The Sun.
London, England, 1865-12-13 00:00:00

THAMES.

HIGHWAY ROBBERY.—Dennis Manning, aged 28
years, Thomas Donovan, 32, and Margaret Hames,
18, were charged with highway robbery and violence.
The victim of the prisoners, who belong to a
dangerous class of thieves, was Charles Quantrick,
a seaman. He was passing along Cannon-street-
road, St. George-in-the-East, last night at half-past
9 o'clock, on his way to the Sailors' Home in Well-
street, when Manning came up on one side of him
and Donovan on the other. Manning said to him,
in a familar tone, " How are you ; how do you get
on ?" The sailor replied " Very well." Manning
said, " You don't know a person ; you don't recol-
lect my taking you to the Sailors' Home ?" He
was then attacked by the three prisoners and much
ill-used.

The prisoners, who were well-known thieves,
w ere committed for trial.

Mr. Galt, Finance Minister of Canada, said at
the 3l`Gee dinner that if Canada would be annexed to the
United States $300,000,000 would be its share of debt, and
he added that, with such a sum the people of Canada
could build the Intercolonial Railway, buy the whole of the
North-west Territory, and build the Pacific Railroad,
besides enlarging the canals, &c.
THE UNITED STATES MONITOR MONADNOCK.—
A correspondent of the London Standard, writing from St.
Thomas, gives a description of the monitor Monadnock, one
of the United States Pacific squadron. The writer says:
—" As this monitor is the first of her class which has
made a long sea voyage, it may not be uninteresting to
your readers to have a short description of her. As she
now lies in the harbour with her low, rusty sides, about
eighteen inches out of the water, funnel and two turrets,
she certainly does present a most curious appearance, and
one cannot but admire the ingenuity of the Yankees for
inventing such a ship, but also must allow them credit for
the pluck they display in trusting themselves on board of
her for a voyage of some 15,000 miles. She is about 250
feet long, 1,200 tons register, and has engines of about
250-horse power. She has stowage-room for 350 tons of
coal, of which, when steaming full speed at a rate of about
eight knots an hour, she burns from 22 to 25 tons per day.
I was informed that she has two screws. On going on board
you are most courteously received by the officers
_and al-
re,red tv Et, ever the whore—all:fp, when the first thing that
strikes one is the immense solidity of the whole concern.
You at once-perceivo that you are on board a war vessel;
which would not be easily destroyed either by the new
system of ramming,' or by good-sized guns. All along
the deck holes about 6 in. in diameter, covered with thick
glass, serve to give light down below, and some
can bo opened when in harbour for the sake of air.
The Monadnock has two revolving turrets, each con-
taining two 20-ton 15-inch guns, which throw a solid
steel or iron shot of 500 lb. three miles with an immense
charge. They are muzzle-loaders and not rifled. The car-
riage of each one weighs eight tons. They are certainly
fine pieces of ordnance. When in action the guns are
loaded inside the turrents, the rammers and sponges being
constructed on the telescopic principle ; then run outside
the porthole and fired. The gun at once recoils, and a
piece of solid iron, the same thickness as the turret, in-
stantly fills up the porthole, which both prevents the
smoke getting inside and keeps the shot and shell of the
enemy from entering. The turrets revolve, one in every
three minutes, and the tops of them are covered with
gratings of the strongest iron in order that any smoke
may escape that way. The inside of the turrets is lined
with a thick padding covered with canvas, so that no con-
cussion may be felt from shot striking it outside. I was
told on board that when the turret is struck by a ball the
concussion is so great that if any one is touching the iron-
work he is at once thrown down. On the top of the
turrets are placed the pilot-houses, from which the
Captain issues his orders and fights the ship. These
