The Sun.
London, England, 1862-10-04 00:00:00

THE iSEIN, LONDON SATURDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 4, 21862.

the Indian army. It is now 70,000 men. Would
not 60,000 do ?_a million a year might be thus
saved. Not just yet, says Mr. LAING. For some
time to come the generation which has seen the
mutiny ought to see that an insurrection is perfectly
hopeless. There are still unquiet spirits who ought
to be exposed to no temptation. He thought Eng-
land ought, in fairness, to bear more of the charge
of the Home Depot of the Indian Army, but then
they should be met by the Chancellor of the Ex-
chequer with the POPE'S non possurnus. The only
thing he could think of was an English endorse-
ment of the Indian guarantee on the railway
capital, by which they might enable India to obtain
capital at 4 per cent., which now costs it 5 percent.
The risk he considered nothing, and the capital was
all English. He did not press this scheme ; neither
did he seem very sure that cotton could be regarded
as an exceptional case, but he knew of no other.
We fear there is little hope for the Lancashire
gentlemen. They will be handicapped with a five
per cent. probably yet fur so me time in the race
with Bombay. We have little doubt that they
will, nevertheless, win. What is wanted, is for
them to become such purchasers of the raw material
in India itself as shall put them and the Indian
factories on a fairer level. The two freights, and
even the lower wages of less efficient hands, they
will easily meet by their energy and skill.

The fuller details of battles generally clear up
but slowly the schemes of the generals. We get
some conception of individual charges, repulses, and
struggles, but seldom any precise notion of the
arrangements. ARNOLD tells us that he never
understood a battle, ancient or modern, from de-
scription merely; and a far better authority, the
Iron Duke himself, confesses the almost impossi-
bility of giving an intelligible account of all the
movements in a great battle to another. What
between the reader's ignorance of the locality, and
the many things ordered on the field itself which
formed no part of the original conception, even the
General in chief command would find it difficult to
make a stranger comprehend the course of the
fight.

The greater part of the more serious American
battles, and not least those just fought, illustrate
these remarks but too well. Some of our contem-
poraries have written as if they thought they fully
comprehended these battles ; but if so, we fail to
comprehend their descriptions; and, when we turn
to the American documents whence they drew
their information, we do not believe that the writers
of these documents themselves were masters of the
battle as a whole. The main results are what we
must be content with ; while it is still interesting
to peruse the accounts of some of the separate feats
of arms. We can see plainly enough that the Con-
federates were so vigorously handled on the Sunday
by the Federals, that they thought it better to
choose fresh fighting ground nearer the Potomac,
whence, if not successful, they could more easily
recross the river. They had done this by the Wed-
nesday. Meantime M'CLELLAN had followed them
and got into the best position he could, as the pur-
suer. On the Wednesday, the 17th, the decisive
conflict, as it proved to be, therefore came off. The
Confederates made the bravest and most resolute
efforts to drive back the Federals, bat they were
met with equal, at least, and successful bravery.
At one point in the struggle, the balance vibrated
much more evenly than the Confederates were pro-
bably aware of, since M'CLELLAN himself sent word
to BURNSIDE that the day depended on his holding
his position, and that all was lost if he could not.
While BURNSIDE, on the other hand, did not be-
lieve he could hold it without support, The retreat
of the Confederates at four p.m., it would seem,
alone saved BURNSIDE from being overpowered.
So nearly were things balanced that M'CLELLAN at
the close of the day, like the Confederates at Bull's

Run, did not know whether he had gained a victory.
A victory, however, it unquestionably was, and
a great one. The defeated side had to ask permis-
sion to bury their dead ; and, what was of far more
consequence, had to commence their retreat at once
into Virginia. It is unfair to depreciate the achieve-
ments of M'CLELLAN the very first time in
which he fairly took the field against such
able generals, and against soldiers not only as
brave as his own, but flushed with recent
triumphs. We are sorry to notice in the corres-
pondence of Dr. RUSSELL'S successor such a total
want of that independence, fairness, and generous
appreciation of high qualities on both sides,
which characterised his impartial predecessor. An
honourable partisan of the slaveholders and their
generals would not desire to elevate his clients by
depreciating their antagonists. The Confederate
invasion of Maryland has proved to be both a poli-
tical and a military failure. They found the Mary-
landers, if not actively hostile, yet anything but
friendly. They did not want their soil to be in-
vaded in the name of Secessia, or of liberation; and,
for the first time, M'CLELLAN ha& the advantage
enjoyed by the Confederates in Virginia, of the
best information. The military failure was also
complete. The capture of a large number of
troops at Harper's Ferry was far outbalaved
by the much heavier loss of killed, wounded,
prisoners, and stores ; and by the recapture of the
' strong positions of Harper's Ferry and Maryland
Heights. This time the Confederates were in-
vaders, and this time, therefore, as we are disposed
to think, the Confederates were fairly beaten.
What the the two parties will now do, we have,
as yet, no iniimation. M'CLELLAN, it is said,
threatened to advance again into Virginia, along
the Shenandoah Valley, from Harper's Ferry. If
he does, his probable reason will be to deprive his
enemies of the supplies of provisions they would find
there. Probably, however, both sides are too much

