The Sun.
London, England, 1862-12-19 00:00:00

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THE SUN.
LONDON, FRIDAY, DEC. 19, 1862.

The two Members for Birmingham met last
night to differ. Not on English politics, not on
the necessity of reducing the Army and Navy
Estimates, nor on the sufferings and merits of the
Lancashire sufferers. It was on the war, and its
causes and results, that these otherwise almost
perfectly harmonising political brothers had to
agree to differ. Mr. SCHOLEFIELD had, like every
one at first, thought the secession of the Southern
States "an act of incredible folly." He had
neverldoubted their moral right to secede; 8,000,000
of people had such a right. lie did not think that
their success would rivet more firmly the fetters of
the slave, and he thought we should consider the
question just as if slavery were not connected with
it. The conduct of the North in making it a war
for the Union, not against slavery, in his view jus-
tified those who, with Lord RUSSELL, regarded it
as a war of ambition. Such were Mr. SCHOLE-
FIELD'S principal statements, and it will be seen at
once that all their force is due to suppression of one
side of the case altogether. Perhaps, knowing
that he would bo followed by so able an advocate
of views nearly opposite to his own, he felt re-
lieved from the obligation to give the other
side.

Certainly no two opposing counsel could ever
address a jury as better personal friends. Mr.
BRIGHT would have almost preferred not to have
to speak at all, than to be obliged to differ from one
with whom he was so uniformly in accord. However,
there he was, and he must do his duty. A great
part of Mr. BRIGHT'S defence of the North was an
argumentum ad patriarn, in regard to England. If
the North went to war when Fort Sumter was
attacked—a Federal, not a Southern fort—we must
remember our readiness to go to war when two
men were taken out of the Trent—an apparently
lighter cause. What would England do if only
Gibraltar were attacked by the Spaniards—a
fortress which Mr. BRIGHT, like Mr. GOLDWIN
SMITH, considers to be perfectly useless,
except as a nest for patronage. What would we do
.if any attempt were made by any part of our vast
empire to sever itself from the mother country ?
What have we done in the case of Indian insurrec-
tion ? In this rather telling appeal Mr. BRIGHT
seemingly forgot that our leading statesmen have
most of them professed willingness to accept the
demand for colonial independence if the colonies
made it. Those larger colonies which have legisla-
tures of their own—and which, therefore, come
nearest to the United States system of Sovereign
States in Federal Union—well know that they are
at perfect liberty to " secede," as the South calls
it. Notwithstanding that the greater part of Eng-
lishmen, with their leading statesmen, feel
no inclination to what they term " dismem-
ber the empire," yet we question whether
even those who least wish it would for
a moment oppose a general demand on the part
of any of the nonmilitary colonies for national
independence. The best appeal to our practice at
home would be in reference to Ireland. Probably
nothing would induce our statesmen to consent to
its separation from Great Britain. Yet it contains
as many whites nearly as the Southern States, and
if Mr. SCHOLEFIELD be content to rest the jus-
tice of the Southern demand for independence, as
he seems to do, on the national numbers of the sepa-
ratists, then he must explain why be for one would
not listen to the all but unaLimous voice of Ireland
when its millions demanded the Repeal of the
Union. They, then, asked less than the Southern
States, and by almost as many voices.
the unansweredknownand unanswerable letter of His
Toitie
to be by one of our first civil
lawyers, has shown that we have not a single pre-
cedent for doing so in such haste, unless we meant
to intervene by
force, atnmd settle the whole business
in our own
rigid the sy mwpaayt h. ie ail lolf
would, we think, carry the sympathies of any
r
hie
English audience, in . BRIGHT evidently car-
refusingto recognise
publ:c which, in language reallyaudience
blasphemous

makes slavery, for the first time in the world,
the foundation and corner-stone of its sys-
tem. We are pleased to hear Mr. BRIGHT
at last speaking out on the subject of slavery
as he now does. We could not doubt his
views on the subject, but we have often regretted
that, before the present disruption, he seemed
always afraid of irritating the Americans by allud-
ing to the subject. Now that the slavehoiders are
separated by their own act from the non-slave-
holders, he no longer retains any such feelings. He
can speak of slavery
as the one " huge foul blot
upon its fame, a hideous outrage upon divine and
human law," and so forth. We are glad that the
conduct of the South has liberated the tongue of
our great orator to say what we could wish he had
done while these same slaveholders were really
governing the whole country. We quite agree with
the hon. member, however, in regarding the
Southern rebellion as one for slavery, and for
nothing else. However long the North may
have felt itself not justified in violating the
common constitution of all the States in regard
to slavery, however slow it may have been
to declare war against slavery itself, as not
warranted to do so, it is notorious that the South
began and has persevered in its rebellion for
slavery and nothing else. To the very last the
Virginian deputies would have made terms with
Mr. LINCOLN himself, if he would have conceded
the right of the Slave States to take their slaves
into the free territories of the United States. So
demented were they for slavery, that though no
one proposed to meddle with it where it existed,
they plunged into war merely to secure a right
to blast with negro .bondage all the yet free soil
of North America.

