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

the

influ• 1
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should be insensible to the al:factions an.,, -
enc.aa of family, It is unjust and unmanly to Stet se
throw the blame of what tts.ny hale been faulty in
our foreign policy upon the Queen. Ministea accept
without reserve, as in all honour and conscience they
are bound to do, the undivided responsibility of
what has been done, and left undone ; and it only now
remains fete the Oppositien to take up the glove
which has been thus thrown down. Wilt 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 7 they may find
fault with one despatch for being too strong, and
with another for not being strong enough, but they
have not the pluck to say honestly what they would
do—they are too poor iu spirit to afford to keep a
great firinciple or any Sort. Lord Ellenborough
found nobody to follow him in Lie teed rash, save
Earl Grey, a most suitable Friday forsuch a Creme:
In common honesty the country ought to be told,
whenever this subject is discussed, for what England
is eitpeeted 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. Bat it is a very different
matter to ge to war after all Europe has passively
looked'on and seen what was an ancient kingdom
reduced by forcible dismerdberment to the limits of
a province and to the dignity of a tenth-rate prin-
cipality. Should the Conference 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 Gluckeburg ? If the
former, we need to be told by what means such a
restoration is considered possible. We 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
IL might have found Ministers to abet such a de-
sign, and the little bellicose man would have capered
about in delight at the bead of an Anglo-Danish
army, and gulped any amount of flattery offered
him as grand protector of petty 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 drawn 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 PELIISSIER AND
HIS CLASS.—We do not know that the death of
Marshal Pelissier is of much European importance,
for France has soldiers as brave and marshals much
more aWe, 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
speaiment 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, it
not in ail, cases a strong though peculiar sense of
patriotic duty. The Sovereign who offered Pelis-
sier, or Radetsky, or von Wrangel, a command
gai2st his own country would only receive an ine
salt, the gtate which endeavoured to engage him
would elicit a cold refusal. Such
for its service
ries, but men infected with the
men are not mei-ma'
,Ilenounced as " militarism,"
disc use which Garibaldi
tinental Kings. They
a complaint chronic with Co..
z
are men who, having originally enuine taste for
military life, have risen in some greht army, have
gradually confined their hopes, and sympathies, and
connectiona to that army, and have at last come to
regard it as their country, its ideas as their guidieig
opition, its morality aa the ultimate divinelaw. The
proaeas is facilitated when the officer springs, as in
Pelissier'e case, from among the peasantry, when
all he has of social dignity is derived from his epau-
lettes, when his only notion of 'sower is his military
grade, when the army is to bins, in short, not 50
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 neeetearily 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 5'.:0 Arabs to come
out of the cave of Abel-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 foe he was
violating the code of his own army, or even offend
ieg against its opinion, end he would probably be
shocked ; but to talk of external opinion, or foreign
opinion, or the laws of humanlty, 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 j 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
thrown at him a hasty word he would have
challenged him to fight to the death. To such men
the death of others is not a question involving moral
considerations, but simply an incident, like the death
of an animal, to be caused or prevented by consi-
derations of expediency alone. If Milanese will
not obey orders, feels as well as says Radetsky,
Milanese must be shot, yet it is probable that the
Bohemian Marshal vas not a cruel man.
THE "LONDON REVIEW" ON A PHILOSOPHER
ON STREET MUSIC.—Mr. Babbage has appeared in
print at last, and waken an awful literary revenge
on the organs, bagpipes., penny-whistles, and other
instruments of torture that fo;.• 80 many years have
interrupted his studies. What Cicero said of
O philo-
sophy, Mr. Babbage can say of le hurdy-gurdy—
rusticatur. It
Pernoctat nobiscum pereyrinatur
unseasonable
knocks him up at night at the MOS!'
hours, it follows him whenever he takes his walks
abroad, and he has before now met in :.he long
vacation a familiar London hurdy gurdy very near
to Laud's End. There is hardly anything that Mr.
Babbage has not done to get rid of the infliction.
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, Tae 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
was posted about the middle of
Sir G. Grey, it
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 G. 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 bad observed that high officials,
distinguished by their intellectual powers, were
occasionally oblivious on minor points; but that
high officials, distinguished only by the office they
hold, were usually most rigidly courteous and exact."
The wind instruments of which 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. Babbage, 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 bl. A ;allay tin" tor
the space of half an hoar in the direction of M.
B!_laaage's ,zarcien. •• I sifn noted the feet
ll'hb7+ges and a 1...

