The Sun.
London, England, 1862-03-19 00:00:00

HIGH WATER AT LONDON BRIDGE.

DAY.—Morning, 3h. 53m.—Afternoon, 4h. 12ra
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THE WEATHER.—SUN OFFICE, MARCH 19, 1862.:
THERMOMETER, IN THE SHADE.
46—highest since noon yesterday.
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43—this day at noon.

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THE SUN.

LONDON, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 19, 1862,

Yesterday' we referred in our leading columns to '
the possible diminution of our tea supplies in con-
sequence of the spread of the TAEPING Revolution.
Almost immediately after our remarks had gone to
press, the reasonableness of our conjecture was
unhappily but too forcibly illustrated in the House
of Commons by the course of the discussion which
there took place a propos to Mr. GREGSON'S motion,
seconded by Mr. TURNER, in reference to the
perillons position occupied by British merchants at
all our various mercantile settlements along the
Chinese seaboard. Their perillons position at all
those settlements, but especially at this moment at
the chief settlement among them all, the Liverpool
of the Celestial Empire, the great outport of
Shanghai. Within view from the walls of Shang-
hai are the smoking ruins of the scattered towns
and villages inland desolated by the marauding
bands of the terrible TAEPING Insurgents. One
hundred thousand of these fearless rebels are there .
assembled together at a short distance from Shang- 1
hai, preparing to descend upon that great emporium I
of commerce. To do by it as they have already by
Ningpo, and by so many other towns, and cities
and villages, and hamlets of the Chinese Empire—
namely, to pass through it with fire and sword, to
pillage its property and massacre its inhabitants, in
old Scriptural phrase, throughout the whole of its
„Tilts, to sweep it with the besom of destruction. The
Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs compared the
evil don
par e by the Taepings throughout whatever
1 of the Chinese Empire their pitiless hordes
have hitherto traversed, to the effect produced by
that awful plague_ still familiar at intervals to the
inhabitants of
of a flight
of Orientaliocut lands the coming and going
According to Mr. LAYARD'S
vivid and picturesque description—when the locusts
approach, their advent is heralded by the sound as
of a mighty wind rising; then the whole surface of
the ground seems trembling and
as
din motion ; there
is a sense abroad for a whsleinnumerable
teeth champing and grinding without intermission,
ermission,
and then everything green over the whole country
side, every blade of grass, every leaf of shrub or
tree,
has mysteriously vanished. The comparisondrawn
thus by Mr. LAYARD, however, between the Locusts
and the Taepings appears to be rather flattering to
the latter than otherwise—judging of them at any
rate from the Minister's own description. The
horrors everywhere perpetrated by the Taepings
upon the unhappy and unarmed inhabitants of
China, if we are to credit the emphatic assurance
of Mr. LAYARD hin;seif, in other portions
of his speech uttered in regard to them
yesterday, from the floor of the House of Commons,
are only comparable, in truth, he tells us, to those
over the records of which the students of history
still
shudder with loathing and incredulity while
reading of the'm after the lapse of many centuries

—the horrors committed far and wide over the vast
expanse of the Roman Empire by the barbaric
hordes that successively laid it low—Goth s, and
Ostrogoths, and Visigoths, and Vandals. If We are
indeed to believe the deliberate and positive assur-
ance uttered in regard to the deeds done by the
Taeping Revolution during the last ten or a dozen
years, from its earliest outbreak in 1850 unti rhow,
the leader of it would almost seem to claim aistinc-

tion in the world's history as "The Scourge of the
Devil," just as ALARIC of old obtained the designa-
tion of " The Scourge of God." Mr. LAYARD takes
his survey of the doings of the Taepings, not as is
remembered to have been done once upon a time
in respect to the doings of the belligerents in the
Crimean Conflict—to wit, From the Mast Head of a
British Man of War! The hon. gentleman—now not
only member for the metropolitan borough of South-
wark, and, as Punch has it, permanently also
Member for Nineveh, but Under Secretary of State
for Foreign Affairs—scans the past and present
doings of the Taeping insurgents from that "'coign
of 'vantage"—so far as detailed, accurate and reliable
information is concerned—Office ! Surveying their
career from that serene and impartial altitude, he
seems to pronounce it—so far as ascertained facts
can in any way sustain him in pronouncing it—
during all these past twelve years of intermittent
rebellion against the constituted authorities—all
but diabolical. Whole tracks of country, he
tells us, have been laid waste by these
insurgents as utterly, we must repeat it, as by a
flight of locusts. During our own warlike opera-
tions there in China, our own officers and men have
passed through the ruins of what were generally
flourishing towns and villages, to find them so
absolutely and utterly destroyed by the revolu-
tions that the charred debris has proved to be only
the haunt here and there of the small wild game►
the hares and pheasants, of those Asiatic regions.
So long as we could in any way reasonably cherish