Mr. BRIGHT is, we are sorry to see, but a pro-
phet of woe for Lancashire. He sees no proba-
bility, at least for a very long time to come, of the
restoration of its prosperity. He entered, at con-
siderable length, into the question of cotton supply,
and showed how slow, as he considered, would be
the increase of supply from other sources: The
quantity in America, which we could now obtain,
he believes to be small, and differing from Mr.
SCOLEFIELD, he believed that there would never be
again a crop of cotton grown in the States
by slave labour—never one which would be re-
garded as available to meet the wants of our
manufactures. India, he considered to be our only
trustworthy reliance, and he condemned without
mercy the neglect of so many successive Govern-
ments, whom he had in vain attempted to arouse
on the subject. The only proposal he had heard of
at all feasible, was made by a very old landowner
and cvltivator in India—it is to exempt for five
years, from land tax, all the land employed
in growing cotton ; it is represented that the
stimulus thus giveu would be enormous, and the
loss to the Indian Revenue would be made good by
the revival of trade in Lancashire. Mr. BRIGHT's
informant believes that the measure would be suc-
cessful, speedily successful, and the relief complete.
We should not be surprised if the five per cent. on
the Manchester goods imported into India, through
the money spent there for raw cotton, would quite
recoup the Indian revenue for anything it might
suffer.

Apart from such a supply created by vigorous
measures in India, our Orator prophesies very
gloomily. He believes " that the misfortune which
has unhappily fallen upon her, will entail ruin on
the whole of the population, and that it will gra-
dually engulph the smaller traders. It might for
years—he did not say it would, because what was
not impossible might always happen, it might
make the whole factory population of Lancashire
almost entirely worthless"; this is, indeed, a dark
picture. We are ready to find relief against it, if
only through trusting to the unforeseen chances
of the future. But we have better grounds of
hope. We think our Government will surely
act more vigorously yet in India, and we also hope
the end of American slavery is so near, that all
over the cotton-growing countries it will become
known that the old monopoly of supply is over-
thrown for ever. Then, at last, we should see
numerous places as well as India turning to the
work of supplying the mills of Manchester. It is
fear of full blown slave cultivation resuming its
course speedily in America, which has checked the
growth of cotton by other countries.

The political situation just now noticeable
throughout Europe is rather peculiar of its kind.
More or less the foreign policy in vogue upon
the Continent is of a laissez aller character.
The juncture being tided through is appa-
rently, by universal consent, one compounded of
a series of complicated postponement. Question
after question is passed by, or is glossed over as—
for the time being—inconvenient. The Italian
Question altogether, for example, we have seen very
recently set aside, in a manner, as—not yet to be
answered. The solution will come in time, bat not
yet. Again—disintegrating that rather complex
and complicated whole—regarding the Italian
Question not in its entirety or totality as a Problem
in any way admitting of instant solution—severing
one after another its component parts, the spec-
tacle brought to light in each instance, at every
turn, is in a manner indentically one of the self-
same character. The settlement of the Roman
Question—the core or pivot of it all—is given, by
universal consent, for the moment, the go by, dis-
tinctly, admittedly as a very riddle of the
Sphinx. Insomuch, that upon the inauguration
of the Ministry brought together but very recently
in succession to RATTAZZI'S, the newly-nominated
Prime Minister of King VICTOR EMMANUEL, almost
we might say ostentatiously guards himself from
being supposed to give any sort of pledge, directly or
indirectly, that he as yet sees his way to a removal
of the difficulty. The Venetian Question, moreover, is
quite as avowedly shelved or cushioned, as a problem
of which a solution has yet not been discovered.
The Quadrilateral is still garrisoned by its German
soldiery, the patriot army of the Italians grimly
casting glances askance at their past, possibly at
any day their present, certainly at some period not
yet to be very confidently predicted their future foes
—all along that strongly guarded frontier ! The
Neapolitan puzzle that is, as to the possibility
of retaining the northern and southern king-
dom, or province, shall we say, of the Roman
peninsula, bound together, by that thin line
of union along the Marches constituting still their
sole point of union—as narrow a band of union, in
its way, as the fleshy bands of the Siamese Twins,
or to take, more reasonably, a geographical illustra-
tion than an anatomical illustration as the isthmus
of Panama linking together the Northern and
Southern American Continents !

Continue to maintain the Temporal Power, so
far as it may be said to remain still intact at
Rome, under the guardianship of the French
soldiery, and it must ever remain dubious
how long, if, in any way much longer, the
huge Southern province of the King of ITALY'S
straggling and incomplete dominion can be
held loyally, in obedience to his Government,
far to the North yonder at Turin. Why, in effect,
Italy is by necessity kept in a transitional and
insecure position as the sixth Power of Europe so
long as this confused state of things between Naples
and Turin continues to keep open on the one hand
the hopes of a Bourbon and the hopes of a Muratist