The Sun.
London, England, 1864-04-01 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF T.

TlMEs.—Her Msjesty's loyal subjects av ill be very
well pleased to hear that their Sovereign is about to
break her protracted seclusion. Next week and
the week after she will hold Courts at Buckingham
Palace,—the first for the principal members of the
Corps Diplometique; the second for such distin-
guished persons as she may invite for the occasion.
Various other announcements encourage the hope
that not only will Buckingham Palace resume its
place in the world of life, but that her Majesty will
herself reappear as its Mistress, and that before long
the whole Court will recover from its suspended
animation. It is almost needless to enumerate the
classes possessing so personal an interest in this
revival that they have taken abundant care to make
their wants known and establish an actual griev-
ance. The West-end of this metropolis only enjoys
life for half the year, and after staking so much
upon its Royal and aristocratic patrons has to de-
plore the lot of those who trust in the favour of
Princes. But the Court has a loftier mission and
wider duties than the encouragement of deserving
tradesmen, or the prosperity of those who seek to
bask in its smiles. It is the very central and highest
institution of the country. It is the Court which
realises and arrays the Sovereign to the mind of the
people. Lawyers and legislators may understand
the Royal prerogative, and say what a Sovereign
may do and what she may not ; and they may de-
scribe her as the keystone of the arch, the symbol
of unity, order, and obedience. Princes, too, may
have that personal knowledge of the Sovereign
which reduces the splendid ceremonial to an idle
formality. But the people at large see, or think they
see, her Majesty surrounded by the officers of State,
the representatives of foreign powers, and the nobi
lity and leading gentry of our own realm. We are
not a peopie to take much on trust, or to conceive
that to be real which does not meet the eye, Every
body must here show himself in his appointed place
or his usual resort. If a gentleman is no longer seen
on the bench of magistrates, or at the covert side, or
wherever else the county chooses to assemble, he
loses not so much caste as existence ; and even a dis-
appearance for a few years becomes so much lee way
in his career and in the progress of his family. It
is an exigency that bears hard upon many charac
ters who are but ill adapted to hold their own is the
crowd, but it is a matter of public weal,and the public
wishes to have its rulers always before its eye, that
being the necessity of its own life, and therefore the
reciprocal duty of all who claim a public character.
We do not deny that it is possible to retire from the
public eye to a household or a select circle, and to
exercise, by force of wealth or position or some per-
sonal gift, a considerable power, and yet be almost
personally unknown. There are, it is true, men and
women who, yielding either to natural taste or to
circumstances, shut themselves up and become names
and nothing more ; known only in the past, or in
their inseparable connection with living persons and
outward things. There are such who are believed to
be models of piety, of goodness, and of accomplish-
ment, whose virtues are often alluded to, and who
are worshipped in a mysterious retirement by a se-
lect circle of congenial and interested admirers. But
in no position or rank of life is it possible to become
this impersonal and mystic being so completely as
to lose feelings and be incapable of opinions. The
most secluded people cannot make the world of their
own so complete as to shut out the reality; and they
who live ever so much in the past will still find the
living intrude. Indeed, they are apt to give way to
feelings upon the questions of the day all the more
because they have indulged too much in recollec-
tions and regrets, and all the shadows of a bygone
time. The present will assert its claims to their at
tention and interest, and will lay a strenuous grasp
on the heart that seemed devoted to the very
tomb. As long as there is life there is that which
sustains the life of the great, the noble, and the
good—the love of justice and truth ; the love of
family and race, the love of a cause, or whatever
else has once possessed the soul. So they who
would isolate themselves from the world and its
duties must forget both it and themselves; they
must cease to know and to (tare as well as to act,
and be content to let things take their course. This
in effect they cannot do; this they never do; and
the only result is a struggle in which they neither
die nor live—neither live, as they wish, in the past,
nor do their duty in the working world. To take a
pert in the world it is necessary to live in it. But
they who live in it and wish to share its action must
be Resent ; they must see and be seen. Without
this, they will find themselves fading to the eye of
man, losing hold on the general interest, receding
into the misty background, speaking without being
heard, aiming without reaching, stretching without
grasping, fighting the air when they believe them.
selves in friendly embrace or in contest of argu
Went. It is the only advice that can be tendeted to
all, from the Sovereigndown to the humblest servant
of the Sovereign, the State, or the public; down to
any man who has his walk in life and his post 'o fill.
He mast walk his walk and fill his post, and that
actually and visibly, otherwise the view dissolves
and another picture takes its place, which is either
not himself, or such as he will hardly wish to be so.
