attack; and that the enemy have found themselves
--tt►' Otter -otitz4r- rnai gin tie co tibtef-
works with which at one time they so seriously
thr, atened our position. Even the Russian accounts
which we publish do not claim any brilliant success, and
are in some places expressed with an ambiguity which
may possibly be meant to cover disasters, and admit
the tremendou4 force of the fire to which the town has
been subjeCted. Th:s cannonade must, indeed, have
been of unexampled severity—unique, as far as we are
aware, in the annals of war. To sustain such a fire for
so many consecutive days and nights—ninetern, accord-
ing to the account i❑ the Moniteur—argues an abundance
of resources, a solidity in the ordnance employed, and
powe'r of endurance on the'r art of the men, transcending
anything we have ever heard or read of. The world can
never Lave witnessed anything more terrible than this
long-continued struggle, in which instruments of destrue-

tion of a size and power never i.efore employed in war
have been met by others equally powerful, and the
thun lers of a tropical storm have been put to silence by
the fearful din of artillery.
During this great duel of artillery the enemy has
been ga,diering in mighty masses around us,,and any.
day may witness an attack made in enormous force along
the whole line of our defences, backed by furious sallies
from the beleaguered tiwn. Never were numbers more
needed than now. As the land dries, and the country
becomes traversable, we must expect to meet in mortal
encounter all the troops which a gre,it empire not else-
where invaded can spare for the defence of a single pro.
vince. The difficulty of subsisting this immense body
of men in the arid steppes of the Crimea will probably
counsel prompt and even desperate action. We need
every man th it can ba sent, and yet we hear of
40,000 Frei.ch troops remaining on the Bosphorus, and
a whole division of cava'ry which has spent the
winter at Adrianop!e. Never v.ai there a situa-
tion so full of hope and fear,' of danger and of pro-
mise. One moment we seem likely to grasp great suc-
cesses, the next suggests the apprehension of enormous
reyer-es. The nation is in a fever of expectation. The
absolute Government of France finds means to communi-
cate to its suljects the last intelligence, even though that
intelligence be neither flattering nor encouraging. But
we are condemned to learn, at second-hand, information
carried by our own telegraph, and are indebted to our
neighbours for giving us by that means all the know-
ledge we as yet possess of our own most interesting
affairs. Is it possible that Lord Raglan should have
sent information of the concentration of Russian troops
on the Belb?ck, and inquired after the Sardinian Con-
tingent, without info rinine his Government that he had
suspended fire? The tldng seems incredible, and yet
we have the strongest Ministerial assurances of its