The Sun.
London, England, 1863-08-25 00:00:00

LATEST INTELLIGENCE.

(REUTER'S TELEGRAMS.)

THE POLISH INSURRECTION.
CRACOW, AUG, 25, 11.45 a.m.
Railway and telegraphic communication between
this city and Warsaw have been interrupted.
A rising of the peasantry has taken place in the
palatinate of Sandomir. The first engagement
between them and the Russian forces is 'said to
have already taken place at Jedlna, in the vicinity
of Radom.

Insurgent detachments, under Eminowicz and
Cwick, are hastening with reinforcements from
the Government of Lublin,

SPAIN,
THE SPANISH ELECTIONS.
MADRID, AUG. 24, Evening.
The Progressistas and Democrats have refused to
submit to the conditions imposed by the Govern-
ment, and have decided not to meet upon the 30th

inst.

THE CONGRESS AT MALINES.
(FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.)
MALINES, Aug. 22.
On arriving at the ball of the Congress yester-
day morning, I found that a general meeting was
being held, having begun at eleven, and that Pro-
fessor Perrin, of Louvain, had already spoken on
the social mission of charity. M. Cochin, late can-
didate for the representation of one of the Paris
arrondissements, was then addressing the meeting,
and his address seems, in the opinion of all, to have
been one of the most remarkable, if not the most
remarkable, of the whole Congress. He observed
that, while other assemblies of the kind were
satisfied with deliberating, this one should adopt
resolutions ; and he proposed to turn their attention
to four special works. The first he mentioned was
that of the Propagation of the Faith among infidel
nations, which made known the Gospel by martyr-
dom. He had lately read again the annals of the As-
sociation for the Propagation of the Faith, and had
found in it a most remarkable contrast with: the
writings of a man, whose recent publication had
saddened at once the learned and the religious
world. He (M. Cochin) had been led by it to
compare two letters written to a sister on
the brink of the grave ; the first was
dated from Syria, and congratulated the
dying woman upon her scepticism, and spoke
a good deal of the mysteries of Adonis and Byblos.
The other was addressed to Madlle. Am ea,: Ver-
nant, at her father's, and was dated but two years
back, " from my cage at Tonking." The writer re-
called to his sister their last interview, on the 26th
of February, when they parted with all fraternal
love, like St. Benedict and his sister ; and therefore
he deemed that his last letter was due to her. He
described his position, shut up in a wooden cage,
hedged in by the lances and swords of his keepers;
surrounded by groups of soldiers, playing at cards
and dice, while he penned those lines by the light
uf a dim lamp, awaiting his sentence to die on the
morrow. "lam to have my head cut off,"says the
intrepid mar:yr. "Weep with joy; thy brother is
to be crowned with the nimbus of martyrdom, and
the palm branch is to flourish eternally in his right
hand. My soul is to ascend to Heaven to behold
eternal beauty. But before this, it is needed that
the wheat be grown and the grapepressed out, that
I may become a bread and wine acceptable to the
Father of our family. I trust to be found worthy,
by the merits and kind love of Christ, and the
prayers of his Immaculate Mother, and begin
already the song
of triumph, as if I had already
conquered." The second resolution he would pro-
pose would be in favour of the abolition of sla-
very. He described to the assembly the suf-
ferings and degradation of seven millions of
baptised children of God, and called attention to
the fact that they were in the presence of one of the
sons (Air. Henry Wilberforce) of the illustrious man
who had been the means of emancipating all the
slaves in the British dominions. He attributed to
this the great grace which had brought three out
of his four sons into the pale of the Catholic Church;
and related en anecdote of the late Archdeacon
Wilberforce, who, wishing to make the poor rejoice
with him at his conversion, went to the Bishop of
Southwark to ask him to distribute a certain sum,
which, he said, was due by him for all the prayers
and masses the good bishop had said for him, The
bishop answered aim that it was true he had prayed
for him ; but that he attributed his having obtained
the grace of faith to the prayers of the guardian
angels of the many slaves liberated by his father's
exertions. He concluded by proposing to the Con-
gress to express also its sympathy for the two works
which relate to the well-being and instruction of
workmen. He did not call attention so much to
children and old men, as to the men in the ful
strength of life, who were the support of families
He ended by repeating Professor Perrin's words—
" Let us organise society anew with the virtues o,
old."

