The Sun.
London, England, 1864-09-23 00:00:00

improvement has mainly served to bring them into mutual
amity by the great progress of co-operative industry. To
this is the whole happiness as well as improvement of the

people due—

" Reason's whole pleasure, all the joys of sense,
Life in these words—health, peace, and competence,
But health consists in temperance alone,
And peace, oh virtue, peace is all thine own."
But if from surveying the progress ci Social Science at

home we turn cur eye to foreign countries, the view is by no
means so gratifying. There has not been that advance in

constitutional systems which we were happy to comme-
morate at our last congress, and in some states the changes
have been for the worse. There appears a determination in
the two great powers of Germany to resist all constitutional

improvements as tending to revolution, and in their own
dominions everything is withheld from the people which it
is safe to withhold, In the smaller principalities the love

of foreign war has suspended all internal reform. The
kingdom of Italy is making very useful changes in its ad-
ministrative syste:n, adopting an improved taxation, and
establishing such an effective peace as may relieve its
southern provinces from the banditti, whom the exiled
family, protected by the Roman Pontiff, continues to en-

courage and support. It is certain that as long as France
maintains an army atßome the tranquillity of Naples may
be secured by orders from Paris. The sufferings of Poland
under Russian oppression have been already adverted to ;
and, reprehensible as the Imperial proceedings have been'
we are bound to admit as an exception the Emperor's conduct
towards the working classes in his own country. Ile has
firmly and suscessfully persisted in the great measure of serf
emancipation, and his merit has been the more remarkable
because he had to contend with the universal opposition of
the landowners, In France some important changes have
been wrought in the law and in the constitution of the pro-
vincial councils, It is proposed to restrict the imprisonment
of debtors to cases where there has been fraud or gross ex-
travagance and carelessness; and a code of bankrupt laws
is preparing, somewhat on the model of our own; the great
errors of which committed recently it is to be hoped will
be avoided. There have been material improvements in
the departments of public instruction, the most useful of
which is the giving prizes to any persons who have left
school and been employed in labour, but retain the know-
ledge they had acquired, it being a common charge against
poor schools that the pupils soon forgot all they had learned.
A very useful association has for two years been established
for international instruction by the exertions of M, E.
Rendu, the good effects of which are to be seen in the school
of St. Germain-en-Lays. But no exertion has been given
to popular influence in any way whatever ; and there have
been prosecutions, that more especially of our distinguished
colleague, M. Gamier Pages, and his friends, the judgment
in which, if upon appeal found to be sanctioned by law,
shows the absolute necessity of that law being repealed,
unless the marvellous discovery of a courtly duke be con-
sidered as founded on fact, that the French are incapable of
wore liberty than they at present enjoy, granted them by
the Imperial Government. It is pleasing to observe the late
elections and their consequences in a very small country
having the inestimable benefit of a free constitution, as well
as most wise and able rulers, the Belgian kingdom, where
the greatest progress has also been made in all branches of
industry. The elections have been in favour of the Liberal
party, and have frustrated all the attempts of the bigoted
adherents of Rome, yet without the least scope being given
to intolerance, as is shown at the Catholic Congress of Ma-
lines, attended by men of the most distinguished station, and
addressed in some of their speeches upon subjects which no
one would have ventured to approach at Berlin, Vienna, or
Paris. A most excellent practice has been introduced by
our Foreign Office, of requiring the secretaries of legation at
different courts to make a yearly report of the changes in
commercial, and generally the economic, measures during
the year. The volumecontaining these reports for 1863 has
appeared, and it contains a body of most important informa-
tion. One head may be referred to as an example, The report
of Mr Layton upon Switzerland gives an account of a most
admirable institution for the education of female servants,
which has been attended with perfect success, and shows
how that problem may be solved which the late Prince
Consort was so anxious about, and which Mrs Baines, it is
to be hoped, will enable our Department of Economy to dis-
cuss with the advantage of her great experience and know-
ledge of the subject. That this country will ever be ready to
benefit by the experience of other nations no one can doubt.
We should be worse than spoilt children were we to justify
the taunts occasionally thrown out by foreigners. We
should be like those princes in despotic States, one of whom
asked the bishop, his tutor, when reading the French his-
tory with him, and that it was said the king died in such a
year, " What," said the prince, "do kings die then ?"
" Sometimes," was the bishop's courtly and cautious an-
swer. The Americans indulge in the taunt at our expense;
we are unable to retaliate; for cheirnational vanity, amount-
ing to disease, is coupled with so rational a regard to their
interest that they are the first to adopt, and often to con-
tinue, the improvements of other countries. And now what
a scene of misery and of crime does their recent history and
present condition present to the friends of social science,
more horrid than any case known in modern, let us say
Christian times; and with this sad pecudarity, that the
whole people, instead of merely permitting, as in other
cases, the crimes of their rulers, are themselves the active
