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

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

THE " SATURDAY REVIEW" ON THE POPE'S
HEALTH.—Every day the telegrt.pA brings some
intelligence ebotit the Pope's health. Sometimes
he is a ii(tie worse, sometimes he is a little better.

One day very unfavourable symptoms hate cat in ;
he has lost his mind, his legs are giving way, he
wholly unfit for btiSine3s, Thn next day he is
nearly well again ; he has receied the French
Ambassador, he has given his assent to a new !clan,
he has blessed thous ands of people from a balcony
The telegraph sends all these conflicting tnesitages
bout him, we may he sure, because Europe takes
a great interest in his heall h ; or because, in plainer
language, a great many people think it to their
interest that he should die, and a great many people
think it to their interest that ha should live. It

is expected that, when the Pope dies, some great
change will take piece. No one says clearly what
the change is to he, or why it should come; but
still a change is expected, and even the possibility
of change is enough at the present day to keep
Europe on the quiver. And yet many reasons
might be urged ter the opinion that this event,
whenever it may take place, will not greatly alter
the situation of afftire, It is absurd to suppose
that a Pope will be chosen who will blindly obey
the Emperor of the French, who :gill go out of
Rome when he is told, and will be delighted to
enter on immediate arrangements for the abandon-
ment of the temporal power. The Cardinal who
would be of such a Mind does nut exist, and, if be
did, he would be sere to b 3 vetoed by Spain or
Austria, The Conclave is entirely under the
direction of persons whose fidelity to the pre-
sent system is unquestionable, whose whole
traditions, feclings, interests, and convictions lead
them to determine that no compromise with the
enemy shall be even thought of, and who will cling
to the temporal power to the last. Prudence may
dictate the choice of a moderate, or a silky, or even
of an oily person—of a Pope who will not go out of
his way to offend the great ones of the earth, and
who, if ha curses at all, will be content to curse in
a mild kind of ecclesiastical dos-Latin. But his
mind' will be as firm as a rock, and his mind will be
set on cleaving to the inheritance of his predeces-
sors, Nor can it be said that there is any conspi-
cuous change in the position of the powers which are
most concerned in the affairs of Rome. It is true
that the Italian Ministry has been able to teriounce
to the Chamber that the negotiatious with France
for the termination or modification of the temporal
power which broke down two years ago, have been
resumed. But that these negotiations will result
in anything, no Italian Minister would venture to
predict. It suits the Emperor to stay in Rome,
and, so long as it suits him, he is not likely to be
turned from his purpose by the diplomatic efforts
of a country that is almost entirely under subjec-
tion to him. And if it suits him to keep his troops
at Rome now, there appears to be no reason why
this should not equally suit him although the pre-
sent Pope died and a new Pope appointed. A new
Pope would do asPiuslX. has done,and if any threat
of withdrawing the French troops from Rome were
made, would simply eanounce his intention of leav
ing Rome altogether. What the Emperor reason
ably dreads is the spectacle of a wandering, exiled
Pope, beating his lucrative martyrdom meekly,
stirring ttp the hearts of the faithful, and manag-
ing to implicate the eldest son of the Church in
the disgrace and crime of his humiliation. If
the Pope cannot do without the Emperor, the
Emperor cannot do without the Pope; and as
the Papal Court is perfectly aware of this, it can
take the same advantage of the necessities of the
Emperor, whether one man is Pope or another. In
Spain, which is the stronghold of thoroughgoing
Catholicism, the determination to uphold the Pope
seems as strong as ever, and the Spanish Ministry
has just annotinco,.d that its vieste Bi to the temporal
power remain Unaltered. it is true that Spain could
not keep up the temporal power for a day if France
chose to decree its termination ; bet Spain, if faith-
ful to the last; might ,have the honour and distinc•
Lion of receiving the Pore in his exile, and thie is an
honour which France would deCltletily grudge her.
THE "EXAMINER" ON THE QUEEN Allitt THE
WAR is little more than a century i;tnce the ac-cession of George 111,, the most wrong headea tee_
expensive sovereign whom this country has known
since the Revolution. Exclusive of the period dur-
ing which the supreme functions of the State were
vested in a regency, his reign lasted about 50 yeas;
and mainly owing to his insane pride of kingcraft
and recklessness in the shedding of blood,wars were
carried on which cost us at least £500,000,000, and
we fear to say how many thousand lives. Yet this
is the man whom, in spite of crazy eloquence, Lord
Ellenborough not only holds up as a model of Eng-
lish royalty, but indecently contrasts with the con-
stitutional, frugal, and peace loving monarch who
now fills the throne. In his first speech to Parlia-
ment George 111. snatched at personal popularity
by boasting that he had been born and bred in
England, a boast which was no batter than a sneer
at his Hanoverian kinsman who had preceded him.
His illustrious granddaughter, under whom we are
more fortunate to live, has never indulged in tawdry
rhetoric when addressing her people, but then she
has never squandered their treasure or spilt their
blood for dynastin objects, or to enforce colonial
tnisrul Georgelll• spent his life in raving against
the liberties of the people, and in plotting
against the Ministers whose advice he was bound
to take. The Queen is the best example of loyalty
in its highest sense, for she is loyal to the law by
which she holds her crown, and loyal to the interest
and freedom of her people. The testimony of Lord
Russell, in her defence against the tirade of Lord
Ellenboraugh, is simple, direct, and coac,hisive.
Whatever advice the Cabinet may have collectively
given to her M tiest v. she has i,lvaritably taken; end
hough it would be unreasonable to expect that she

