The Sun.
London, England, 1864-06-27 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

TEE " SPECTATOR" ON TUE COMING WAR.—
The Conferenee which ought never to have met has
risen, and the possibilities of peade are slipping
away by hours. One more formal meeting takes
place to-day, and then the plenipotentiaries sum-
moned to register and legaliie an act of armed
spoliation disperse to countries more deeply em-
bittered than they were before the assemblage,
.11hroughottt the negotiations every country en-
gaged has maintained the attitude which it had
assumed in war; Prussia, insolent, unreasoning,
and aggressive; Atistria cotirteotis in seeming, but
following steadily Herr von Bismark's lead; Den-
mark complaining, and moderate up to a point, but
pressed beyond that, had as iron, or as the op-
pressed are apt to be; Russia Unintelligible; France
watchful; and England, conciliatory to the verge,
or over the verge, of national humiliation. After
surrendering the treaty 0f1852, which England her-
self prepared, after giving up Holstein and sellieg
Lauenburg, after offering one large slice of the
country whose integrity he was bound to defend,
after compelling his unhappy ally to abandon the
boundary of a thousand years, and suggesting that
she might live without a defensible frontier, Earl
Russell made his final effort in favour of peace and
accepted a crowning humiliation. He abandoned
his own ultimatum, the line of the Schlei, and by
agreeing to an award of any boundary between the
Dannewerke and Apenrade, agreed to place purely
Danish population under the rule of their foes.
Even that shameful concession was rejected, eagerly
by Prussia, reluctantly by Austria, despairingly by
Denmark, and then at last the uselessness of the
Conference became clear even to the diplomatic
mind, and it remained only to decide whether Ger-
many should carry out the design which she has
pursued all along, and Denmark ceases to exist, or
England should declare that concession being ex-
hausted,she was prepared to defend the right of small
nations to exist by arms. Then at last the thesis
maintained from the first by Elri Grey alone among
p )iiticians, and the Spectator alone among journ.,ls,
was felt to be true. Hid Egv.l4,nd ;rum the first
preferred her honour and her policy to her comfort
and the surplus, had she coutiselled the formal re-
nunciation of Holstein, and sent 20,000 men to the
Dannewerke, the war would never have broken out,
and with Holstein assigned to Germany and
Lauenburg to Prussia, the Danes might have
remained the guaranteed and independent masters
of all that is truly theirs, the Peninsula north of
the river which before Latin ceased to be a co,-
loquial tongue was described as the Scandinavian
fron tier,

THE EXAMINER ON THE BALLOT.—Lord Pal

self from his less scrupulous companions by refus-
ing to snatch freedom at the expense of his parole;
and he would, we doubt not, have lived and died a
conviet rather than seek a favour from the Govern-,
ment which at !est pardoned him. Altogether, tho
descendant of Brien toroitme had a sort of regality
about him which marked hilt off from the mercenary
or bloodthirsty patriots with whom an unkind
destiny associated him. Intellectually he was *
very poor creature ; as a political guide and leader'
of men, he was an incapable simpleton ; but he bad
at least a fall average share of the moral qualities
which, when found in conjunction with common
sense, claim the respect and admiration of mankin.e.
What was really wonderful about a character which
otherwise offers little to invite or repay the labour
of psychological analysis was a vanity which ap-
proached the preternatural. For a man who had
had the benefit of the best education that England
has to give, and whom 20 years in the House of
Commons might have taught to take the measure
.of
his own abilities, there is something astounding In
the dull, stolid audacity with which he uniformly
thrust himself into positions for which he was
ludi4
crously unfit, and assumed responsibilities Which be
had not a single qualification, natural or acquired,
for creditably discharging. Without a particle of
oratorical talent, he set up for a demagogue; and;
with the pro'bundest ignorance of the art and
science of war, he headed an armed insurrection
against the British Empire. He was cased in a
perfect rhinoceros hide of self-conceit on which no
amount of ridicule, remonstrance, or censure could
could ever make the faintest impression.