The Sun.
London, England, 1864-07-07 00:00:00

STATE OF TRADE,

LEICESTER, July 6.—The hosiery trade continues active.
Most kinds of goods are in request, end the trade generally
remains healthy. In the rural districts there is as much
doing as there has been for some time past. The wool
market is quiet, but high prices are yet made. Yarns hold
very firm, spinners being well engaged to orders, There
are no hosiery stocks on hand.

NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE, sth.—The north winds are
keeping light ships back, and causing a scarcity of tonnage.
Coal freights to the Mediterranean still are good; but the
only increase of imports from that port to the Tyne is
E ;pert° grass, which is continued to be largely used in
papermaking. There is a great demand for coke and
manufacturing coals, and the price of coke keeps very
steady. Last week 36,629 tons of coals, 1,912 tons of coke,
7,775 cwt. of iron, and 2,716 cwt. alkali were exported from
the Tyne.

NOTTINORAM, 6th.—There is not so much doing this
week in lace goods. Cotton fabrics are a slow sale. The
disturbed state of the Continent checks the demand for
goods suitable for that market. There is not so much doing
in black silk laces, many of these goods being usually
finished for Germany. The silk quilling trade is still quiet.
Silk mechlins are without much change. There is lEss doing
in narrow silk edgings. A few buyers are in the town, but
their purchases are not extensive. A few reechlin quilling
orders are being finished ; in other respects the plain cotton
trade is dull. There is not much alteration in the hosiery
trade. A few home and foreign orders are in the market,
but the trade is on the whole quiet. Yarns are advancing

in price.

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLICS JOURNALS.

