The Sun.
London, England, 1862-12-18 00:00:00

LI7.E.RA7 U.RE.

.Tournal of a Mission to A ffghanistan in 1857, under
Major (now Colonel) Lumsden, with an Account
of the Country and People. By H. W. Bellew,
Medical Officer to the Mission, Smith, Elder,
and Co.
Although Affghanistan possesses many features
of interest, and is inhabited by a very peculiar
people, it is a country which, to the ordinary tourist,
may be considered inaccessible; not from difficulty
of transit, but from the savage nature of many of
its tribes and the jealousy of strangers entertained
by the dominant Aflgivn race. Descended un-
doubtedly from the Jews, they trace their pedigree
back to Saul ; they retain, although Mahommedans,
not only many of the distinctive customs of their
ancestors, but also their turbulent disposition and
impatience of authority which so eminently charac-
terised the chosen people. "A man who goes to
Hindostan acquires wealth, a man who goes to
Affghanistan loses his head,'' says a native pro-
verb, and that the author and his companions re-
turned unhurt must be attributed solely to the fact
of their having visited the country at the Amir
Dost Mahommed's express desire, and under a gua-
rantee for their safety, and even then they were
not permitted to enter the capital, but rested at
Kandahar under the protection of his son, the heir
apparent. The purpose for which the mission en-
tered the country was that of watching the pro-
gress of the Persian war, and transmitting informa-
tion respecting it to the Indan Government, the
Affghan Amir having requested aid in consequence
of his frontier appearing in danger. Shortly after
the arrival of the mission, however, the Persian
war concluded, but the Indian mutiny broke out,
and they therefore remained until it was quelled ;
and the influence of Major Lumsden appears to
have been of no slight service in restraining the
Affghans from taking advantage of the opportunity
to attack the British territory, which they were
strongly disposed to do. Although the author's
observation of the country was restricted to
what he saw on the journey to and from
Kandahar, his excursions round that city
being very limited in extent, he nevertheless,
from the nature of his profession, came very exten-
sively in contact with the people, and had abun-
dant opportunity of studying their manners and
disposition, and the conclusions at which hecarrived
are by no means favourable. Oppression he found
not the exception, but the rule. The common people
look upon burglary as an honourable and legiti-
mate occupation, and the ill-paid and undisciplined
soldiery take every opportunity to rob the peasants ;
order there is none, and filth and disease abound.
Apart, then, from its value as a record of Affghan
life, the work is valuable as showing the result of
Asiatic rule, though it must be admitted that it
assumes, under the Affghans, its worst form.
During his stay in Kandahar Mr. Bellew dili-
gently studied the few native works he could
meet with which threw light upon Affghan his-
tory; be also describes, at length, the natural
productions and resources of the country, and the
volume, which contain a number of illustrations,
is a valuable addition to our knowledge of that
remote district of India.

SMITH, ELDER, AND CO.'S CHILDREN'S
BOOKS.
Tuflonybo's Journey_ in Search of Ogres. By
Holme Lee.
We have here a fairy tale, written in a matter of
fact stye, but displaying considerable power of
fancy. The Tuflongbo's birth, childhood, and edu-
cation are described. We are told how he resisted
the seductions of the Salamanders and the Ondines ;
and how, having started on his journey, he escaped,
with his companions, the clutches of the ferocious
Ogre Gulmalog ; rescued from imminent danger
the pusillanimous Ogre Clickaclop, outwitteed cer-
tain deceitful Griffins, and finally, his labours
done, departed to join his fairy parents in the
realm of Shadowland.

Stones of Old; or, Bible Narratives, suited to
the capacity of young children—first series, Old
Testament.—Second series, New Testament, By
Catherine Hadley. The nature of these two
volumes is sufficiently indicated by the title. They
are nicely got up, contain various engravings, and
parents will find them valuable.
Children's Sayings ; or, Life at Home. By Cathe-
rine Hadley. To assist in training up children in
the way they should go, the author has collected a
number of those wilful words in which the juvenile
nature is wont to indulge, and has written a short
tale illustrative of the ill effects of each. The in-
tention is good, and the style is clear and simple.

THE WOOD ANT.—This insect, which may be
known by its large size and reddish thorax, is one of the
stingless ants, though it is quite as formidable an antagonist
as the species which possess those sharp and envenomed
darts. For, thoughthe wood-ant has no sting, it yet has a
store of poison, and can use its venomous powers efectively,
though in a more roundabout manner than is adopted by the
stingbearers. It is a most fierce and determined creature, the
sense of fear seeming to have been wholly omitted from its
composition. It will attack anything and any body without
the least hesitation, and possesses all the courage without the
cunning exhibited by the Lilliputians in their memorable
tnta thatin' but a moving world ; and yet
will nut attack a man, if it
attack on the Man Mountain. Fora man is to the wood-ant
tnhoetroe is nlynaot a singlemovingmaonu
0
fancies him to be in too close proximity to its residence.
Urged e
rt
ted skin, bites fiercely with its sharp and
calliper-shaped
and simultaneously bending its body so
e s ub y n
ps ro o m wonderful instinct, it makes at once for the
n ts
jaws,
as to bring the tip of the abdomen to bear upon the wound,
squirts a small drop of its poison into the cavity, producing
for the time a sharp and painful smarting sensation. The
pain, however, is very transient, although, at the mo ment
it is inflicted, the pang is quite as severe as that inflicted by
the sting of a wasp.—Once a W.

