The Sun.
London, England, 1862-10-23 00:00:00

"PUNCH" AND THE CA.RDINAL.

Our humorous contemporary has hit it this week.
Mr. Punch, to do him justice, is a ♦ery religious
man. His hump 's, we almost imagine, a bump of
veneration. We do not recollect, in his long career,
a single sentence, or a single wood-cut, exhibiting
the slightest tendency even to smile at religion.
With all his mirth, drollery, caricature, lampoon-
ing, joking, jesting, and so forth—he never sees a
laughter-provoking side in religion. We have often
been struck with this. We have wondered how by no
possibility, religious matters never move him to
a laugh. Mr. Punch must have a very serious side
to his inner man. But Mr. Punch does laugh him-
self and makes us all laugh with him, at counterfeits
of religion. When a " worldly Wiseman" tries to
talk in the language of religion—when a man who
should be a meek Christian bishop sets up for a
temporal prince, and plagues Italy and all Europe
with his non possurnus, and his curses—why, Mr.
Punch does religion the good service of making
ludicrous those who would make the sacred thing
itself ludicrous. Ever since England was England
we have nad this spirit among us. Our Wickliffe,
and a host of followers, Catholics as they were, were
not Papists; and the Holy Father got pretty well
shown up by his children—wicked Hams as they
were ! And now to these last evil days, if Popes, and
Cardinals, and Anglican bishops play the fool at the
expense of religion, Mr. Punch, therein religions'
best friend, straightway puts the fool's-cap on them.
Long may he live to do so. Cardinal Wiseman may
see to a shade, this week, what every real English-
man, be he Catholic or Protestant, thinks of his
canting pastoral. He will learn that he cannot
drive past his " dear lambs" engaged in loading
their bludgeons, and using their bludgeons, and
afterwards write whining oily letters to those whom
he did not quiet at the time, without incuring uni-
versal contempt. What all Englishmen do think
of this pastor is that he was the shepherd who piped
to the Pope's lambs while playing the Break-head
Dance at the Garibaldi mound.

The West Africa Company (whose prospectus
will be found in our advertising columns), with a
capital of £250,000, in shares of £lO each, intro-
duces itself to the public at a very opportune mo
ment. The object of the company is to establish
trading stations, factories, and depots on the coast
of Western Africa, for the purpose of collecting and
shipping the valuable products with which the in-
terior of the country abounds. The company also
propose to introduce machinery for the preparation
of the cotton raised in that part of the world
for the European markets, for which a very
large revenue may be most certainly anticipated.
The officers of the Niger expedition, and also Dr.
Livingstone and other African travellers, state that
indigenous cotton is growing in abundance through-
out vast districts, covering many thousand miles of
territory in Africa, and all that is required to make
it useful to Europeans is buyers on the spot, who
will give the natives that which they require—

namely, manufactured articles—in exchange for
that which is now almost beyond price in the Lon-
don market. The promoters of the company are
all excellent men of business, and they may safe`y
calculate upon entire success. The company, no
doubt, will be the means of contributing towards
the total extinction of the foreign slave trade, as
nothing i 3 better calculated to attain that desired re-
sult as the full development of the resources of the
interior of Africa.

The traffic with France appears to be steadily in-
creasing. In the month of September 11,409 pas-
sengers landed at Boulogne from Folkestone and
London, and 12,776 embarked for England, making
a total passenger traffic of 24,185 or 5,422 more
than in the corresponding month of 1851. The
total passenger traffic in the first nine months of
1862 has amounted to 131,936 at Boulogne, and
108,634 at Calais, being a large increase at both
ports when compared with the corresponding period
of any previous year. This, it is considered, may
be ascribed quite as much to the abolition of pass-
ports and removal of most of the French Custom-
house restrictions as to the infhence of the Exhibi-
tion. The tidal service between London and Paris,
via Folkestone and Boulogne, has now been regu-
larly performed in nine hours and a half for some
months with great punctuality, and the services via
Dover and Calais have likewise been accelerated,
both in connexion with Paris and with Belgium and
Germany. The international goods traffic is also
increasing by
way of Boulogne, and there have now
been for several months daily cargo boats both to
Folkestone and London-bridge.

In the prison chaplain's report read at the Salford
hundred sessions yesterday, it is stated that "though tens
of thousands of our operatives have been reduced to poverty,
the fruitful cause at all times of crime, few of them compa.
ratively have had recourse to dishonest means to supply
their wants." The increase of committals of all classes in
the year was 742, Of the se 101 were debtors, and the
chaplain remarks that this difference between the crime of
a " year of famine"
plenty, is " in nowise remakable."
and that of recent years of comparative