The Sun.
London, England, 1862-05-28 00:00:00

sides, too many have no inclination to merit the
suffrages of tenants at will, or ten•pounders and
freemen, when they can now enforce them, or buy
them pretty cheap.

Lord PALMERSTON, whatever others might do,
was not the man to lose his temper. An attempt
to count out the House before the Ballot motion
came on, and while Mr. DILLWYN was speaking"
was obviously the chief stratagem on which the
old Whigs had relied—and failing that, they were
not prepared so soon after to beat Mr. BERKELEY
and Mr. &am Mr. BERKELEY, like a good
General, although well equipped, we doubt not
with his usual Ballot ammunition, thought
that would keep, and determined to come to the
vote at once—they had not answered his indeed
unanswerable arguments of last year and other
years, so he would take a vote on the old unanswered
argument. And the vote showed that eighty-three
members thought it worth while to come down and
support the bill, while only thirty-three cared to
oppose it. That much must at least be conceded
on behalf of the Ballot. Lord PALMERSTON had
not the good luck to be in time to say " No" to Mr.
BERKELEY; he was there, however, just in time
to vote with a smaller minority against a per-
missive Municipal Ballot Bill, which served
his purpose almost as well. Including Mr.
WYLD's bill, this is, we believe, the third
majority which has been obtained by the Ballot ;
and that it will in due time compel an effective
majority, one which shall force it through the
House of Peers, is as certain as that the people are
advancing in intelligence, and in consciousness of
their right to be able to give their electoral and
municipal votes without hazarding their social
comfort, or their pecuniary interests.

While our operatives in the manufacturing dis-
tricts are suffering severely from a lack of the raw
material consequent upon the closing of the
Southern ports by the Federal blockade—while
our population in the Fen Districts are suffering
again in their turn by reason of the late deplorable
floodings from the Wash and from the liumber_
while Ireland is tortured in parts because of a still
scattered and intermittent scarcity—an important
town and district in Holland have just now sus-
tained a calamity worse in some respects, because
less easily reparable, than any resulting from
either a lack of Cotton, of Food, or of Employment,
or even, be it said, from a temporary inundation.
Enschede, recently destroyed by fire, is now disco-
vered to be a mass of rains over seventeen-twentieths
of the area covered by it. Almost every portion of
the town thus consumed in one all-mastering con-
flagration having, moreover, been unhappily unin-
sured ! So that the 4,000 inhabitants who are thus,
" at one fell swoop," rendered homeless are, as a
matter of course, not only houseless, but also, in a
great measure, absolutely destitute. The spectacle
witnessed there just now in those melancholy
suburbs of Enschede must bear a resemblance—(of
course upon a miniature scale, and done into Dutch)
—to the spectacle witnessed upon the outskirts of
London now very nearly two hundred years ago,
that is in 1666, when the Great Fire of London,
beginning at Pudding-lane and ending at Pie-
corner, sang by DRYDEN and commemorated by the
" Monument," was dying out slowly over acres upon
acres of smouldering embers. The misery caused
by the recent conflagration at Enschede is upon a
scale of course almost insignificant by comparison,
but so far as it goes it is not a jot less bitter or disas-
trous of its kind than that more wide spread misery
which called even the voluptuous CHARLES from
his orgies at Whitehall to the end that he might
personally co-operate in the universal efforts then
made to alleviate it.
At Enschede it is true that there are but 4,000
souls who are sufferers from the late destructive
fire; but those 4,ooo—men,women, and children—are
sufferers to the extreme limits of the uttermost
destitution. They are homeless—their dwel-
lings having been completely destroyed. They are
penniless—all their goods and chattels without
exception having been swept away by the same
irresistible element that consumed their abodes.
During the conflagration, of course, many lives
were lost—now from suffocation, now from falling
rafters or masonry, now from some unpremeditated
auto-da-fe. We are commenting, therefore, merely
upon the condition of the actual survivors. And
already it is consolatory to know that the sympathy
excited in their regard is as earnest as it is wide-
spread. According to the last advices from Hol-
land, given in our impression of yesterday, as much
as 100,000 guilders had even then been poured into
the coffers of the Central Relief Committee from the
sub-committees organised promptly in all principal
towns and cities of the kingdom. What notoriously
tends to enhance the eagerness of the benevolent
in these humane endeavours to ameliorate
as effectually as possible the anguish caused
by this abrupt affliction to the unfortunate
population of the town thus all but totally de-
stroyed, is the knowledge that that population
is deprived en masse, not only of its homes and its
subsistence, but of the very means of gaining its
subsistence. It is satisfactory, to be sure, to know
at the same time for certain—as we do—that the
machinery employed in the manufactories lately re-
duced to ashes by this terrible conflagration at
Enschede was well ensured, by the wise forethought
of the owners, in the principal English Offices for
Fire Insurance. A happy circumstance no doubt
to the employers, but a very faint and remote con-
solation indeed to the employed. Time, to them, is
everything. And as surely as Rome was not built
in a day, so surely in like manner a reasonable inter-
val must elapse before the poor, destitute, houseless,
penniless, workless operatives of Enschede can have
the consolation of beholding that town rebuilt, the
great manufactories there reconstructed from base

ment to roof, new machinery again put together
therein, and themselves enrolled once more

as thrifty, zealous workmen in the old

favourite establishments. Before that happy time
Can come, it is a terrible ordeal that they will all
al
have to pass through as best they may. And con-
/36(1'1B of this, the sympathisers with them are
land ready,
more
Bending from the outlying districts of Hol-
especially in the immediate vicinity of
Enschede
itself, not merely money, but together
with that, creature comforts, as absolutely necessary
for existence as clotli
their regardnorthwards
ing and provisions. Turning
towards the borders of that
smouldering
mass of ruins, lately the busy and
-
thriving town of Ensched€, the
poverty-stricken
peasantry of Tipperary, the unemployed
operatives of Lancashire, the
a most ire_
others,
labouring population of Lincolnshire alf,
and swamped
may find ample reason enough, but
pressive and persuasive one also for hope and for
manly endurance. The remarkable calamity 'which
has just befallen a happy and flourishing town et
Holland will, at any rate, be a reminder to them at
once that their own sufferings ore not so •,try
exceptional, and that hero again—in the instant
and universal sympathy manifested upon the occa-

sion of any great public calamity—is another

affecting verification of the poet's dictum, that

" One touch of nature makes the whole world

kin." Aid, timely and sufficient aid, can never he
wanting at any of these dire emergencies—no matter
what the geographical position of the scene afflicted

by Any such sudden or inscrutable yisit4tiQn, Is it