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THE SUN.
LONDON, TITURSDAY, DEC. 18, 1862.

We must confess our surprise that some of our
pro-Southern contemporaries and their correspon-
dents should affirm that had Mr. LINCOLN'S pre-
sent compensation scheme been offered at the be-
ginning, it would have averted the terrible war
which they all lament. Surely they forget both
facts, and the nature of slaveholders. Mr. LIN-
COLN did not enter upon office before the 4th of
March, 1861. By that time the State of South
Carolina (which began this mad work so early as
the 20th of December, in 1860), Mississippi, Ala-
bama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, seven
states in all, had already seceded, and on the
9th of February had published, after a five days'
session, their rebel Constitution at Montgomery.
SEWARD made, for that matter, a compromise ora-
tion, the Virginian delegates tried their skill in
vain, all kinds of conciliatory motions were made
in the Senate ; but to what purpose could they
be ? The leaders of the South had declared
eternal antagonism to the North. They declared
in express language, that the fundamental
views of the North and South, on slavery, were
irreconeileable ; the North, they said, regards it as
a sin and crime, and injurious to the body politic.
JEFFERSON, they said, and the founders of our Re-
public, knew no better, and hoped for the extinc-
tion of slavery. We, on the other hand, regard
slavery as a Divine institution; we regard the
absolute subordination of the inferior race to the
will of the superior race, as the latest and grandest
of social and political discoveries, we hold that
slave institutions ought to cover the earth, and re-
gard ourselves as exhibiting the noblest model of a
Republic—one in which a ruling race subjugates to
itself, for the mutual advantage of both, another
race destined by Providence to toil for it.
Let not the reader suppose there is a word of
exaggeration here. He will find almost the ipaissznia
verba we have employed, not only in the speeches
of Southern men, and in their official documents,
but in their elaborate octavo Defences, republished
by English booksellers. How, we may ask, would
such men have received any proposal which implied
that slavery was a thing to be got rid of, to be
regarded as an evil in the Great Republic ? Nothing
would have contented them but acknowledging
6141ery as the foundation of the whole Union, and the
right consequently of slaveholders to take their
slaves not
Free Btate:nly inte the territories, but into the
themselves,. as freely as a Northern
man might
take
with him his horses and cattle.
When comp,,„3:.
States, after the u was offered to the Border
'war had begun, and with all its
horrors before the
of slaves is, not onesmall as the proportion there
c'sf them accepted it. How
absurd, therefore, to imagine that the proposal now
made would have been treated
otherwise than with
supreme contempt.
But it is only to recollect for a moment the effect
of elaveholding on the possessors of slaee,,
natural Is their aversion to anything per
ceive to
ke
how
general emancipation of their slaves. We all kuow
and Mr. CUAS. DICKENS especially noted the
fact, when in America—that " of all earthly temp_
tations the abuse of irresponsible power is the most
The profits to be made out
difficult to be resisted."
of slaves are not so pleasant to the master
as the power to make a fdlow-man obey his will
unconditionally, at the peril of feeling the weight
of his wrath. It was so in our own West
Indies. The proprietors and mortgagees of
estates there, living in this country, were but too
thankful to fill their pockets with the compensation
they had never hoped for, and to find a fortune in
their bankrupt estates ; but the resident whites,
the attorneys and State agents who worked the

' estates, never could endure the measure which de-
prived them of the power to lash the "niggere
at their will for a word or a look. It is just the
same in the slave States of America. In their pub-
lished apologies we see how they loathe the idea
of the black man having any civil rights at all, any
power to punish the master who maltreated him,
beyond, at least, such power as the white mail
here possesses to punish the carter who villanously
maltreats an animal. The South are, indeed, the
aristocracy of America. But they are an aristo-
cracy separating themselves from their serfs by an
impassable line. The offspring of every black or
coloured woman, even though the blood of the aris-

tocrat flaws in his veins, is the absolute property of
his unnatural father, an article which he sells to
the best bidder, a part of his real or personal estate.
It is an abuse of language to apply the same word

to the English and the Southern aristocracy.
As to the position in which the offer now made
would have placed Mr. LINCOLN and the North
before the world, had Mr. LINCOLN laid it before
the rebels whom he found already shaped into
a rival republic, we fear it would not have done
them much good. The previous offer of compensa-
tion was only laughed at here by those who were
determined to see nothing right in the North. It
had indeed a grievous defect, which we pointed
out at the time, but this proposal has defects quite
as great. We suspect, in truth, that the real fault
which certain parties here dislike in it, is what

constitutes one of its chief merits. It is so mode-

rate, so just in the pecuniary sense, requiring lite-
rally no sacrifice on the part of any slaveholder,
that those who hate American political institutions
and the Union are galled exceedingly that the
North should expose the South before the world
as a race of men-stealers and men -dealers, whom
nothing will satisfy but the retention of their odious
tyranny.

