The Sun.
London, England, 1863-08-11 00:00:00

a shipsereck is imminent. Mr. Chase's real power
is not in his bullion, nor yet in his surplus of esti-
mate over expenditure, but in his credit,—that vast,
illimitable credit reposed in him by the Congress, by
the army, by the coni:actors, and the whole Ameri-
can people. There never such a credit. It is a
power to issue any amount of pi:?er, some bearing
interest, some not. It is also a poss-er to pay no
debts, to keep the soldier without his till he
disappears, and to give the contractors Cjfi
cates of Indebtedness. As to the soldier, the
policy is sound, for as soon as he gets his pay
he deserts. He is faithful, because unpaid.
Much the same may be said of the contractors.
They get promises, which they can sell or raise
money upon. Meanwhile it is not the policy cf the
contractors to weaken Government or destroy its
credit. Much less is it their policy to quarrel with
Government. They have opened large factories;
they have built and bought largely ; they have
entered into engagements ; they are in the same
case as the Government and their cause. To stop is
to be ruined. They must go on or fall. There is no
such thing as standing still in their case. You
might as well attempt to stand still in the mid
traffic of Ludgate-hill. You must go either for-
wards or backwards. Indeed, it is questionable
whether there is any retreat possible in the case
under question. The Federal Government appears
to feel that it must go on, and that an attempt to
stop would be trying to stop a ship in a storm.
True it is that you can often keep your footing more
easily while in rapid movement than standing still
or walking cautiously. If you try to stand on a
sloping glacier, or walk across it, picking your
steps, you may soon find yourself performing a
terrible glissade. Your only way is to run across
with your utmost speed, and that is the feat which
the Federal Treasury is now attempting. It used
to be thought that the want of money must stop the
war at last. Some trifles were overlooked in this
anticipation. The necessity of having to pay im-
mensely more than you can possibly pay at the end
of an operation which you have the power of con -
tinuing will always be a great inducement to con-
tinue it, however ruinous in its final results. An
embarrassed merchant " keeps up the war," as the
phrase is, as long as he can, and allows no mark of
poverty to crop out. He keeps up his establishment,
gives entertainments, and lives just as usual, be-
cause he knows that as soon as he makes an altera-
tion his creditors will flock in. But the stimulus to
perseverance is more cogent and direct in America.
With peace comes the settlement. Credit then
must cease. The Secretary of the Treasury will
no longer be empowered to raise " greenbacks,"
and put off contractors with bills. Then there
will come the great question of questions, how
is the interest of the debt ever to be raised ?
By the time the war is ended, that interest,
on the most favourable supposition, will be twenty
millions sterling of our money, to be found, by
hook or by crook, every year. It is in vain that we
run over the items of our own revenue to find the
answer to this question. Will American Excise,
will Assessed Taxes and Stamps, will Income-Tax,
will Succession Duties, will the Post-office, will
even the Miscellaneous receipts, do much to meet
this immense annual demand P The only item that
rromises at all is that on which the Americans have
long leaned as their only resource, even in their
palmiest days. That one resource is the customs.
Even we in this sea-girt empire, without a mile of
land frontier to be guarded, without a river to be
watched, and with a population much larger than
that of the Federal States, do not venture to raise
more than about £20,000,000 a year on our customs.
Neither the temper of the nation nor circumstances
will permit larger receipts from this one source.
But how are the Federals ever to raise the sum,
when their northern and southern frontiers will
each be thousands of miles ? Nor are the people in
a state to consume foreign produce and manufac-
tures sufficient to produce such a revenue. But the
truth appears to be admitted. The tariff does not
work. In truth, Mr. Chase's Budget, besides being
a war Budget, besides having only to do with
various forms of extravagant borrowing and extra-
vagant expenditure, puts revenue out of the ques-
tion altogether. It is the grand balance-sheet of a
speculator who knows his profits are not even worth
recognition, and that the affair before him is a pitched
battle between liabilities and assets. When a
speculator is in this case he commonly fights as long
as he has a leg to stand upon. He only staves off
as long as he can the evil day, when he intends to
draw his last £5OO from the bank, and put himself
on board a Folkestone steamer. So when people
ask how long the war will last, we can only answer,
"As long as credit lasts ;" and that credit it is
undoubtedly the interest of the wealthiest people
and the most powerful classes to sustain as long as
substitutes for the draughting cost, say, less than
a thousand dollars.
