The Sun.
London, England, 1862-02-04 00:00:00

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THE SUN.

LONDON, TUESDAY, FEB. 4, 1862.

At the eleventh hoursome of our representatives
are rendering up an account of their stewardship.
Their constituents had, no doubt, faith in the poli-
tical solvency of Mr. ROUPELL and Mr. ANGER-
STEIN, so that to pass the accounts of one session
two or three days before another began, was all in
good time. The past everyone knew, the future
was safe, and the whole affair in each case was no-
thing more than an affair of political conviviality.
Elected and electors like to see each other, to ask
and answer questions, even to have perhaps alittle
Ichaffing, and then to wind up with the stereotyped
resolution. Not one time in a hundred does amem-
ber encounter monitory resolutions, such as Mr.
HORSMAN knows all about at Stroud,—" Oh, he's
a jolly good fellow—and so are all of us"—is the
well-known glee for these occasions.
Metropolitan members, like all other speakers,
find it naturally impossible to keep on their legs
many minutes, now, without going off in their
thoughts and words to their English cousins across
the water. Both Mr ANGERSTEIN and Mr ROUPELL
found themselves in the course of the evening in
America, whither their audience evidently followed
them with an interest greater than that with which
they staid at home with them, over Law Reform,
Parliamentary Reform, Bankruptcy Reform, Con-
servative reaction, and all the topics suggested
by the dead and buried session. The two hon-
ourable members indicated shades of slight differ-
ence of opinion. Mr. ROUPELL is justly angry
with the North, though he had not a word to say
for the slaveholding South. Mr, ANGERSTEIN is
strongly impressed with the free trade policy of the
South as contrasted with the stringent protec-
tionist tariffs of the North; yet he too was no
Southerner. No Englishman can sympathise with
slaveholders, or dare show his sympathy in public
if he did feel it.
We see in the Lambeth and Greenwich audiences
and speakers what we shall be sure to find in the
House of Commons itself. A determination to ad-
here rigidly to our neutrality, a clear and unmis-
takeable anti-slavery feeling, and hence a disap-
pointment with the North, which seems almost
like hostility to it. It is, however, very far from
that. The North has been unfaithful to its posi-
tion and opportunities, and hence, though at this
time last year we were all in its favour, the feel-
ing of the whole country has very much changed
since. Mr. ROUPELL had some rather warm
Northerner amongst his hearers. When he observed
"they should do all in ther power to keep down
the natural indignation and disgust they felt at the
criminal course which the Americans were pursu-
ing, and wait for what he hoped would be a speedy
termination to their insane and wicked conflict."
(A voice exclaimed, " Which
side ?") Mr. Rou-

rELt went on—" No doubt it was difficult to say
on which side was the right, because they did not
know for what the Americans were fighting ?
No doubt, if the North had declared for the aboli-
tion of slavery, a large amount of sympathy would
have been felt in this country. A year ago he was
under the impression that the North would go in
for the abolition of slavery. But now it appeared
that they had offered to rescind many of the State
Acts which had provided for the safety of escaped
slaves, and probably they would be disposed to sur-
render every one of them. That was a question
in which Englishmen were only interested as spec-
tators, and as members of the great human family,
could but suffer when other members of the same

family suffered. It behoved them to exercise
patience, and to avoid interference, though there
were cries being uttered in different parts of the
country as to how long they were to regard an in-
efficient blockade."

