The Sun.
London, England, 1864-05-30 00:00:00

should be insensible to the sffietions and the infla-

ences of family, it is unjust and unmanly to seek lo
throw the blame of what may have been faulty in
our foreign policy upon the Queen. Ministers Except
without reserve, as in all honour and conscience they

are bound to do, the undivided responsibility Of
what has be-en done and left undone ; and it only now
remains for the Opposition to take up the glove
which has been thus thrown down. Will they
take it up ? The shabby silence of Lord Derby
and his colleagues in expectation, whenever the

question of peace or war has been raised, convinces
us that they have no stomach for the parliamentary
battle to which they have so often been provoked.
They may cavil and criticise details ; they may find
fault with one despatch for being too strong, and
with another for not being strollg enough, but they
have not the pluck to say honestly what they would
do—they are too poor in spirit to afford to keep a
great principle of any sort. Lord Ellenborough
found nobody to follow him in his mad rash, save
Earl Grey, a most suitable Friday for such a Crusce.
Iu common honesty the country ought to be told,
whenever this subject is discussed, for what England
is expected to go to war. We were among the
earliest to express our readiness to hazard some-
thing, nay to hazard much, in defence of the terri-
torial integrity of Denmark. We have always
thought that on the highest principles of policy
the maintenance of a free and Protestant State like

that which existed up to the month of November
last at the southern entrance of the Baltic was an

object which the most cautious and peaceable
statesman might well think worthy of great sacri-
fices and of great efforts. But it is a very different
matter to go to war after all Europe has passively
looked'on and seen what was an ancient kingdom

reduced by forcible dismemberment to the limits of
a province and to the dignity of a tenth-rate prin■
cipality. Should the Conterenee fail to arrange
the questions in dispute, as most people expect
it will, and should our Government be urged to

send a fleet to Copenhagen with orders in
certain eventualities to interpose, then we
have a right to know definitely on what ground
and for what objects we are expected to interfere.
Is it with any hope of reinstating Schleswig and
Holstein as integral portions of the Danish realm,

or is it only to preserve the phantom of regal state
and dignity for the House of Glucksburg ? If the
former, we need to be told by what means such a
restoration is considered possible. 1W e are far from
saying that it might not be accomplished; but ob-
viously it would require resort to measures of no
ordinary vigour and comprehensiveness, and for
these we know not what party in the country or in
Parliament is prepared. The latter alternative is,
we take it, not to be thought of. King Christian
IX. may be a worthy gentleman of quality, whom
accident has suddenly flung into a gilt chair of
State; but that this country should, for the sake of
his personal rights in contingent remainder, plunge
into a European war, is out of the question. George
11. might have found Ministers to abet such a de-
sign, and the little bellicose man would have capered
about in delight at the head of an Anglo-Danish
army, and gulped any amount of flattery offered
him as grand protector of patty Continental sove-
reigns. George 111. was at all times ready for any
folly of a similar kind. But times are changed, and
happily royalty amongst us is changed with them.
England, it is to be hoped, whenever she draws the
sword again in a neighbour's qaurrel, will do so in
defence of a wronged and deserving community, not
for the sake of any crown or half-crown in Christen-
dom.