should be insensible to the affections and the inflas
encei of family, it is unjust and unmanly to seek to
throw the blame of what may have been faulty in
our foreign policy upon the Queen.: Ministers accept
without reserve, as in all honour and conseieeee they
are bound to do, the undivided responsibility o.
what has been done and left undone ; and it only now
remains for the Opposition to take up the glove
which has been thus thrown down. Will they
take it up It The shabby silence of Lord Derby
and his colleagties in e±pectatiott, whene'er the
question of peace or war has been raised; eonesinees
us that they have no stomach for the parliamentary
battle to which they have so often been provoked.
They may cavil and criticise details ; 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 in spirit to afford to keep a
great principle of any sort. Lord Ellenborough
found nobody to follow him in his mad rash, save
Earl Grey, a most suitable Friday for such a Crusoe:
In common honesty the country ought to be told,
whenever this subject is discussed, for what England
is expected 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 priqciples 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 go to war after all Europe has passively
looked on and seen what was an ancient kingdom
reduced by forcible dismemberment 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 Mulish realm,
or is it only to preserve the phantom of regal state
and dignity for the House of Glucksburg ? If the
former, we need to be told by what meals 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
11. 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 draws 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 PELISSIER AND
HIS CLASS.—We do not know that the death of
Marshal Pelissier is of much Foropean importance,
for France has soldiers as brave and marshals much
more able, 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
speoiment 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, if
not in all, cases a strong though peculiar sense of
patriotic duty. The Sovereign who offered Pelis-
sir.--
or Radetsky, or von Wrangel, a command
pis own country would only receive an ins.
against a
which endeavoured to engage him
suit, the State:
Id elicit a cold refusal. Such
for its service woes.
but men infected with the
men are not mercenaries,
.need as "militarism,"
disease which Garibaldi deno:
tai Kings_ They
a complaint chronic with Confine.:
are men who, having originally a geb:line taw() for
military life, have risen in some great arC2v, have
gradually confined their hopes, and sympathies,and
connections to that army, and have at last come io
regard it as their country, its ideas as their guiding
opinion, its morality as the ultimate divinelaw. The
process is facilitated when the officer springs, as in
Pelissier's case, from among the peasantry, when
all he has of social dignity is derived from his span-
lette3, when his only notion of power is his military
grade, when the army is to him, in short, not so
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 necessarily 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 Pelissiee was
no fiend, but when he wanted 5'2,0 Arabs to come
out of the cave of Abd-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 hie 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 teat he was
violating the code of his own army, or even offend
ing against its opinion, and he would probably be
shocked ; but to talk of external opinion, or foreign
opinion, or the laws of humanity, 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 11s
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 wen
the death of others is not a question involving moral
considerations, but simply au 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 was not a cruel man.
THE "LONDON REVIEW" ON A PHILOSOPHER
ON STREET MUSIC.—Mr. Babbage has appeared in
print at last, and taken an awful literary revenge
on the organs, bagpipes, penny-whistles, and other
instruments of torture that for so many years have
interrupted his,studies. What Cicero said of philo-
sophy, Mr. Babbage can say of the hurdy-gurdy—
Pernoctat nobiscum peregrinatur rusticatur. It
knocks him up at night at the most unseasonable
hours, it follows him whenever he takes his walks
abroad, and he has before now met in the long
vacation a familiar London hurdy.gurdy very near
to Land's Eud. 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
- none before the police magistrate—in vain he
ha. ,
- o Sir G. Grey, The police have gene-
has written .t.- in accordance with that higher
rally been wanting, _ -Ps of them every where
law which always dispee_ The police magis-
except where they are needed. - symptter to
athised
-
trate, deserting his duty, has actually ~
with the grinders of organs. As for the h
o'
Sir G. Grey, it was posted about the middle c
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. Bebbage's popularity at the Home
Office :—" 1 confess that this event based all my
calculations. I had 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 zeal name is
legion. They go as high as brass bands ; they sink
as low- as penny trumpets. A workman inhabitine
an attic that commanded Mr. Babbage's garden, by
way of annoying Mr. Babbage, went lower still,
and took up a regular coarse of " penny ties:,
When he calm, home to dinner, it was his wont to
open his, window, teed to blew a " penny tin" tor
1
The spec aof half an hour in the direction of Mr.
BAebege ts gqrden. " I simply noted the fact in a
teameeee elaese-heals," zee:, e Mr, Fighb9ge. "ant then