Such struggles of hope that the North would yet
see and do its duty in regard to slavery, with the
facts of administrative hostility to any move against
it, would be found in any assembly of respectable
Englishmen. We wish to believe that events will
compel the North to make the war an anti-slavery
one; we see that Mr. LINCOLN and Mr. SEWARD
are ready to give the slaveholders any guarantee
for fugitive slave laws, and for the security of
slavery in the Slave States—and we are chilled.
When we think of the whole case, all is natural
enough. Mr. LINCOLN and the Republicans are
hearty Free soilers, but not anti-slavery men.
They are prepared to fight rather than allow
slavery to be extended into the United States terri-
tories, but they are as much prepared to fight in
resistance to what they, as a party, hate—" aboli-
tion." Mr. LINCOLN and the Free States are
resolutely anti-African. They would, like the
people of Kansas, if they could, legislate against
the entrance of persons of African descent into
their States at all. Mr. LINCOLN in his last Mes-
sage had the superlative folly to declare that a
wholesale deportation scheme must accompany any
proposal for emancipation. In truth the Republican
party feel not the slightest pity for negroes, they
have no sense of their rights, any more than slave-
holders themselves—they regard negroes simply
as a nuisance. Hence they have two principal ob-
jects—first they want to keep the negro nuisance
out of their territories—secondly, they want to con-
fine the negro nuisance to the present slave States ;
and should the war free the whole or a large portion
of the slaves, they wish to deport the negro nui-
sance—Florida they mention—aid to create a kind
of tropical Siberia to be peopled there, by those
who like the Asiatic Siberians have been unjustly
defrauded of their liberty.
Our speakers both of them adverted to the
blockade, expressing views the opposite to those of
Mr. MASSEY, though Mr. ROI/PELL was convinced
of the illegality of a blockade which was so ineffi-
ciently maintained. It is plain, however, that be
the consequences what they may, Englishmen will
-.lot consent to do wrong to relieve Lancashire. Mr.
ANGERSTEIN did but express the general sentiment
of the country, which we doubt not will also pre-
vail in Parliament by a large majority, when he
said, "that he trusted that the manufacturing dis-
tricts would not suffer, as had been antici-
pated, from a short supply of cotton ; but this
threatened evil had to some extent been pro-
ductive of good, as it had led to serious inquiry
relative to obtaining cotton from other than
American sources. The Government had paid
great attention to this subject as well as
the Manchester Chamber of Commerce and the Cot-
ton Supply Association, and he believed the result
would be that in a, very short time we should not
by any means be dependent upon America for cot-
ton, but it would be procured in large quantities
from India, the West Indies, Africa, and other
countries.

The Professor of Modern History in the Univer-
sity of Oxford, Mr. GOLDWIN SMITH, has within
the last few days put forth so extraordinary,
and as it also appears to us so extrava-
gant a proposition, that we cannot but hasten at
once to comment upon it as it deserves. Mr.
SMITH'S proposition, then, to begin with, is simply
this—that• England should with all convenient
despatch mismember her Empire. Britannia may
still rule the waves, but she must forthwith give
up her colonies. That is the perverse and eccentric
thesis wilfully selected by the Regius Professor of
History at Oxford, and persistently argued upon
by him from the beginning to the end of the chap-
ter. A chapter it is, in its way, the oddest and, in
some senses, the most irritating that could well be to
every clear-headed, earnest, and patriotic English-
man. It is fairly out-Benthaming BENTHAM. It
is carrying a reasonable proposition to the utter-
most extravagance. A capital specimen after its
kind, the letter is, in truth, of the reductio ad
absurdum. Strange it must seem to everyone, at
the very outset, that a man occupying the eminent
and responsible position which Mr. GOLDWIN
SMITH has won for himself, purely by the force of
his raro and cultivated intelligence, should—in-
structor of the Youth of the Nation though he is—
have arrived, deliberately, at so low an estimate of
the rank attained by England among the nations
of the civilised globe. His conviction, as to the
Decadence d'Angleterre, appears to be so much in
accordance with that ungratefully insisted upon,and
disgracefully promulgated by M. LEDRU ROLLIN
in his new and revised version of " Rollin's His-
tory," that we actually find this very cosmopolitan
Regius Professor of History, coolly maintaining
that we had better put the best face upon the
matter at once—(bad certainly must be the best if
this is all, forsooth, that can reasonably be hoped to
come of it I)—and that doing this, England should
quietly yield up, as soon as may be, not merely
little Archimedian resting-places, where she can
move the world whenever she pleases—such as the
Rock of Gibraltar or the little rocky island of
Malta—but immense possessions, like the two
Canadas, like Hindostan, like that grand fifth con-
tinent at
.our antipodes—Australasia. A cooler
proposition in its way could hardly have been set
forth had Sir CHARLES COLDSTREAM, for the nonce,
occupied the professorial chair for one night
only, by particular desire. It is the whim-
sicallest, Pococurante crochet that one could
very well have dreamt of, though sleeping the
most bewildering sleep of the veriest victim of hal-
lucinations. Reading VOLNEY in a just and philoso-
phic spirit we mayheretofore have come to the couclu-
sion that the Ruins of Empires ought to to expected
invariably to result in reason only from the destruc-
tive influence either of the lapse of Time or of the
arms of Man. A new light is now thrown, how-
ever, upon our meditations by the Regius Professor
of History at Oxford. The British Empire is to prove
the rule it seems, by becoming the one old prover-
bial exception. Having been laboriously built up
by the energies of successive races, by the blood,
and the heroism, and the genius, and the indomitable
resolut ion of whole generations, it is at last if we are
to subscribe to the logic of Mr. GOLDWIN SMITH'S
argument, it is at last—by a ridiculous anticlimax
—to ba shaken down abruptly like a child's house
of cards ! Never was there a more bizarre, or, for
that matter, we N‘ ill venture to assert distinctly, a