The Sun.
London, England, 1863-09-01 00:00:00

THERMOMETER.

____________
This morning
This day at Two o'clock .. 62

Barometer-30.05.
Wind—S.- Westerly ; moderate, and fine.

447_ t
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ntr,

LONDON, TUESDAY, SEPT. 1, 1863

It was, from every point of view, the noblest
incident in the last French Revolution, the Revo-
lution of February, 1848, when M. DE TAMAR-
TINE, iu front of the Hotel de Ville, proclaimed the
abolition of the punishment of death for political
offences. The repudiation by that same poet-orator
of the red flag of the Ultra-Democrats was, it is
true, a magnificent improvisation ! That red flag
which, as the Revolutionary Leader then exclaimed
in a sudden and ever-memorable burst of elo-
quence, and at the imminent hazard of his life
while uttering the words, that red flag which
had made merely the tour of the Champ
de Mars trailed in the blood of the peo
ple, while the tricolour had been making
on the contrary, the tour of all Europe with the
glory and the liberties of France meaning by the
latter, not Imperialism (of that we may be certain),
but instead of Imperialism, the pick of the doctrines
01789, the noblest and sublimest of the political
principles set forth by the Great French Revolution.
Another resplendent incident redeeming much that
was culpable in the outbreak of February, was the
Lynch-law applied, through an instinct of recti-
tude, by the populace of Paris to those who would
fain have desecrated the national movement by
the despicable meanness of theft. But incom-
parably beyond all other incidents of the time,
even those the most signally evidencing the
valour of individual Leaders like LAMARTINE,
or the magninfinity of that general multitude
he was leading by the beck of his finger or the

tone of his voice--was the incident already parti-
cularised—the proclamation by that Poet Statesman
of the abolition,thenceforth and for ever in France,
of the Punishment of Death for Political Offences.
If it but might be, in any way, possible that, from
the utterance of kindred accents, only the other
day at Malines, bythe lips of CHARLES, the Count
DE MONTALEMBERT,:there might cease the passions
of fanaticism, of bigotry, of that cruel and dreadful
zeal which has before now, at intervals, so often
during the past centuries, desecrated the holy name
of Relgion, by ott traging the divine and beneficent
doctrines of the Founder of Christianity! Nobler
accents than those we are about to quote as having
been so very rectutly uttered by the Count DE
MONTALEMBERT, in the.magnificent oration deli-
vered by him to, his assembled co-religionists at
Malines, nobler,, gentler, bolder, loftier accents
than these have hardly been uttered in our time.
" Can one at the present day," asked MONTALEM-
BERT, " demand liberty for truth—that is to say,
for one's self (sin co every one, if he be sincere, be-
lieves himself a ft )Ilower of the truth), and refuse it
to error—that is do say, to those who do not think
as we do ?" A nd, his own question, he en-
s wered at onto and unhesitatingly. " I dis-
tinctly reply, No!' " Pausing immediately, how-
ever, upon his v tterance of that monosyllable, he
added,in the spirit of FENELON, " Here, I well know,
incedo per igner.., and I hasten once more to declare
that I have no F rretens;on beyond that of expressing
an individual o pinion ; I bow before all the texts,
all the canons t bat may be cited to me, and not one
of them will I contest or discuss." So that it is a
Churchman amongst Churchm an,a believer amongst
believers, an nit ramontane even amongst ultramon-
tanes, who is spe eking what we are about to quote
as having fallen but the other day (in the presence of
the eternities, we might say but the other instant)
from the lips of the Count DE MONTALEMBERT !
And what were those words—with these
humble prostrations, beforehand, before the canons
what were those words he uttered, in
the hearing of four thousand souls at Malines,
words afterwards to be echoed through the
whispering galleews of the Press throughout all
Christendom?—." I cannot," he said," today repress
the conviction which reigns in my conscience and
in my heart. I coamot refrain from expressing it
after having read during the last twelve years the
attempts to rehabilitate men and things which
nobody in my youth, nobody among the Catholics,
dreamt of defending." Mark well, now, what
follows !—" I declare, then, that I feel an invin-
cible horror for all tortures and violence inflicted
upon humanity under the pretext of Serving or de-
fending religion. The faggots lighted by a Catholic
hand inspire me with as much horror as the scaffolds
on which the Protestants immolated so many
martyrs. (SenSation and applause.) The gag forced
into the mouth of whomsoever lifts up his voice with
a piire heart to preach his faith—that gag I feel be-
tween my own lips, and 'shudder with pain. (Sen.
saion.) When I. evoke in imagination the glorious
martvrs of the 'Liberty of Catholic consciences ; when
I think of THOMAS MORE and the other victims of
the founder of the Anglican Church ; of all those
pious Jesuits who, with a heroism so modest and
undaunted, beetled cruel England with their blood;
of the Francismns of Gorcum ; of the innumerable
priests who aeeonded the steps of the guillotine or
rotted in the pontoons of Rochefort ; of La Vendee
butchered, of Leeland starved, of Poland agonising,
I will not endure that the blessed privilege,
the holy joy, of admiring and invoking such martyrs
should ever be' troubled or tarnished by the neces-
sity of approving or excusing other cruelties and
other crimes, buried though these may be in the en-
sanguined obscurity of the past. The Spanish in.