exhausted, now, to attempt much more at present.
The Confederates are, by all accounts, both of
friend and foe, in such a half-starved, ragged, shoeless
condition, that the Union soldiers wondered how
men, in such a condition, could fight at all, much
less as they did. The normal condition of the
" mean whites," however, who form the rank and
file of the Confederate army, is pretty much this.
They are used to sach hardships as the better fed
and better clothed North would never endure; and
it is not improbable that the struggle will become
increasingly one of
well-fed and comfortably-pro-
vided for troops with the desperation of rags and
hunger.

As grave as judges were the Philosophers yes-
terday, down at Cambridge,
while discussing, in
Section D of the British Association—the section
devoted to the themes of the Fauna and Flora of thb
habitable globe, Botany and Zoology—the differ-
ences discernible between the Man and the Monkey.
A discussion, of course, this was, especially suggested
by that highest specimen of the ape species, the
grotesque and formidable Goriila.
In this grave debate, among philosophers as dis.
tinguished as Professors OWEN, HUXLEY, and ROL-
LEBTON, a sense of the ludicrous, to say nothing
of the indecorous, never once appears to have passed
across the imagination of these men of science. It
was seemingly, to them, as sober and rational an in-
quiry, in its way, as any upon which the various sec-
tions of the Scientific Association now carrying on
their labours industriously and intelligently from day
to day could by possibility adventure. Months and

months ago Mr. SPURGEON took this very subject
up, it may be remembered, in a much more suitable
spirit—in an entertaining lecture upon the Gorilla,
delivered to an immense audience in his Metropoli-
tan Tabernacle. Humourist as he is essentially in
temperament, Mr. SPURGEON could not find
it in his heart to treat the preposterous
question that had then very recently been
raised in consequence of the publication of
M. Du CHAILLU'S African Adventures, quite
seriously—as these learned professors nevertheless
did yesterday down at Cambridge in Section D.
Mr. SPURGEON found it absolutely impossible not
to recognise upon the instant the intensely
ludicrous aspect of a query that might really with-
out exaggeration be expressed in the form of an
inquiry addressed to the Human Biped by the
Gorilla, somewhat to the effect of the old familiar
remonstrance of the negro, "Am I not a Man
[at any rate the Gorilla's advocates would delicately
insinuate—Sonzething very like a Man—something
all but Human] and a Brother ?" Elevated upon
his raised platform, for it is less of a pulpit than a
platform in his vast Metropolitan Tabernacle—
having there beside him upon that platform a
gigantic stuffed specimen of the Gorilla species, Mr.
SPURGEON from his own intense and hearty sense
of the whimsical, could not, we repeat, but recog-
nise above all things in regard to the inquiry
selected by him for discussion upon that occasion
its flagrant ridiculousness. Apostrophising the
stuffed body of the Gorilla beside him during the
course of this popular lecture of his, Mr. SPURGEON
spoke quite conclusively, we cannot but think,
upon the matter then seriously in debate among
some people—As to there being any similarity,
resemblance, or analogy between the Human
Family and the race of the Gorillas! He
spoke thus conclusively because his words, oddly
addressed to the inanimate form of the Gorilla
beside him, were, in the midst of their very
oddity, the thoughtful utterances of the Satirist—
of the Humourist —of the MAN! Bearing in
mind, indeed—what we here ;scarcely dare even
to hint at with a veiled and reverend sense of awe
as connected with a notion so wild in its utter ex-
travagance—bearing in mind how in the History of
Mankind the Human Form has been sanctified with
a sanctity beyond all articulate expression—it does
absolutely appear to us hardly less than a profanation
to take an outrageous phantasy of this kind into so-
lemn and deliberate discussion. If it is to be discussed
at all—let it be discussed in the reasonable, because
the only appropriate spirit in which Mr. SPURGEON
discussed it ! Bringing the ridiculous notion, at
once, down from the cloud-land of the scientific
dreamer—down, down, irresistibly, to the very
dust ! Effectually setting aside the nonsensical
theory broached by some among these dreamers, by
the very simple and suitable logical device wisely
hit upon by Mr. SPURGEON, as alone applicable to
the subject, the logical device, namely, of the
reductto ad absurdum. Better this, surely, than
all the learned prattle of yesterday—indulged in so
very gravely in Section D, down at Cambridge, by
Professor OWEN—about posterior lobes of the cere-
brum overlapping, about lateral ventricles, about
the hippocampus minor, about what Professor
OWEN, for:want of a better phrase, calls archen-
cephala, and so forth. As well might we chatter
with Miss WILHELMINA AMELIA SKEGGS, in
the " Vicar of WAKEFIELD," about SHAKSPEAP.E
and the musical glasses and what not—as hope to
raise into dignity a theme so ludicrous and even
despicable by means, of no mattel how unmeasured
a quantity of 'this kind of learned, or (we shrink
not from presuming to designate it, though Pro-
fessor OWEN himself is the Philosopher who conde-
scended to employ it yesterday) this kind of psnedo-
learned small talk ! No—laughter-moving though
the remark may have appeared to be in the
estimation of some who listened to it yesterday,
when very simply and earnestly expressed by
the Rev. W. N. MOLESWORTH, there is a moral
and psychical gulf between Man and the higher
order of Apes—a gulf that is in itself altogether
impassable. We would go beyond this even, and
say—that merely to suggest the crossing of which
(in the remembrance of the awful considerations we
have already alluded to) does appear to as, we re-
peat hardly less than a deliberate profanation ! The
humane sentiment expressed in immortal words by
TERENCE— •