houses are of a great thickness, eleven inches I
was informed, and have small holes all round,
through which the commander takes his observations.
It is so arranged that the monitor's anchor is weighed
on the main deck, in order that at no time may any of
the crew be exposed to an enemy's fire. I noticed that
the ship was constructed of 1-inch iron plates, the sides of
these being composed of six of these plates rivetted
together. She bears the marks of her late engage-
ment at Fort Fisher, Wilmington, one 10-inch shot
having struck her, just at the top of her side, making
a good dent in the plates ; another struck her forward.
After going all over her, and seeing what an enormous
mass of iron and wood she is composed of, one cannot
really help being convinced that the Monadnock is an
ugly customer, tnd a vessel that would do great destruc-
tion amongst a fleet of wooden vessels; at the same time
I must acknowledge that she is not the ship ono would
choose to make a Transatlantic passage in."
THE LIVERPOOL AND NEW ORLEANS STEAMSHIP
COMPANY.—A public dinner was recently given in New
Orleans to Capt. J. Glover, of the steamer Alabama, of the
Liverpool and New Orleans lino. In response to the toast,
"The British Steamship Company," the host, Mr. Stone,
said "That the merchants of Liverpool and London, remark-
able for a sagacity to which England, is indebted for much of
her prosperity, should at this time, so soon after that ter-
rible civil commotion which wo have lately experienced,
consummate so long-delayed an enterprise, evinces a con-
fidence in the stability of our Government and the pros-
perity of our country, notwithstanding our changed system
of labor ; and, I may further add, of the practicability and
wisdom of the reorganising policy of our noble and magna-
nimous chief magistrate, which we are pleased to recog-
nise as the very highest compliment that could possibly
be paid to our Republican system. Yet, to England, more
than to any other nation, is the civilised world indebted
for its civilisation. Commerce not only developes the
resources of nations, but is a humanises, adjusting the
differences, and as our lamented Lincoln would have said,
hewing the rough edge and rounding the corners,' of
conflicting systems of government to man's necessities,
ennobling his nature and benefiting the world. This enter-
prise, the subject of this occasion, m ill do much to en-
courage the arts of peace, which, by God's sanction, let us
hope may never again be disturbed, and in a few short
years when old differences shall be forgotten, and old pre-
judices obliterated, the Crescent City,' now under a
cloud, shall merge brighter than a star in the firmament,
and become, as nature has destined she shall become,
second to no other on the American continent. May
Captain Glover live long and make many trips, and may
Mr. Hunter enjoy in green old ago a rich harvest, of which
this is but the breaking of the soil."
AN ENGLISH COTTON COMPANY FOR AMERICA.--A
Washington correspondent states that a 'number of Eng-
lish merchants and bankers are looking to the organisation
of a National Cotton Company. English capitalists who
have been trying to produce cotton in Egypt are making
constant inquiry as to the movements of the freedmen and
the cultivation of cotton lands in the South, evidently
desiring to invest their money where they can realize
better profits than they do in other lands. Mr. CONWAY,
late of the Freedmen's Bureau in Louisiana, has been re-
quested to proceed to Liverpool and London for the pur-
pose of giving such information as will secure the invest-
mentyn en t of Southern
n
freedmen o f Einngl
their
cultivationcapital, andthe
of cotton.plo IGeneraIHOWARD
favors this project, and thinks that by turning capital into
em
owAt
the South much can be done to settle difficulties now en-
countered in the operations of the Freedmen's Bureau.
The General will either assign Mr. CONWAY to the charge
of freedmen's schools in Kentucky and Tennessee, or
permit him to accept the mission to tngland.