That convict labour is a valuable commodity, we
cannot but recognise, even in the midst of all
our horror of garotting. The employment of the
hrute force, and of the mechanical skill, and of
the previously misapplied intelligence of our cri-
minal population, upon public works who is
there amongst us that fails to recognise as a tho-
roughly common sense proceeding ? The principle
is obviously right in two directions—benefitting the
felon and the community. That is to say, it affords
the felon the most substantial of all opportunities
for the restoration of his own character. It ob-
tains from his thews and sinews, from his dex-
terity, from his brain and nerves, a visible and
material advantage to the public, whose
laws and habits, whose morality and integrity
he has outraged. Upon the European Continent
many of these wretched creatures forgats —not ac-
tually chained to the oar in those floating hells the
Galleys, of which our old and now happily obsolete
Hulks were until a very few years ago the lumbering
imitations—are employed, as we know, in the pub-
lic streets in gangs, manacled together, clearing
away the dung, and performing other filthy and
menial offices. It is the merit of the carefully
organized system of which Sir JOSHUA JEBB is the
Originator, or at any rate the Organizer, that
larger benefits are (through its application to the
treatment of Felony) derived in the shape of actual
advantages to the general community from the em-
ployment of Convict Labour upon Public Works.
Latterly it has become a sort of fashion to
clamour down this system as erroneous. The
accursed brutality of the Ticket-of-Leave ruffians
—turned into Thugs in the twilit suburbs of our
metropolis—armed with brass knuckle-dusters and
knotted bludgeons—endangering the lives of her
MAJESTY'S lieges for the sake of the dirty
halfpence that may be found in their pockets when
reduced to a state of insensibility—these new
fangled atrocities of the Garotters have so clouded
the judgments of many in regard to the merits of
the system from whose exaggerated misappli-
cation the crimes of the Garotters have
emanated, that one might almost be led to imagine
that the whole panic-stricken community has sud-
denly become oblivious of that sufficiently plai❑
and solid fact—the Portland Breakwater.

Sir JOSHUA JEBB may very probably, like most
innovators, have carried out his system to the ex-
treme. That he apparently has done so would seem
to be clearly demonstrated by the mere circum-
stance of the existence of these Garotters. Yet—
allowing that—it must be none the less obvious to
any dispassionate observer, that the general public
has, by way of retaliation, rushed in turn, in the
opposite direction, blindly into an extreme.
To Sir JosauA—until recent events perhaps
awakened his eyes to the magnitude, at the very
least, of a doubt as to the efficiency of his system—
that system of his would appear to have been re-
garded as all good. To the general community just
now it would seem that the system is deemed to be
exactly the reverse, that is to say, also in two words,
all bad. The truth—as invariably happens to be the
case among disputants who rush to opposite ex-
tremes—lying all the while as nearly as possible ex-
actly midway.

Without the elaborate and masterly organisation
described in a very able report copied by us into
our impression of Tuesday from that morn-
ing's issue of our leading contemporary, without
the elaborate and masterly organisation visible any
day in the year, to any one who lists to go there
and see for himself, in the Great Convict Establish-
ment at Portland, we should probably have heard
nothing, have seen nothing, of perhaps the greatest
of all the Public Works of our age—the Portland
Breakwater. There, cheek by jowl, as it were,
with the Convict Prison, whose salubrity, and,
cleanliness, and comfort are so loudly and insen-
sately inveighed against (as—like the whole sys-
tem itself, of the character of which that large
and splendid establishment is the most conspicuous
of examples—all bad!) there, within can-
non shot of the Portland Convict Prison, is
its.palliative, its vindication, its justification, in
the Portland Breakwater. " The bane and anti-
dote" are, there, both of them, as visibly
before us as they were before CATo, is his dagger
and his scroll of the Platonic Philosophy ! Yonder
the Palace of Felonry Yonder shelving off into
the neighbouring sea the magnificent result pro-
duced by the wise application of Convict Labour
the Breakwater. Remembering that one offshoot
of his elaborate system, Sir JosrtuA JEBB's critics
would do well to pause before pronouncing
an unconditional sentence of reprobation
upon his certainly not all.-perfect but also,
it should be admitted, his not all imperfect
scheme of Convict Discipline. For ourse!ves, we
cannot but recognise in Sir JOSHUA JEBB a very
able
and gifted servant of the Crown and of the
voisvaniozaosft
Public, who having become impressed with a con-
trhuoctaiobtslolute excellence of a system of his
tem into a liobb;
'without let or hi
haansacventually turned that qs-
rllu onb
tbhye usual hazard of nadfrtaernealofnrgomraidniyng one,of hihass
those so mounted—the im-
minent risk of riding
hie Robby to Death.

Mr. COBDEN, in
speech at
his very interesting
Y much Miclhurst, undertook a service ver
needed—
the exposition to a rural audience, or What the great
Lancashire community really is. Sprung from the
neighbourhood in which he spoke, i3gving repur.