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

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 mast forget both it and themselves; they
must cease to know and to cars 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 pi esent ; 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-
ment. It is the only advice that can be tendered to
all, from the Sovereign down 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 to fill.
He must 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.—During the reign of the Emperor Nicho-
las in Russia no one was surprised at accounts of
atrocities unknown 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 flogged, 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 Sr. Petersburg during the reign of Con-
srantiee's younger brother, Nicholas, to whom he
yieldad the imperial crown, and practised, too, no•
merely on Polish but on Russian women. In the
year 1830. if we remember rightly, one of the prin
c.nil hotels lit 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 Sapt.),
as having spoken rather freely of one of the Dimes
de la Cm ir, M :dame Demuth was seized, bound,
stripped, and fl,igged 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 wee
despo ically governed; the narrow-minded Em-
peror Francis still lived, and Metternictt was alt.
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,
but a veritable Hessian, being the natural son of
William I. the Elector of Hesse-Cassel, by Madame
de Lidenthal. 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, brewers' 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 he 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 remorse,
he was seized with apoplexy, and died on his way
to the waters of Grafen berg in 1853. Since the period
of his death Austria has undergone great changes.
The military power of the empire has been humbled
and chastised. The Emperor Francis Joseph has bran
induced to grant rep usentative 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 tut to
Austria. But since the outbreak of the Polish
leaurrection many of those who were not origin tit's'
unfriendly to Austria have seen cause to change
thrir opinion. They are constrained to think that
Austria is acting in perfect complicity with Russia
end Prussia, and that the constitution and repre-
sentative institutions granted by toe Emperor may
be but mere convenient shams, delusions, mockeries,
and snares—anything, in a word, but reality. Teat
very Galicia which, in 1831, was a refuge and
shield for Russian Poles, is now, according to the
Journal de Debats and the Presse, the theatre of
,ets as atrocious as any occurring in 1831 at War-
w under the Grand Duke Constantine, or at Wilna
se,) :tor Noao.i I. z •ff• For more than a
ionth past councils of war have been in toil activity
tit Lemberg. They dispose at least of tour cases daily.
.People of both sexes are condemned each week—in-