The Mammoth Directory is'again true to its own
gigantic programme, and is in every essential
respect worthy of being still relied upon as at once
the key to the mystery and the clue through the
labyrinth of our stupendous metropolis. A city
having hundreds of miles of streets, and peopled
with over three millions of inhabitants, must needs
require for the mere enumeration of the names of
the heads of houses among those inhabitants, and of
the nos. of houses in those miles upon miles of
streets, squares, crescents, lanes, terraces, places,
rows, and what not—a, catalogue of enormous
dimensions. Such a catalogue it has, in point
of fact, long possessed, thanks to the
indefatigable exertions and the untiring
assiduity of the Messrs. Kelly, the projec-
tors, proprietors, revisers, editors (and all the rest
of it rolled into one firm) of The Post-office London
Directory. That Directory, in truth, is to a nicety
exactly of the same age as the century. The present
issue of it—for 1866—is marked upon its title-page
as " The Sixty-seventh annual publication." Look-
ing back to what it was at the outset, and regarding
it as it has now for some years past come to be,
we have all of us long become accustomed to note
in its regard how literally it has grown with the
growth of the vast city it more than anything
else that we could name, has helped the most vividly
to realise in its full immensity to the popular ima-
gination. Mapping out the contents of this enor-
mous accumulation of towns, villages, parishes, &c.,
called as a huge whole LONDON—the compilers of
Kelly's Directory have enabled the world at large to
form some adequate idea of the Brobdingnagian
dimensions of this the largest and most populous
capital upon the surface of the globe, by means of
its various important and comprehensive subdivi-
sions. Here, for example, is the monstrous sub-
division, or section, or department of the Directory
dedicated exclusively to the alphabetical, house by
house enumeration, of the STREETS—beginning with
Abbey Gardens, St. John's Wood, and ending with
Young Street, Kensington ! Here, again, is the
COMMERCIAL portion of the work, alphabetically
arranged, like all the other portions, and—so
arranged--leading off with Aaris and Company,
stock and sharebrokers, and closing the long round
of names with one Zweifel, a silk mercer. Fol-
lowing immediately upon this we have the
TRADES, under their several heads, comprehensively
enumerated marshalled by Academies and
tailing off with Zinc-merchants. " Law" and
" Court"—" City" and " Conveyance"—" Postal"
and " Parliamentary"—" Banking" and " As-
surance"—Here, too, are other departments of the
Directory, each of immense importance, and all of
them preceded, as by right in the order of precedence,
by the division of divisions in regard to London as
the metropolis of the British Empire, the su-
preme division, so to speak, coming under the
significant title of—OFFICIAL ! In other words, the
list of the whole mass of our administrators. together
with a duly subdivided record of the various de-
partments of the whole Governmental organization.
Here it is that in this alphabetical list of persons
holding situations of every kind under the Crown
in public offices, of any and every denomination,
our administrative workers are led off in this
purely arbitrary alphabetical arrangement, by
Abbiss, an Alderman, to be closed up by Zwinger, a
Bank of England clerk unattached. Chaoti-
cally confused together in a world of dingy
streets, jumbled together anyhow, though
London itself appears to be to every wayfarer pass-
ing through it—a guidebook as thoroughly well-
organised and systematised and parcelled out, name
by name, house by house, like this same wonderful
Post-office Directory, annually issuing from Bos-
well-court, St. Clement Danes, draws to light order
out of this otherwise bewildering confusion and con-
ducts us, clear-eyed and sure-footed, to any person or
to any locality we may be in search of among all these
stony-hearted worlds of London streets, and among
all these three millions and more making up this a wful
aggregate of the London population. As the
responsibilities devolving upon the compilers of the
work unceasingly increase and multiply from year
to year, in proportion with the steadily progressive
increase of London itself, and the equally steadily
progressive multiplication of its inhabitants—so do
their Cyclopian labours increase quite manifestly in
their ever-advancing and accumulating toil of revi-
sion. The corrections, besides being minute and in
almost microscopic detail, are brought down
to the latest possible period before publica-
tiod. Accuracy above all things being aimed at
evidently as the one paramount and most eagerly-
desired excellence, constantly held in view for attain-
ment by the compilers, at any cost or at any labour.
The result is as close an approximation to perfect
accuracy as is in any way practicable in the midst of
such an amazing mass of materials and materials,
moreover, that are more or less perpetually in fluctua-
tion. Altogether, this huge tome is a triumph of inge-
nuity, and one that is achieved only year after year
by the most diligent research, guided at every step
by a system of the most elaborate organization. It is
the hand-book of a giant city, and, naturally
enough, therefore, appears to be a book solely suited,
in its dimensions, for the hand of a giant.