The Sun.
London, England, 1862-02-08 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, SATURDAY EVENING, FEBRUARY' 8, 1862.

lash, and in refusing freedom of labour to the negro,
the South would protect the North, in its tariffs,
and in refusing free competition to British goods.
And these are the hypocrites who come to us cant-
ing about free trade!
The truth is Slavery is the one odious crime
which is dear to them as their life -blood. For dear
slavery's sake they would vote for prohibitive
Northern tariffs ; for beloved slavery they will vote
for free-trade with England. Anything they would
vote for, so that it did but gain artificial support
for slavery. Mr. YANCET in this document terms
the Northerns hypocrites, because Mr. LINCOLN
and the North have endeavoured to persuade Europe
that their cause is that of antislavery, while they
propose in America to adhere to a pro-slavery con-
stitution, and have in all their acts, and in their
resolutions of Congress, taken all possible pains to
show that they do not intend to free the slaves.
" The great object of the war, as now announced,
is not to free the slave, but to keep him in subjec-
tion to his owner;" at the same time the LINCOLN
Government aims to get control over the slave's
master. This is, with the exception of the last
remark, too true. But the North, after all,
has one important superiority to the South
—the one thing which, though these gentle-
men conceal it—caused their utterly unjusti-
fiable secession—the North is opposed to extending
the curse of slavery to soil yet free from it. The
restriction of slavery as an evil to its present limits
—the prohibition of its introduction into any of the

territories of the Union which may yet become
States—and the refusal to allow slaves to be brought
by their masters into the free States on the same
terms as their fourfooted living property ; —these are
the real grounds of secession, and Messrs. YANCEY,
ROST, and MANN are as hypocritical as the North
can be for suppressing this, and putting forward
free trade for their pretext.
Since the letter of the commissioners, things have
altered but little. The South has resisted longer,
and the North has longer attempted to conquer in
vain. Mr. LINCOLN has shown himself no more
hostile to a reunion with slavery than he was then,
and the South have certainly shown no disposition
to mitigate its hornrs. Money has failed in the North
as well as in the South ; but in relation to England
and to Europe the strife presents no altered features.
The blockade may be imperfect, but it is a reality ;
some generals may have headed the Executive in
their anti-slavery zeal; but the Executive has

purged itself of earnest antislavery men, and small
battles, useless victories, and harmless defeats are
continually recurring. We must therefore wait.
Want of success, or want of money, must soon
bring about negotiation in some shape; and Eng-
land will follow, not anticipate, events.

Tardy though the tributes proffered by the
Lords and Commons to the memory of the late
PRINCE CONSORT have necessarily been, they have
compensated for their delay by their magnificence.
Seldom has there been heard such a superb series
of eulogiums—heartfelt we do believe every one
of them—pronounced upon a Prince of these
realms, passing away in the flower of his life : the
encomiasts themselves being among the foremost
men of the age.
Lord PALMERSTON, the Earl of DERBY, Earl
RUSSELL, and Mr. DISRAELI—each in turn spoke
of the Royal Consort of Queen VICTORIA in
terms that but for their almost tearfal earnest-
ness, and but for the fact that they were
spoken of one then lying calmly in his sepulchre,
might have appeared to the more cynical the lan-
guage of extravagant adulation. Of this at least
we are satisfied, that 'no one would have more
eagerly deprecated these unstinted panegyrics
than the PRINCE CONSORT himself—he among
whose distinctive attributes was his graceful
modesty and his almost sublime self-abnegation in
the laborious assiduity of his life, as the comfort and
support of his Queen-wife in all the State anxieties
incident to her supreme position as a Constitutional
Sovereign. Before, the first day's sitting of the
Legislature had even commenced, before the chosen
proposer and seconder of the Address in answer
to the gracious Speech from the Throne in the
two Houses of Parliament had risen to discharge
their nervous duties by the delivery of their maiden
speeches, we felt satisfied that some incidental
allusion would be made, in one house or
the other, to the noble lines penned in
homage to the fair fame of Prince ALBERT—
" ALBERT the Good "—by the Poet Laureate. In
this expectation we were not disappointed. Lord
DUFFERIN closed his commendations of that lofty
and eminently beautiful career by echoing those
accumulated benedictions upon the widowed
monarch with which Mr. TENNYSON ends his
affecting " Dedication." The meaning of all these
impetuous and almost impassioned tributes to the
Prince, now that he has suddenly passed away
from the midst of us—

Not making his high place the lawless perch
Of wing'd ambitions, nor a vantage-ground
For pleasure; but thro' all this tract of years
Wearing the white flower of a blameless life,
Before a thousand peering littlenesses,
In that fierce light which beats upon a throne,
And blackens every blot;
—the full meaning of all these abounding panegyrics
upon the Prince's memory—we take to have been
most happily expressed in those simple and truthful
words of ALFRED TENNYSON in which, with a
world of pathos in every melodious syllable, he
writes—

We have lost him : he is gone

We know him now :
Adding to this—

. . . all narrow jealousies
Are silent; and we see him as he moved,
How modest, kindly, all-accomplish'd, wise.

It is the fact of that o'er late and even posthumous
d'4,,, recogniti khe nobility and the resplendent worth
of this exal ,personage—" a Prince indeed !"
. ..
Nt. that explains t epth of emotion, of an emotion
half love, half gi. . de, all admiration, prompting
every earnest word, ieln or spoken, of the Royal
Consort of VICTORIA 'since moment of his
demise, when—. 'O-.4.; f

Commingled with the gloom of imnillient war,
The shadows of his loss moved like e 31450 -
Darkening the world." is. "I
Through all these eloquent tributes to the departed
Prince, there is manifest, moreover, such a blend-
ing of appreciation for his excellence- with loyal
devotion for the widowed QUEEN, as cannot but
have yielded to the latter from first to Iv'
exquisite sense of consolation. Her MA,
knows full well by this time in very trutl
deed that her august husband has not lived
for his family or for his adopted country,
rectly even, it may be said, for all Christer
Premature (as it appears to us mortals) t
his death—his life at its completed round
recognised by us, one and all, as having bei
far as human fallibility could admit of an;
being, all but perfect ! It is seen now in
orbicular completeness. It is' lovicl.l and re\
by a free people, as pure and earnest throughk
An eminently laborious life it was—a life
up for the most part of the discharge of e)
duties earnestly. And it is the. memory
these incontrovertible facts that in a measure
sanctifies with truth and feeling, exitogiums .that
must otherwise have palled upon the national