a hope of the kind,we have clung to the belief that at
least these marauding hordes ;of the Taeping Insur-
gents had amongst them some glimmering notions
of the truth of Christianity. After the disclosures
made last evening in the House of Commons by Mr.
LAYARD in his official capacity as her Britannic
MAJESTY'S Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, it
would be manifestly worse than idle seriously any
longer to entertain a belief in what is manifestly
proved now to be altogether erroneous. If holy
names are upon the lips of these Asiatic freebooters,
if sacred mysteries venerated by the veritable be-
lievers in Christianity amongst ourselves here in
Europe and elsewhei e, are babbled about by the Tae-
pin gs as within their comprehension and consecrated
to their homage—all is, according to the revela-
tions made by Mr. LAYARD in the unauthoritative
name of the British Government, literally and
actually but as a blasphemous Travestie of Truth.
Hitherto, that is to say, at least, until a compa-
ratively recent period, we " outer barbarians" from
the remotest corner of the eastern hemisphere have
had no kin d of plea whatever for interposition between
the Taeping Insurgents or Revolutionists, and the
Imperial Government against which they have
now during twelve years raised aloft the Standard
of Rebellion. So far as it in any way affected
our ourselves, it was nothing whatever to
us whether the Rebels or the Imperialists
should, in the end, prove victorious. The conflict
for ten yeafs at least of the interval, has been alto-
gether out of our ken. It has raged inland. We
have had nothing whatever to do with it—there
has not even been an alternative before us, until
very recently, for intervention or for non-interven-
tion. The Rebellion has, however, at last been so
far brought home to us that it is, as it were, knock-
ing loudly at the doors of our Settlements. Ningpo
has been devastated. Shanghai is now
threatened—imminently—with destruction. So
alarmingly is it threatened with capture
and desolation by the Taepings, that even
our merchants there have gone the costly
length in the way of increasing their local defences
of employing three thousand Chinese Navvies (if
the existence of such amphibious creatures can be
imagined) in rapidly digging out a canal connected
with the great river of the Yang-tse-Kiang, a canal
there, sufficiently broad and deep to admit of the
easy passage to and fro along it, of our British
gunboats.
What Mr. GREOSON asked yesterday in the
House of Commons has manifestly therefore not
been asked an hour too soon. And it has not
only been asked very distinctly and ex-
plicitly in the very nick of time, at pre-
cisely at the right moment—but it has forthwith
been answered quite succinctly and categorically,
and more than that (everybody will admit it, we
should think, even by this time Colonel SYKES him-
self) most satisfactorily. And this well-timed ques-
tion ? It is simply, of course, as to whether her
Britannic MAJESTY'S Government is prepared to
afford all possible protection at Shanghai and at our
other Chinese settlements to the lives and the pro-
perty of the British subjects there just now most
seriously imperilled. The answer accorded to this
inquiry has been, as every one might have been
certain it could only have been under the circum-
stances, instantly and unhesitatingly in the affirma-
tive. The stretched out arm of England will be
there in all its might—with a view to Vie effectual
protection of the lives and properties of British mer-
chants at Shanghai and at all the rest of our
Chinese settlements.

The King of PRUSSIA and VICTOR EMMANUEL
have both of them strained their rights as consti-
-1 tutional Monarchs to the uttermost, but the Prus-
sian King must be regarded as far the worse
offender. The Italian Monarch's chief fault lay in
being as much influenced by Court favourites as by
considerations of public policy. There were those
about him who hated the noble and honest RICASOLI
much as HERODIAS hated JOHN the BAPTIST, and
it is generally asserted, and with far too much pro-
bability, that the King was far too desirous of
pleasing them. The other consideration which
influenced him was doubtless the dislike of the
Emperor for RICASOLI, and his strong preference
of RATTAZZI ; and if it was personally unworthy
of VICTOR EMMANUEL to heed the whispers of
Court favourites in a political matter, it was politi-
cally unworthy of him to regard dig wishes
of a foreign potentate in the choice of his
Prime Minister. For this last we acknowledge
that there is some excuse, in the peculiar position
of the KING in regard to the EMPEROR. It is
USelcoa to act on the fiction that the King of ITALY
can yet contemn the k.erioua wishes of the Emperor
of FRANCE. The mode in which Italian freedom
was acquired, and the occupation of Rome, forbid
that. The unconstitutional act of the KING
re-
solveseove
lis itself into this, that, like our WILLIAM the
\
FOURTH, he dismissed his Minister without the
People's Representatives having shown in any
formal
had not found their dissatisfaction with him. RICA-
SOLI
used, indeed, as a pretext, the plea that he
found in the House all the support he
wished; still,
commanded a
tat 1 , large
constitutional
always have `3:10 a question of confidence, he could
KING had a fullni majority.
right,
i gThhte,
therefore, to hint to him
a wish for his resignation,
but he had hardly a moral •
right to do it.
Altogether different is it with the King of
,rilussiA. No necessity of paying some deference