PoST.—Daring the reign of the Emperor Nicho-
las in Russia no one was surprised at accounts of
atrocities unkno`wn and unheard of in civilised
countries. In those infelicitous times neither age
nor sex was excepted from corporal punishment.
The monster Constantine, who governed Poland as
viceroy, and himself married a beautiful Pole, was
constantly in the habit of ordering Polish women to
be flagged, not for crimes against the law, but for
political opinion, or the wearing of colours that ins
dicated a political opinion. Nothing raised the
gorge of the Poles more than this brutal soul
debasing inhumanity ; and there can be no doubt
that it was one of the proximate causes of the
Revolution of 1831. Nor was the flogging of
women confined to Poland. It was often prac-
tised in St. Petersburg during the reign of Con-
stantine's younger brother, Nicholas, to whom he
fielded the imperial crown, and practised, too, not
merely on Polish but on Russian women. In the
year 1830, if we remember rightly, one of the prin
c.pal hotels at St. Petersburg was kept by one De-
muth, and his wife, a born Russian, having been
denounced by a police spy, a Russian prince (princes
in Russia are as plentiful as blackberries in Sept.),
as having spoken rather freely of one of the Dames
de la Coeur, Madame Demuth was seized, bound,
stripped, and flogged by the police authorities in her
own house. The sensation this produced at Vienna
at the close of 1830 was intense, and when the revo-
lution broke out at Wilna and 'Warsaw in the fol-
lowing year the sympathies of the Viennese were
breast-high with the Poles, In Galicia facilities of
concealment and escape were afforded to Poles flying
from pursuing Russians, for the Austrian Govern-
ment did not at that moment dare to run counter to
public opinion. Yet Austria at that period was
dsspo.ically governed; the narrow-minded Em-
peror Francis still lived, and Metternich was all-
powerful. True, the governing power was leaden
and heavy-handed, but it. was not stolid or stupid,
and certainly it was not brutal. It was not, indeed,
till seventeen or eighteen years after this period
that woman-flogging was heard of in Austria, and
then it was resorted to, in 1849 and 1850, by the
monster Haynau, who was not an Austrian born,
hut, a veritable Hessian, being the natural son of
William I. the Elector of Hesse-Cassel, by Madame
de Lidentbal. The manner in which this brutal
soldier exercised his authority was so ferocious that
the Austrian Government was forced to deprive
him of all military authority in July, 1850. He
left the army and the country which he disgraced
by his inhumanity at the close of August,
and in the month of September, 1850, arrived in
England. The infamy of his evil deeds had pre-
ceded him hither, and it is in the remembrance of
all that when he visited Barclay and Perkins's
brewery, some fourteen years ago, l‘rewers' dray-
men and populace all joined in one loud diapason
of disgust and indignation at his cowardly con-
duct. The inhuman monster speedily left these
shores for Brussels. There, as well as here, the
populace taunted him with his dastardly and in
human conduct to women, and received him with
shots of execration. From Brussels be proceeded
to Paris ; but though the police in that capital
afforded him protection from actual manual vio-
lence, yet he could sufficiently read in the expres-
sion of every passing visage indications of loathing
and contempt. He did not remain much longer
in France than in this country or Belgium, and
quickly returned to his fatherland. There,
whether from the stings of conscience or remove,
he was seized with apoplexy, and died on
ts way
to the waters of Grafenberg in 185,
of his death Austria has the period
period
IthetT.gonegreat changes.
The military power of the empire has been humbled
and chastised. The Emperor Francis Joseph has been
induced to grant rewesentative institutions to his
subjects, and 15 or 16 months ago many in these
kingdoms were hopeful enough to think that a career
of progression and improvement was opening but to
Austria. But since the outbreak of the Polish
insurrection many of those who were not originally
unfriendly to Austria have seen cause to change
their opiriton. They are constrained to think that
Austria is acting in
perfect complicity with Russia
and Prussia, and that the constitution and repre-
sentative institutions granted by the Emperor may
be but mere convenient shams, delusions, mockeries,
and snares—anything, in a word, but reality. That
very Galicia which, in 1831, was a refuge and
Amid for Russian Poles, is noweaccording to the
Journal de Debate and the Psesseis the theatre
war
atreo!
acts as Mx sinus as any occurring n 1831 a
-iaw under the Grand Duke Constantine, or at Wilna
_intier the senator Novosiltz°ff. For more than a
nonth past councils of war have been in full activity
it Lemberg. They dispose at least of four cases daily.
People of both loxes are condemned each week—in-