and willing agents in the work of merciless slaughter— of
such wholesale bloodshed as never before disgraced the
name of man. " Qum est ista tam infesta ira, quam per tot
acies, fusus sanguis expleri non potuerit ? Adai hue popu-
lationem agrorum ; incendia villarum ac ruinas orania ferro
ignique vastata, hiscene ira expleri non potutt ? (Liv. vii.
30) How the blame for the three horrors should be distri-
buted, it boots not to irquire. Some good men have been
deceived by the notion that slavery is the cause of the war
—duped by the pretext that the North fights to free the
slave, whereas their emancipation edict was a mere belli •
gerent measure, and an afterthought ; they (as Bishop
Wilberforce said) caring no more for the freedom of
the black than they do for that of the white. But it
has been reserved for the later act of the tragedy to see that
government, when destitute of other troops, drive herds of
the unhappy negroes to slaughter, with no more remorse
than sportsmen feel in clearing a preserve. Yet certain
though it be that the North did not make war to free the
slave, and that this could not have entered into their consi-
deration when they began the contest for preventing the
secession, it is no less certain that the maintenance of slavery
—their detestable institution—was partly the object of the
South in fighting for their independence ; and the friend of
humanity, although feeling that we are not entitled to re-
quire a more sudden emancipation than we ourselves effected
in our colonies, may yet earnestly hope that out of this
cruel contest and its countless evils, the mercy of an all-
ruling Providence may draw the good, contemplated by
neither party, of giving freedom to the slave. But whatever
difference of opinion may prevail regarding the origin of
this frightful civil war, there can be none as to the duty im-
posed on other nations of not taking part with either belli-
gerent; and in this country individuals were most properly
warned by proclamation against enlisting in either army,
the enforcement of the Foreign Enlistment Act being held
out as certain. Every British subject is liable to its penal-
ties who so enlist, and that which is now a misdemeanour
was formerly a felony, at one time punishabte with death.
All who serve in the army of either party are guilty, and
may be prosecuted in the Court of Queen's Bench as if
their enlistment had been in an English county. Therefore
the North makes war upon the South by troops composed
in part of persons liable to prosecution for the offence of
enlisting, and it was one of the gravest charges upon
George HI, that he employed German mercenaries against
the independence of America, though these Germans were
guilty of no offence in hiring themselves to the service.
The poor Irish who thus sell themselves break the law
of their own country in order to perpetuate in America all
the crimes of civil war. 'We are now in York, the birth-
place, it is commonly believed, of the first Christian
Emperor, Constantine, who declared the Gospel the
religion of the State. It is lamentable to think that to
this capital there has penetrated the unbelief which is one
of the great misfortunes of the present day, prevailing
much more on the Continent than in these islands, by the
elaborate and subtle efforts of its victims, yet somewhat to
be deplored among ourselves. The friends of religion very
justly complain of the mode and manner of these attacks,
that they are not plain and open, but covert and insidious,
casting doubts and raising suspicions, without such a direct
assault as the religion itself might meet and repel; nay
sometimes proceedings from persons who avow their be-
lief, but would reduce the subject cf it to such dimensions
as left it unstable and incapable of defence. There are,
however, more open assailants ; and it is strange to find
that while a body directing these are actually distributing
tracts, conducting a periodical work, and holding meetings
for debate, both in the southern counties and even as far
north as Edinburgh, there should be found at the same time
propagators of spiritual visions, in which, as extremes often-
times meet, those are prone to believe who have faith in
nothing else. Although some of the most zealous of those
subject to these delusions fancy that true religion gains by
them as affording proofs of another world's existence, it is
certain that the bulk of those who believe in spiritualism,
in communications from remote regions of the earth, and
even from beyond the grave, are utter disbelievers in all
religion natural and revealed, unhappy persons in whom
the works of the Creator which surround them fail to raise
a thought of the almighty power. wisdom, and goodness,
and to whom the revealed will of God is addressed in vain.
It becomes us to regard such opinions with pity, as far as
they are sincere, abstaining from all expression of vitupe-
ration, difficult as it may be to avoid blaming those who,
by propagating such delusions, would unsettle men's faith
in one system without even affecting to put anything in
its place, But we of the association hold fast by our
own opinions, handed down with the sanction of the
names most venerated in all the walks of all the sciences,
held indeed by the most respected and beloved
and deeply lamented of our own body. Death
has since our last congress visited us with irreparable losses,
of which may well be noticed that of our excellent Profes-
sor Pillow, one of the most able, learned, and pious of men,
and that of Sir W. Brown, whose munificence, almost un-
exampled in modern times, bestowed upon the working
classes in Liverpool their rich library and the great struc-
ture for their meetings—the friend of all sects, bestowing
his generosity alike to them without any distinction, though
every one knew how firmly held wore his own principles of
religion as well as policy, though tempered by forbearance
towards whoever differed with him on either. The loss of
_ Lord Lyudhurst also Wel us at the very close of ow Ediu-