TIMES.--We are all speaking our minds one to
another with the most charming candour. The
blame is so great that everybody must take a
share. It's downright 'shabby to refuse. Mr.
Horsman perhaps excels us all in the art of distria
buting this commodity in such a way that neither
party shall feel itself praised by implication, "A
plague on both your houses," he says to both sides.
Government has not done its duty; it has made
splendid advances, and executed rapid movements
to the rear. It has taken up a treaty which
it ought to have reconsidered and recommended
for revision ; it has applied the torch to the
magazine of German ambition; it has encouraged
the Danes ; by its interference about Poland it
has animated the Poles, vexed Russia, committed
France, and, finally, exposed the latter to a
grievous humiliation. On the other hand, the Op-
position has neglected its duty, not of demanding
the production of all the documents, or supplying
a policy, but of proceeding upon what all the world
knew, of sounding the alarm, and of compelling her
Majesty's Ministers to be explicit end decided. As
it is, Parliament, says Mr Horstnan, has fully
shared all the blame, by tacitly adopting the
policy of Government. When one independent
member did happen to give notice of a motion
'midi would have brought matters to a point,
Mr Disraeli shut him up by the announcement
that he intended to move the previous question,
and that on the very ground that it was not expedient
either to take the responsibility of war or to endorse
the Ministerial efforts for peace. As for Austria
and Prussia, they are robbers and murderers ; and
Mr Horsmata is anxious that the palm of villainy
should not be awarded to Prussia with undue preci-
pitation. Austria he thinks the more designing,
doublefaced, and hypocritical of the two, France
and Russia ought not to have allowed any other
consideration to interfere with the simple and
straightforward fulfilment of a Treaty. Mr. Hors-
man does praise the Danes for their determination
and their gallantry ; but he praises them very
much as he would a bulldog which fought after it
had lost half its teeth and its legs had been broken.
But it candour be made easy, the absolute truth is
made difficuit by the fact that the whole ground is
haunted, as it were, by considerations uppermost in
the memory but forbidden to tile tongue. We know
not why there should be this degree of reserve on
the circumstance that the highest personage in the
realm is bound by every natural tie, except one, to
the cause of the Germans. By birth, by her own
marriage, by new alliances she is linked to the
German States and to that Prussia which has put
itself at the front of this offending. Mr. Horsman
delicately alludes to this as a source of weakness
to Government in its dealings both with Parlia-
ment and with the Continental Powers concerned
in the quarrel. On the other hand, the intimate
alliance of the heir apparent with the principal
victim of this unhappy war, while it has made us
more sensitive to injury and insult, has certainly
contributed no strength either to Ls or the Dane. In
both these cases the leaning is natural, inevitable,
and hardly a matter of praise or blame; and all we
can say is, that so long as we have a Sovereign
and Princes, and so long as they are men and
women, such personal feelings will occur among
the incidents of a public question. Again, while all
are freely discussing the various events which have
affected the Powers committed to the Treaty, it
seems almost to escape recollection that between
them there has been, Since the signature of the
Treaty, a war most costly in blood and treasure to
Russia, France, and England—most damaging to
the designs of the first, and without much glory to
the last ; while Austria, perhaps, suffers more than
her share of Russian resentment for her passive
part in that affair. But the circumstances which
more than all has not a place in the controversy
corresponding to its real importance in the story is
the fact that England has not only connived, but
rejoiced at the triumph of nationality, and the rend-
ing of an old Treaty bearing its own signature, in
the foundation of the new Peden monarchy at the
cost of Germany and the gain of France. If these
shadows of the past must have hung over the Con-
ference, confounding in one dull hue the rights and
wrongs of the present question, another spectre
obtrudes itself, not for the past, but for the unknown
future. Should Prussia obtain ail Denmark, who
then is to grieve over the extinction of that
Monarchy or the extinction of our own? Might not
France take the price of acquiescence, and may not
France and Prussia already feel a common interest at
the cost of weaker Powers P The possession of Den-
mark is worth to Prussia the cession of the Rhen-
isle provinces to France, and that would not throw
Europe entirely out of gear. The more one reviews
all the consideration; likely to effect the parties to
the treaty of 1852, the more one marvels how it ever
came to be signed at all, unless, indeed, it were to
suppose that they who signed it were paying an
empty homage to peace, and knew the Treaty would
never be worth more than the parchment it was
written on. But when Mr. Horseman has gone the
whole round, and arrived at the conclusion that, ill
as her Majesty's ministers have managed the affair,
the Opposition would have managed it worse, and
only show their candour, though not their sense of
political obligation, by confessing that they would
not go to war if admitted to power, does he not
bring us to the threshold of a higher and more sen-
sible conclusion—that we could not have done better
and are really powerless in the matter? It is best
to admit that we cannot do everything, and we
certainly do not hold the balance of European
•power. All the force that we could ever put on the
Continent would be a mere handful compared with
the millions now under arms on the Continent, and
ready to co-operate for almost any other cause in
preference to the eustentation of a decayed old
Monarchy. Mr. Horswau has little hope of all that
justice, wisdom, and courage can do, when the
prey is weak and the pack strong. He: looks for
no political remedy and points to no present
avenger. Oa the contrary, in the helplessness of
his just indignation he appeals to the course of
Providence, or to the mysterious laws of the moral
creation that make crime the seed of a fatal harvest
which the sower shall reap its due time. He sees
the robber band scouring the plains of Jutland ;
he hears the German hoof violating the soil to
which for all ages its very seclusion and the sim-
plicity of the race gave a sort of sanctity ; there
ring in his ear the felon shots that destroyed women
and children in an unarmed town; ho writhes like
an Englishman under the ignominy of having to
accept statements and excuses scarcely pretending
sincerity and truth, and, by a natural instinct, he
sees the shadows in the clouds of the wider and
more terrible catastrophes of which these are but
forerunners. All the oracles are in his favour. His
words are echoed from a thousand battlefields, a
thousand ruined cities, a thousand hardly contested
hills, a thousand monumental mounds, Never yet
did nation suffer, however unjustly, till it had com-
promised its own interest in the great moral law
and set the precedent of crime. Why is Germany
still dreary, still full of names rather than places,