" Homo sum et nemo alienum mihi puto 1"

is strictly in its significance the sentiment of a
philanthropist! Not all the babbling of the deli-
berate maintainers of the Darwinian Theory of
Development, and of their predecessors the sup-
porters of the much older Lamarckian Theory, can
surely induce any one out of St. Luke's seriously to
believe in his heart that the Gorilla is to be in-
cluded—and with the Gorilla of course the chim-
panzee, and the long-armed ape, and the little
marmoset, and the huge baboon, and the ourang
outang, and every fantastic member of the race of
the Monkey—under the all-comprehensive nemo in
the beautiful and eminently Christian ejaculation of
the pagan TERENCE.

Lancashire is not only, it appears, threatened
with a cotton famine, but with a coal glut. With
the impoverishment caused by the lack of the raw
material of cotton among the manufacturing opera-

tives of the County Palatine, we are all long since
familiar. The impossibility of obtaining our usual
supplies ; or, indeed, for some time past, any sup-
plies at all of that raw material from the Southern
or cotton-growing States of North America, has
been throughout this year of grace a matter of pain-
ful notoriety. The stoppage of the customary im-
portation of the raw material has necessitated, of
course, the stoppage also, later on, of the customary
exportations of the manufactured articles. Im-
plying between whiles, quite obviously, the inter-
ruption of the labours of manufacture. Mills thrown
out of work by scores upon scores—operatives
thrown out of employment by thousands upon
thousands : such have been the inevitable conse-
quences intermediately of this dwindled importation
and exportation.
And now, added to all this but too well-known
source of grief and anxiety as the winter closes in
upon us—comes the melancholy recognition of yet
another evil of a kindred character, and in some
measure, also, of a kindred origin—the dreadful
prospect of what we have designated a coal glut.
As illustrative of what we mean by this phrase of
a coal glut, it will be sufficient to allude to one
indisputable fact, just now brought to light, in re-
gard to the actual state of things sown at Wigan,
in Lancashire. There, at Wigan, at once a great
cotton town and coal depot—there is one colliery
proprietor alone, for example, who has not less
than 70,00 tons of coal banked, that he knows not
what to do with,from the closing of certain consider-
able markets for it ! Divers other colliery proprietors,
having thousands upon thousands of tons of coals
" banked" in like manner (uselessly left, as the
phrase is, upon their hands) in similar propor-
tions. So direfully are the evils of the
American war spreading wider and wider, ring
within ring, from the first dropping
of that strong
fact into the deep waters of our commerce, of our
trade
and manufactures. These tidings from the
coal districts, as well as from the cotton districts
in the North, threaten for us but a sombre and
alarming winter. Thought must be taken now be-

times for the possible throwing out of work of very
many thouss.nii colliers side by side with crowds of
starving operatives.

THE METROPOLITAN RAILWAY.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE SUN.

SlR,—Next to the Great International and the
Armstrong cannons the Metropolitan Underground
Railway is the " great gun" of the day. Would it
not be an auspicious event to open it with charity
There are thousands now in London who would
willingly pay a small fee to pass through the tunnel,
or a portion of it, which, being certain to raise a
good sum, could be given appropriately to the suf-
fering inhabitants of the county of Geo. Stephenson.
If the directors would make this concession to a noble
undertaking it would be felt as a generous and gea-
cious act by the public in general, as well as by—

yours, &c., W. SMITH.
New Adelphi Theatre, Oct. 2.

SEIZURE OF ENGLISH ENGINEERS BY

BRIGANDS.

A letter just received from Turin says :—We have
new shocking instances of assassination at Turin
and of atrocious murders at Brescia, and elsewhere.
Decidedly a strong Government must be found,
able to wrench the dagger from Italian hands.
Three of the English engineers of Messrs Waring
Brothers, Brassey, and Co., constructors of the
Southern Railway (Eboli branch) were seized by
the brigands last Friday, in the neighbourhood of
Laviano, and carried off to the mountains, where
they will have to be heavily ransomed ; the ill-
starred engineers have been subjected to great ill-
treatment.