POST.—The inquiry into the circumstances which
occasioned the recent accident on the Lynn and
Hunstanton Railway has resulted in showing what
the large majority of similar investigations prove,
namely, that by the exhibition of a very little
care a sacrifice of human life might have been
avoided. So long as railways exist, and carriages
are whirled across the country at speeds varying
between thirty and sixty miles an hour, so long
we must expect to hear of accidents which entail
destruction upon large numbers of those who adopt
that mode of travelling. In the course of events
occasional incidents are inevitable, and to their oc-
currence we must reconcile ourselves as best we can.
When, however, a mishap occurs which might with
ease have been guarded against and foreseen, we
have a right to complain that those precautions
were not taken which would have prevented its oc-
currence. Now, to this class of accidents we think
the recent catastrophe on the Lynn and Hunstanton
Railway is fairly referable. The mode by which
some two or three carriages of a train proceeding at
an average speed were upset and five persons killed,
though unusual, was not unparalleled ; and any
person who was acquainted with the nature of the
fences on the line near the spot where the accident
happened might with tolerable certainty have pre-
dicted that it would have taken place. Many years
since, when a Parliamentary committee was ap-
pointed to inquire and report upon the proposed
scheme of employing steam as a locomotive agent,
Robert Stephenson was asked what would be the
result if a train, whilst in motion, came in collision
with a cow which chanced to stray upon the line of
rails. The great engineer is reported to have
answered, "It would be a bad thing for the cow."
The question and the reply are, however, important
as indicating that before a single rail was laid down
an accident similar to that which happened a few
days since was foreseen. A few years back, some-
where in the North of England, a train was overact
in precisely the same manner as that on the Lynn
Railway, and several lives lost. Unusual, there-
fore, though the recent accident is, it is not unex-
ampled, and the evidence which was given on the
inquest places it beyond a doubt that, had anything
approaching to a careful supervision of this state of
the Lynn and Hunstanton Railway been main-
tained, the casualty which rendered that inquest
necessary would never have happened. In this,
however, as in so many previous instances, the rail-
way company and the public are wise after the event.
Into much of the evidence which was adduced
upon the inquest it is not necessary to enter. No
blame appears to be attributable to the railway
company so far as regards the management of the
train to which this accident happened. The dis-
tance betweenllunstanton and Lynn is about fifteen
miles, and on Monday evening, August 3, two trains
were despatched from the former to the latter place
at an interval of twenty minutes. The first reached
its destination without mishap, but the latter hav-
ing come in contact with a bullock which had
strayed upon the line, several of the carriages were
thrown off the rail and broken by the force of the
collision, and five persons killed and many others
severely injured. The verdict returned by the
jury is extremely comprehensive, and well deserves
the attention both of the public and of the Legisla-
lature. It embraces four distinct conclusions. The
railway company are convicted of gross negligence,
first for not making their fences sufficiently high
and strong to prevent cattle straying on the rail-
way from the adjoining pastures ; and secondly,
for not having in the late instance driven off the
line the bullock which occasioned the accident.
They are also blamed for the disgraceful condition
of the carriages which received the greatest amount
of injury when the collision took place; and
finally, the Government inspectors are pronounced
deserving of censure for having sanctioned with
their approval a line of railway so inadequately
fenced as that of the Great Eastern Company be-
tween Lynn and Hunstanton. In every particular
of this verdict we entirely concur.
HERALD.—The choice of Sir James Wilde as the
successor of Sir Cresswell Cresswell will not at first
be understood or appreciated by the public at large.
There were no special reasons, perhaps, why the
preference should have been accorded to him ;
and yet it is believed on all hands that his
performance of the duties attaching to the Probate
and Divorce Court will be satisfactory at once to
the bar and to suitors. Extravagant reports have
been current with regard to this particular judge-
ship. There was a talk—very irrational and yet
popular—about Chief Justice Erie receiving a
peerage upon condition that he should descend the
Judicial ladder and become the lictor of matrimonial
peer of the
life in Westminster Hall. This idea, we should
say, had its origin in America, where a favourite
novelist touchingly depicts an English
realm, in a barrister's robes, retained for the defence
of a prisoner uponaennialenbdicdtmt
oesnttaftber,, ftehlaotnyD.r. Rpahnigi..
ing to an opposite` extreme, our well-informed con -
was to mountswere the vacant bench , hut it turns
ei
mm, pr ae
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out that this early information was only too good,