The Sun.
London, England, 1862-10-22 00:00:00

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THE SUN.
LONDON, WEDNESDAY, OCT. 22, 1862.

The contributions for the relief of the distress in
Lancashire are pouring in amain. Yesterday the
Lord Mayor received a sum of £lO,OOO sterling
towards that benevolent object. This magnificent
contribution being, however, but the first instal-
ment of a splendid subscription, to the amount of
£25.000 sterling, poured with a lavish hand into
the funds by the inhabitants of Bombay. A con-
tribution of £25,000, collected at a meeting of those
inhabitants of Bombay at a great gathering, pre-
sided over by his Excellency Sir BARTLE FIUME.
Who shall say, with facts like these before us, that
the British Empire is not one in feeling and in
spirit—that the populations of its most remote and
scattered possessions, differing in race, in religion, in
language, in manners and customs, are not bound
together by our all-embracing bond of sympathy P
The loyal and patriotic devotion to the interests of
the innocent sufferers in the old fatherland, from
the effects of the unnatural civil war so
long raging in the once United States of Ame-
rica : the profound and earnest sympathy
felt for the miseries of the unfortunate operatives
in the manufacturing districts in the north of Eng-
land—a sympathy, a devotion, manifested alike to
the West in Canada, to the East in Hindostan, to
the far off South in Australasia—augurs, in truth,
wonderfully for the preservation in its full and
complete integrity of that vast empire whose consti-
tuent portions are distributed far and wide over
the four quarters of the habitable globe! That
empire which, nevertheless, one of the most learned
and gifted among the very numerous body of the
Mr. SMITHS in England is strangely bent upon
breaking up altogether. Professor GOLDWIN
SMITH'S proposition, involving not alone the con-
cession of an absolute independence to gigantic ter-
ritories, like Hindostan, or the two Canadas, or that
noble group of colonies into which the fifth conti-
nent, the Antarctic continent of Australia, is
already parcelled, His notion actually going to
the length that lesser items—helping, however
moderately, to make up the grand sum
total of the British Empire—items such as
Gibraltar, and Malta and St. Helena, and so forth,
should be cast loose from our authority—and given
—to whom ? Gibraltar to Spain, of course—as a
conciliatory offering, the memory of which
must, Professor SMITH argues, bind the sym-
pathies of the Cabinet of Madrid everlastingly
with those of the Cabinet of St. James's. Malt a—
to what power ? Perhaps Professor SMITH, out of 1
the same conciliatory spirit, would suggest to our
imperial neighbour and ally, France. For, to
France, Malta belonged—no matter for how brief a
space—before ever it belonged to England. It
were idle to dream of resuscitating the long since
I dead and buried religious order of knighthood, the
kmstnaighetrs of St. John—appointing another Grand
at Vttoa.lord it over his band of preux chevaliers
Valetta, An attempt, that would be, not one
jot less of an
eanachronismpele alnner
ted
band
ofn d
x
athan
Knights
Middle)
dged itT
installation
betweener
ap
iar
again of a newly s
down at our Temple
Temple Bar and the River
away the lawyers now haul:vet.
replacing the present reverend and
respected Master
of the Temple by a new Thames—driving
Ing that locality, and
reverend and gallant
Master of the Knights Templars, Consent to the