employed the time he thought he was destroying i
taking my daily exercise." It is a terrible re.ffect.
tion to think that we are at the mercy of things EO,
insignificant as a " penny tin," and that one of the
most philosophical mathematicians living is obliged
to !Niter his hours of exercise to escape it. But Mr.
Babbage s rot surrounded with music that is in-
strumental only. He is equally experienced about
the human voice in its various forms. He dividee,

,he human voice into three heads, First, there
,he human voice shouting out objects for sale ; them

there is the human voice engaged in religious wor-
ship, in conjunction and in unison with the human
nose i then, lastly, there is psalm singing. All these
interfere with Mr. Babbage, and distract his

workmen while they ate engaged in attending to
the famous analytical engine. They drive him wild
with mental agony, and affect injuriously hie mode
of life. Three or four times a day Mr. B.bbage
rushes down stairs from the middle of the moat
complicated calculation that ever perplexed a senior
wrangler, to beg the organs and the human voices to
move of. Their triumph over his nerves and his
good nature aught, indeed, to rank as one of the
glories of St. Cecilia's day. Of the divine Cecilia—
the " inventress 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 i 5
that dislikes harmonies so constant and so noisy..
An astute magistrate once asked Mr. Babbage
whether he believed that a man's brains would be
injured by listening to a street organ. Mr. Bab-.
bage replied, " Certainly not ;" for that no mars
with a brain ever 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 end 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 raised to the peerage who care for brass
bands. The reason, we imagine, must be, that it is
only a parvenue peeress who is to blow her ONVII
trumpet. Nobody who came over with the Con+
quest ever encouraged street music. Thus we have on
one side gin-shops, and Mr. Babbage's visitors from.
the country, and Anonyms, and a growing Brum-
magem nobility. On the other are Virtue, and
Modesty, and the Analytical E,tigine, and the Plan-
tagenets cf Plantagenet Castle. Between such op-
posite lists 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 melodists.
The real moral to be drawn from annoyances to
which Mr. Babbage is subjected, is, how much
better it would be in laige tow ns if man was
an analytical engine. Mr. Babbace's calculating
machine has no sorrows ; no journeym, an or mechanic
has the power of putting it out by a constant per-
formance upon " peony tins." It i-frinds away
through Verdi and a hundred organs. ,(talians with
monkeys cracking nuts to slow music hi ive no effect
upon the quantity or the quality of its work. Its
internal organiaation enables it to calculate loga-
rithms totally irrespective of a piano next door,or the
German flute with window open across a e way: It
is therefore a great thing to be an analytic al engine.
Mr. Babbage tells us that during the h ist dozen
years of his life, at least one-fourth of his working
power has been destroyed by the nuisance of street
music. He thinks that 25 per cent. is a I arge in-
come-tax to be levied upon the brain of tt a intel-
lectual workers of the country for the sake of brass
bands. Mr. Babbage's brain is probably extraor-
dinarily sensitive; but it is certainly a loss tt ► science
that he should have to labour under such difliculties,
nor can we conceive a more real penance to a sensim
tive brain than the penance which the press tit regu-
lations of the police compel him to undergo..