THE " SPECTATOR" ON MARSHAL PELISSIER AND
Hls CLASS.—We do not know that the death of
Marshal Pelissier is of much European importance,
fur France has soldiers as brave and marshals much
more able, but it deserves for another reason more
than a passing comment. The Marshal was in many
respects the representative of the new soldiery whom
the Continental system of government is fast be-
getting, and whom we take to form one of the most
dangerous classes which have ever appeared in the
world. They are not soldiers of fortune by any
means—bear, indeed, very little affinity with men
of the stamp of the Duke of Berwick or any other
speeiment of the high-class Dugald Dalgetty. They
do not care greatly about money, certainly do not
fight for its sake; never enter ranks other than
those of their own land, and manifest in most, if
not in all, cases a strong though peculiar sense of
patriotic duty. The Sovereign who offered Pelis-
sier, or Radetsky, or von Wrangel, a command
against his own country would only receive an in-
sult, the State which endeavoured to engage him
for its service would elicit a cold refusal. Such
men are not mercenaries, but men infected with the
disease which Garibaldi denounced as " militarism,"
a complaint chronic with Continental Kings. They
are men who, having originally a genuine taste for
military life, have risen in some great army, have
gradually confined their hopes, and sympathies, and
connections to that army, and have at last come to
regard it as their country, its ideas as their guiding
opinion, its morality as the ultimate divinelaw. The
process is facilitated when the officer springs, as in
Pelissier's case, from among the peasantry, when
all he has of social dignity is derived from his epau-
lettes, when his only notion of power is his military
grade, when the army is to him, in short, not so
much an instrument for the defence of his country
as the supreme organisation to feed which the coun
try itself exists. Such men when unsuccessful are
apt to contract a bitter distate for civil life and civi-
lians, to revenge themselves, as it were, on society
by denying that it contains elements equal to that
to which the discontented belong ; when successful,
they become the dangerous instruments of tyranny.
Not that they are necessarily tyrannical by tempe-
rament ; on the contrary, they are often genial, but
when in movement they can only move in the mili-
tary groove, only attain objects by the direct em-
ployment of force increasing always in severity
until the end is attained. Marshal Pelissier was
no fiend, but when he wanted SSO Arabs to come
out of the cave of Abd-el-Riah, and they would not
come, he employed force in the only way he saw
practicable, and smoked 500 human beings to death.
If they had come he would not have slaughtered
them except to gain an end. Marshal von Wrangel
probably never realises the fearful individual misery
inflicted by his requisitions; he thinks only of the
value of terror to secure certain ends, and employs
it as he would employ the halberds in a regiment
inclined to mutiny. Convince him teat he was
violating the code of his own army, or even offend
ing against its opinion, and he would probably be
shocked ; but to talk of external opinion, or foreign
opinion, or the laws of humanity, or moral laws,
or any rules of action whatever except the laws of
war, is so much argument thrown away. As well
speak of feeling to a sheriff's officer or moral cer-
tainty to a solicitor hunting for legal evidence ! It
is the unscrupulous readiness to apply military law
—of necessity an extreme law—as if it were a just
and general code, as indeed it appears to them to
be, which makes these men so cruel. Marshal
Pelissier had a bonhommie of his own, but if his
dearest friend in the camp had hesitated at an
order he would have had him shot with perfect
indifference; if his greatest benefactor had
I thrown at him a hasty word he would have
challenged him to fight to the death. To such men
I the death of others is not a question involving moral
consist--ohms, but simply an incident, like the death
•,
of an animal, to ue eaused or prevented by consi-
derations
puediency alone. If Milanese will
not obey orders, GOO #0 says 4adetsky, of 3.
Milanese must be shot, $Tt, t zrobahle that the
Bohemian Marshal was not a cruel man.
THE "LONDON REVIEW" A i 4 PHILosopHER
ON STREET MUSIC.—Mr. Babbage has appeared in
print at last, and taken an awful literary revenge
on the organs, bagpipes, penny-whistles, and other
instruments of torture that for so many years have
interrupted his :studies. What Cicero said of philo-
sophy, Mr. Babbage Can say of the hurdy-gurdy—
Pernoctat nobiscum peregrinatur rlOtfolfifr. It
knocks him up at night at the most unseasonable
hours, it follows him whenever ho teimi his waika
abroad, and he has before now met in the long
vacation a familiar London burdy.gurdy. very near
to Laud's End. There is hardly anything that Mr.
Babbage has not done to get rid of the
He has summoned the police in vain—in vain he
has gone before the police magistrate—in vain he
has written to Sir G. Grey, Tne police have gene-
rally been wanting, in accordance with that higher
law which always disposes of them every where
except where they are needed. The police magis-
trate, deserting his duty, has actually sympathised
with the grinders of organs. As for tne letter to
Sir G. Grey, it was posted about the middle of
August. Mr. Babbage waited patiently for a reply
till December 17 ; then he wrote again, and
obtained from Sir G. Grey's private secretary the
valuable admission that his first note had been
received. His comment on Sir O. Grey betrays an
aggrieved and wounded spirit, and is not calculated
to increase Mr. Babbage's popularity at the Home
Office :—" 1 confess that this event baffled all my
calculations. I had observed that high oit dale,
distinguished by their intellectual powers, were
ohcigcahsieoffin obliviousaelilayle,distinguished n
only minor points;by
the
office but
they
hold, were weeny most rigidly
courteous and ex.aet.
The wind instruments orwhich Mr. Babbage com-
plains may be classed, for the Sake of simplicity,
under the title of organs; but their real name is
legion. They go as high as brass bands ; they sink
as low as penny trumpets. A workman inhabiting
an attic that commanded Mr. Babbage's garden, by
way of annoying Mr. Bahliage, went lower still,
and took up a regular course of " penny tins."
When he came home to dinner, it was his wont to
open his window, and to blow a " penny tin" for
the apagp of half an hour in the direction of Mr.
Babbage's simply noted the fact in a
memorandum-book," says Mr. Babbage, 6; end then