The Sun.
London, England, 1862-07-11 00:00:00

THE SUN.
LONDON, FhIDAY. JULY 11, 1862.

Colonel KNOX would, perhaps, do well if he were
to think twice before again venturing in the British
House of Commons to champion the cause of the
Taepings. Some people may have imagined that
the Prime Minister spoke in terms of exaggeration
towards the close of the discussion which took place
the other night on the motion of the hon. gentleman
the member for Brighton. It is probable, however,
that they will regard these words of Lord PAL-
MERSTON as rather feebly expressive of horror and
loathing, if applied to the opposite side (that is
to the Chinese themselves), when a narrative,
which we publish in another part of our im-
pression of this evening, has been glanced at. It
is a narrative, the like of which has never,
perhaps, before now, appeared in print, Pray
Heaven, no other truthful record of the same
kind may ever again make its appearance. ! We
publish this dreadful
srecord of atrocities with re-
luctance. But we are constrained to do so from a
sense of solemn duty. Besides—it were impossible
now to gloss the truth over by an attempt at its
suppression. It is too late for any such mistaken
endeavour. Even supposing it to be still pos-
sible, we believe it would, if carried tont, have been
monstrously mistaken. Such an effort at conceal-
ment, however, is impossible, as it happens: the
appalling description given this evening in the
Columns of The Sun, having already, this morning,
appeared simultaneously in the columns of the ,
Daily ems and the Morning Advertiser. A glance
at it, We repeat, will be quite sufficient. Nay,
fur that matter we would almost defy any
man of common humanity, to say nothing of those
who are possessed of anything like sensibility, to
read what is there related, throughout. It is no
affectation to comment
upon those events thus. Our
words are faint and feeble as expressions of horror
and of indignation. It would require a vocabulary
like that of TIMoN, when cursing Athens in his
flight from it, to afford any °nett.
ue remotest notion
of the sense of abhorrence produced b a perusal
of even the merest fragments of such a narrative of
unspeakable abomination. Yet is the narrative the
simple and literal record of facts. And a record
of
facts penned, moreover, by the hand of an English-
man. It describes—this astounding document__
the treatment of the Taepings by the Chinese
not of the Chinese by the Taeplegs! Let not the
Prime Minister of England again taunt Colonel
XNox, or anyone else, in the House or out of it,
with venturing to advocate the cause of the Tae-
ping Revolutionists. Talk of the brutalities of these
Taepings They are absolutely as nothing to the
fiendish cruelties perpetrated upon them by the
very race that we English, forsooth, and our impe-
rial neighbours, the French, are expected to aid
and abet with our banded forces in trampling them
down and suppressing them in their capacity as
Revolutionists.

The only marvel is, while glancing with a shudder
down these records of infamy in the way of punish,
mint, the only wonder is, as we turn sickening
from the description, that there is no record there
also of the ground opening under the feet of their
perparators and swallowing them up. There—in
that Celestial Empire, in that Flowery land of
China—it is as If we were looking appalled down
one of the vistas of DANTE's Inferno. It is like
c,itaing a glimpse of " the abomination of desola-
., All that the evil minds and the more evil
hurts of human reptiles like the demons of the
First French Revolution ever imagined,3gined,
seems there
on that
chincf:e soil, among those Chinese people,
actually reaiised and enacted..
It isuesite extremity
tical illustration, at PP the prue-
the

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