The meeting was then adjourned at about one

proceedings were opened by
o'clock.
E cbools of Belgium, by the
a rAe
pt
etrhtr o' proceedings tehee
Canon de Hearne, member of the Belgian Parlia-
ment. M. de Monge also presented a report of the
deliberations and the conclusions of the fourth sec-
tion, on Fine Arts, which opined that no exclusion
of any style should be made in Ecclesiastical Art.
Reports in the same sense were made by the Rev.
Mr. Braccsse, of Amsterdam, and the Rev. M. do
Proy ; the former, on Historical Literature and
Works of Fiction, and the latter on Music. M. de
Smet made a report, on behalf of the fifth section,
against the present state of the law in Belgium,
which forbids soldiers who have received their fur-
lough to marry until the expiration of their time of
service. M. Porseyn reported on the question of
clubs for Catholic young men, and proposed that
their members should be admitted into any similar
club whenever they left their own town.
At the conclusion of these reports M. Armand
Neut, editor of the Presse of Bruges, delivered the
long-threatened Flemish address, of which, I under-
stand, the drift to have been the beauties and
national importance of that delightful language.
His Eminence, CARDINAL WISEMAN, then went
up to the President's table, on the platform, and,
during an address of considerable length [it
occupied two hours in its deliverry], gave to
the assembly an historical and statistical account of
the progress and state of the Catholic Church in
England. It was, of course, still a great contrast
to what existed in Belgium, the greatness of which
was best evinced by such an assembly. However,
in England th© progress of Catholicity was admitted
both by friends and foes; and he gave an account
of it, dividing its history into the three periods
elapsing between the creation of the four Apostolic
Vicariates of England by Benedict XIV., and
Catholic Emancipation in 1829 ; between that and
rthe doublin
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uht e;loalnincudmbr of via
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e e
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d.ithen
1850. He spoke of the providential gradations
through which the Church had passed in England,
which by multiplying the centres of Episcopal
authority brought many localities more directly
developmentaw under
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religiousincreasetheirbishop,andCatholicthe
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population increased 12 per cent., the Catholic
noleemrghyer ofhad priestsinereased 36 per cent. In 1830 the
in
whereas it is now 1,242. England
In Len
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eb u 4
Church
h er3e4h,
had to encounter all the obstacles of the anti-
Catholic societies, and to struggle with very small
means against the wealthy proselytising organisa-
tion brought to bear against the children of the
Catholic poor. Moreover, land was excessively dear,
in London, and this wax serious difficulty in the
way of multiplying the number of churches re-
quired. So that Catholic churches which might be
considered as worthy to rank among the monumen:s

of the country should not be sought for in London
so much as in other dioceses. Yet the character of
the new churches did not disconnect them with the
ancient ones for all attentive observers. He had
heard since he was in Malines of a fact which illus-
trated this in a marked manner. At York, in the
very shade of the glorious old Minster which had
been raised of old by English Catholic hands, the
Catholics of the town had built a fine church with
the money given by the town as a price for their old
chapel whose site was needed, and with such sub-
scriptions as were added to that sum. At the
Assizes lately held there, the judge, who sat in the
court near it wished to see the church, and having
examined it, he said that it seemed to him as if the
old Minster had struck its roots underground and
then sprung up again from it to shoot into the new
church ; a fit emblem of what is taking place in Eng-
land with regard to the Catholic church in general.
But the weak point of its position at present was
the want of education of the children of the poor,
which, from the extraordinary proportion of poor
which Ireland contributed to the Catholic popu-
lation of England, it was impossible for the latter
to supply unassisted. Already a community of
Belgian nuns, under the direction of a Belgian
priest, had devoted itself to this work in one of the
poorest and most miserable districts of London, i e.,
Charles-street, Drury-lane. Every year, he was
happy to say, school accommodation for a thousand
children was added in his diocese ; but still it was
calculated that 17,000 Catholic children, at least,
never attended any school, or, if any, only now and
then some Protestant school. In France a society
was being formed for the support of Catholic schools
in London ; and, really, if foreigners did not assist
them for a time, he could not see how such a task
was to be adequately fulfilled. A large number of
Catholic foreigners were found in London, which
was not the case with other dioceses. Since No-
vember, 1862, a large church had been opened for
the Germans in Whitechapel; while during the
last spring, a large church, or basilica, had been
opened for the Italians in Hatton-wall; and its
underground crypt, which formed a chapel,
was used by a Polish priest from Posen
as a place of worship for his countrymen.
For the French-speaking Catholics, there was but
a small chapel in a quarter of the town which was
rather remote from the main group of French
settlers; but ground had fortunately and providen-
tially been procured and bought in the neighbour-
hood of Leicester-square, where and near which,
foreigners, and especially the French, mostly con-
gregate, and he hoped that, with the assistance of
benefactors a church would soon rise there, to be
served by French priests of the Marist order, among
whom a Flemish priest would always be found.
The surest sign of progress for Catholicity was, how-
ever, the conversions which had taken place and
were still going on. Not so much publicity wss
given to them as at first, as it had been found to
result in bringing on social persecution, but the
current of conversion had anything but stopped,
and now extended very much to the middle classes
and among professional men. He spoke of the many
good works of these converts, more than 42 new
churches having been built exclusively by them.
At the time of the restoration of the hierarchy,
although it brought no temporal advantage to Catho-
lics, the whole nation had been roused against them,
and had inflicted on them much pain and terror.
He was now happy to report that the good sense
and fair play of Englishmen, had, with time, made
them make ample amends to their Catholic country-
men for such a want of justice. His Eminence
then described how the various grievances of
Catholics were being or had been already done
away with ; and he paid a special compliment to
the venerable president of the Catholic poor school
committee, the Hon. Charles Langdale, whom he
compared to the President of the Congress, the
Baron de Gerlache. He alluded also to the founda-
tion and progress of reformatory and industrial
schools, and to the institution of chaplains in the
army and navy : beyond this, speaking more par-
ticularly of the Prison Ministers Act, as the last
instaiment of justice and equality given to Catholics
in England. He expressed, moreover, the hopes
which the committee of inquiry held in 1861 on
the state of Catholics in workhouse has given of an
early provision being made for them.
At the close of this speech of the Cardinal's,
which was listened to from first to last with marked
attention, being repeatedly interrupted with ap-
plause, and greeted at its close with a burst of accla-
mations, M. SCHOLVERT, a member of the Belgian
parliament, concluded the proceedings by a most
animated:speech, on religious liberty, or rather on the
wonderful effect of uniting religion and liberty, in
which he mentioned and quoted the Count de Mon-
talembert not less than six times, coram Pontifice.
And ended by instancing the United States of
America as a specimen of the thoroughly religious
national character produced by political liberty.
At seven o'clock in the evening, the Count de Mon-
talembert delivered another address on religious
liberty as existing in Belgium, and showing that
Catholicity had never been so cruelly persecuted as
by Protestant England and Revolutionary France.
He stigmatised Renan as " Ce protégé de Cmsar,"
giving the true key to the importance attached to
that writer's recent work against our blessed
Saviour.