taking my daily exercise."
employed the time he thought he was destroying in:
It is a terrible refleca
- think that
Lion , we are at the mercy of things 5D
insignificant b-: a " penny tin,'' and that one of the
most philosophical mathematicians li-ring is obliged
to alter his burn of exercise to escape it. But Mr.
Babbage is not surrounded with music that is in-
strumental only. He is equally experienced about
the human voice in its various forms. He divides,
the hnroan voice into three heads. First, there is.
the human voice shouting out objects for ma's ; them
there is the human voice engaged in religious wor-

ship, in coojunc!ion and in unison with the human
nose then, lastly, there is psalm aiming. All these
interfere with Mr. Babbage, and distract his
workmen while they are engaged in attending tab
the famous analytical engine. They drive him wil6
with mental agony, end affect injuriously his mode
of lift.. Three or four times a day Mr. Babbagc
rushes d677n stairs from the middle of the most

complicated calculation that ever perplexed a senior
wrangler, to beg the organs and the human voices to
ino-tte off. Their triumph over his nerves and hie
good nature ought, indeed, to rank as one of the
glories of St. Cecilia's day. Of the divine Cecilia--
the " invehtress of the vocal frame"—the poet•
says, that " she drew an angel down." It is what
the organs outside accomplish most days of the
year with Mr. Babbage. Down he comes, almost
by clockwork, an angelic visitant, who, as the
organ-grinders soon discover, is not always in an►
angelic temper. it is easy to understand who it ie
that dislikes harmonies so constant and so noisy-
An astute magistrate once asked Mr. Babbage
whether las believed that a man's brains would be
injured by listening to a street organ. Mr. Bab.,
bage replied, " Certainly not ;" for that no man
with a brain over listened to street music. Those
who confine themselves like Mr. Babbage to philo-

sophy and to the music of the spheres, have no ear
for the tom-tom and the flageolet. It is far harder
to make out who it is that likes them. Mr. Bab-
bage has drawn up in a masterly manner two tho-
roughly exhaustive tables, which he thinks embrace
all the admirers of that description of music which
may be said to be made up chiefly of sounding brass
and tinkling cymbals. There is something slightly
acrimonious in the composition of the list, but in
Mr. Babbage's state of mind we cannot wonder at
it. In the first column we have tavern keepers,
gin shops, coffee shops, servants, children, and
visitors from the country. It is evident what Mr.
Babbage thinks of his college friends and of his
country cousins. It is an uncomfortable thing to be
tabulated by the side of coffee shops and gin
shops, and Mr. Babbage can only have done
it to his country visitors as a solemn
retaliation. On the other column he places,
first and foremost, ladies of doubtful virtue.
He conceives evidently of Jezebel,as of a young per-
son who was in the habit of looking out of upper
windows, and encouraging hurdy-gurdies. Next
in the list come (" occasionally") "titled ladies;"
" but these," adds Mr. Babbage, " are almost inva-
riably of recent elevation, and deficient in that taste
which their sex usually possess." This is decidedly'
a fact for Mr. Dod. It is only those who have been
recently raked to the peerage who care for brass
bands. The reason, we imagine, must be, that it io
only a parvenue peeress who is to blow her own
trumpet. Nobody who came owl. with the Con'
quest ever encouraged street music. Thus we have on-
one side gin-shops, and Mr. Babbage's visitors frog
the country, and Anonyma, and a growing Brun;
magem nobility. On the other are Virtue, and
Modesty, and the Analytical Engine, and the Plan-
tagen,?.ts cf Plantagenet Castle. Between such or
posite Hsi:3 it is difficult to hesitate a moment about
choosing, and any man of refinement, or woman of
character, will at once pronounce for Mr. Babbage
and for the suppression of all wandering meledistE.
The real moral to be drawn from the annoyances to
which Mr. Babbage is subjected, is, how much
better it would be in large towns if man Wag
an analytical engine. Mr. Babbage's calculating
machine has no sorrows ; no journeyman or mechanic
has the power of putting it out by a constant Per-
formance upon " penny tins." It grinds swat'
through Verdi and a hundred organs. Italians Nvit4,
monkeys cracking nuts to slow music have no effect
upon the quantity or the quality of it's work. It°
internal organiaation enables it to calculate wit'
rithms totally irrespective of a piano next door,or tbe.
German flute with window open across the way: 111'
is therefore a great thing to be an analytical engine'
Mr. Babbage tells us that during the last dozen
years of his life, at least one-fourth of his working.
power has been destroyed by the nuisance of streo
music. He thinks that 25 per cent. is a largelntel_
lectual to be levied upon the brain of the
lectual workers of the country for the sake of brass
bands. Mr. Babbage's brain is probably extract'
dinarily sensitive; but it is certainly a loss to science
that he should have to labour under such difficul ties,
nor can we conceive a more real penance to a E
tive brain than the pemoice which the present regll4
lations of the police comp,sl him to undergo.