After M. de Montalembert's long and interesting
discourse, Poland had again the misfortune of being
inopportunely put forth for commiseration to a
wearied audience, by the Rev. P. Lescccur, of the
Paris Oratorians, and so ended oar day's work.

L'Opinion Nationale of to-day remarks in re-
gard to the speech of his Eminence—briefly referred
to above by our correspondent—" Cardinal Wiseman
in his address on Friday at Malines gave a sharp
lesson to the ultramontane clergy in general. He
showed that he himself was in no way disposed to
condemn or to reprobate, in the presence and hear-

ingot foreigners, either the men or the institutions
of his own country. He would in no way consent
to hurl anathemas against the Protestants or Pro-
testantism of England. He could in no respect
treat them as enemies; but, on the contrary, he
rendered justice to their loyalty and to their gene.
rosity.” In England," he said, "the heart of the
people is full of prEjudices in regard to the Catholic
religion ; but while we have confidence in the jus-
tice of our cause, we have also full confidence in the
justice of our fellow-citizens." " Behold !" ex-
claims L'Opinion Nationale, " noble language, in-
deed ! And language that contrasts strongly with
those words of anathema and with those cries of
fury with which some of the high ultramontane
prelates of Rome, of Italy, or of France deafen the
ears of modern society, at the very time when they
are babbling the most noisily about their rights,
their liberties, and their progress."

1 Galignani of to-day observes upon these same
proceedings :—" The most interesting incident in
the sitting of the Catholic Congress at Nialines was
an address by Cardinal Wiseman on the civil and
religious position of Catholics in England. His
Eminence rendered justice to the uprightness and
generosity of the English people, and spoke in
warm terms of the conduct of the Govern-
ment. Ho remarked on the prejudices existing in
England against the Roman Catholic religion, but
recognised the desire to act equitably towards that
form of worship, and mentioned the conduct of the
English Parliament in ordering an inquiry into the
claims of the Catholics, and the latter obtaining
justice from even the ultra-Protestant members of
the Parliamentary committee. A long address was
again delivered by Count ds Montalembert on
liberty of conscience and its practical form and
liberty of worship. A proposal to found a Roman
iiatholic academy was voted, and the creation of a
fund for carrying out the resolutions of the Con-
gress was decided on. 'rho establishment of a
society of the former members of the University
of Louvain was determined on, the seat of which is
to bo at Brussels. A proposal to invite the Catholic
press to abstain from giving reports of executions
was brought forward, but rejected, and a motion
for the better observance of the Sabbath was
adopted.

THE FRANKFORT CONGRESS.

FRANKFORT, Aug. 23, 3 p.m.

The Congress cf Princes has held no regular
sitting to-day,and there is but little political news