The Sun.
London, England, 1862-04-05 00:00:00

THE SUN.
LONDON, SATURDAY, APRIL 5, 1862.

The result of last night's debate will give un-
nlingled satisfaction. The House and the country
have only asked
of Lord PALMERSTON what he,
Thehis wonted
ey did not demand good nature, has now conceded.
abandon
hie that ho should definitively
and for ever
favourite forts, but that
he should pause; that
he should expend for the
present no more than ha:lsoalurledady been disbursed
on them ; nnd that time
action in acccrdanoe with thegiven to modify
our,%rleat lesson
which the Americans have taught the
orld..
Of course, no decided action is taken, negative or
positive. The CormisJioners are to reconsider the
matter, tiro foundations of the forts alone are con-
tracted tor, mud the pause CAD, if the House wishes

it, be made there ; and, at that time for everything,
"after Easter," the House can decide what shall be
done, the Government being quite willing to abide
by its decision.

We need ask no more. The Government is 1,
already alive to the necessity of discontinuing the
building of wooden ships. All we wanted was,
that money should not be squandered on forts
which iron-plated ships have rendered almost use-
less, money which ought to be devoted to building
the iron ships themselves. The Duke of SOMERSET
and Lord PALMERSTON still plead for a little wood-
work, in the shape of " that very useful class of small
ships, despatch vessels." To that no one will
object ; only they will no longer be regarded
as part of our defensive or of our aggressive
force. Their business may well be what their
name would imply, vessels for carrying despatches ;
for, as to their engaging in any conflict with the
smallest iron-side, that would be out of the ques-
tion. These small ships, therefore, we leave in the
hands of the Government; they will make little
difference either way, and 'we have now the assur-
ance that the work of iron-plating is to be com-
menced in earnest. One three-decker is to be
operated on at once ; several ships, which are as yet
but frames, are to be adapted to iron ; and Captain
COLES'S cupolas are to have full and fair play.

But we must cast a momentary glance back-
wards, if only to strengthen and make sure of the
movement forwards. Sir MORTON and Mr. LIND-
SAY, both of them eminently practical men, strongly
insisted long ago on the necessity of ceasing to
build wooden ships. What took place before Kil-
burn, satisfied these business men of the change
which must be made. It satisfied the French
Government also, and the French Government
acted on the facts before them. Not so our Admi-
ralty. We set to work to reconstruct our navy ;
we spent some ten millions in new ships, and about
three millions in repairs and alterations, and now
all the work has to be recast. It is true the huge
three-deckers can be cut down ; their sides can be
plated, and cupolas can be made to turn round on
their decks. But is also true that the cost of doing
all this will of course be vastly greater than that of
building a ship, adapted from the commencement
to its final purpose. And, what is more to be re-
gretted, though the cut down ships will be valuanle
and efficient, they will not be equal to those which,
from the first, were constructed for iron plating.
It is the too old lesson of the unteachable-
ness, and the consequently enormous cost of
routine administrators. Had we had at our
Admiralty men only as capable of learning by
events as the French Naval Administration, we
should not have had at this moment only four ships
which can be called ships of war, and an immense
fleet, which these four could sink in a very short
time. We have need to remember our costly blun-
ders, to prevent their costly repetition.

The discussion which took place last night in the
House of Commons in regard to the affairs of Poland
cannot, we feel persuaded, but exercise a beneficial
influence both upon the Poles themselves and upon
the Russian Government. In that way the two
members for the borough of Tiverton, the hon. and
learned gentlemen who brought the condition of the
unhappy race and country referred to, under the at-
tention at once of the Ministers of the Crown and of
the popular branch of the Legislature, and the noble
Viscount who responded to the appeal of his col-
league, doing so in his two-fold capacity as Leader
of the House and as Chief of the Administration—
Mr. DENMAN and Lord PALMERSTON have alike
done noble service to the cause of that heroic and
suffering nationality. Very earnestly do we hope
that as full and accurate a report as possible of
what took place last evening in the British House
of Commons may be translated both into Russian
and into Polish—these translations to be after-
wards transmitted, the one to the Imperial
Councils at St. Petersburg, the other as
secretly, rapidly, and effectually as may be (in a
less northerly, in a more easterly direction) for
circulation among the inhabitants of Russian Po-
land. Reports thus supplied to the .Czar ALEX-
ANDER 11., and to his unfortunate Polish subjects,
could not but touch them equally to the heart,
though in ways, of course, wondrously different !
Reports thus conveying to the knowledge of the
Russian Autocrat and of his Polish victims, the
victims of his insensate Government, the sentiments
with which the Past and the Present, and, for that
matter, also the Future, of the Polish people and the
Polish nationality are regarded in this free land of
ours. From the earnest words articulated in evidence
of these sentiments upon the evening of the 4th of
April, 1862, in the English House of Commons,
first of all by the Hon. GEORGE DENMAN,
M.P. for the borough of Tiverton, and after-
wards by ' Viscount PALMERSTON, not only
himself also M.P. for the borough of Tiver-
( ton, but the veteran chief of her Britannic
Majesty's Clovernment—the Czar of all the RUSSIAS
will learn at length (supposing him to be in any
way ignorant of the facts already) how frightful
and inhuman have been the cruelties perpetrated,
in his name, of late, not only in Warsaw but more
or less throughout the whole of the Polish frontier
of his dominions ? And let us hope, too, that
somehow or another, simultaneously, the Poles
themselves at Warsaw and throughout Russian
Poland malbecome cognisant, no less than his Im-
perial Majesty ALEXANDER 11., of language uttered
in the English Parliament by the First Minister
of the Crown of these realms, so calculated to
hearten them to the cherishing still, with each of
them until death, of their life-long hopes, of their
eventual emancipation.

What is there, however, that is in any way new
that can be uttered in regard to the heinous wrongs
on the one hand, and to the inalienable rights on the
other—the wrongs so long endured, the rights
so resolutely cherished by the heroic
and patriotic vindicators of the holy cause
of the Polish nationality ? Nothing ! The story
is indeed familiar to us all—that sublime and
pathetic story of the triple downfall and partition :
triple both in its geographical subdivision and in
the periods of its recurrence : the infamous triple
partition of what was until not one hundred years
ago the ancient kingdom of Poland. A poet like
CAMPBELL has lamented it in words of music that
will never be silenced—
" And freedom shrieked when Kosciusko fell 1"

A hero like PONIATOWSKI has within this nine-
teenth century died for it, to vindicate the inde-
structible chivalry of his race, cherishing in his
heart until death the dream of its revival among the
independent nations of Christendom. A patriot
like Prince ADAM CZARTORYSKI has lived for it—
more than died for it, lived for it—until a patriar-
chal age, cherishing in exile that same vision of his
country's ultimate restoration. A foreign histo-
rian like the late Lord MAcAtitaY has written of
its partition in words of fire the mere reflection of
which burns like a brand of infamy into the royal and
imperial escutchions of the three partitioners—that
it was "that kind of partition which consists in tear-
ing a living man limb from limb.►" Nothing new, in
truth, can well be said in regard to events that have
during so many years past been known in all their
details, and recognised in all their matchless afro:
city, as censtitutitig the greatest and the blackest

crime of modern Europe. But of the reiterated -
and persevering cruelties that have at intervals
during the last seventy or eighty years followed
that Great Crime's consummation—alas ! every
generation in turn has something new to
relate of those ! In illustration of which
lamentable truth there are the records of
these recent occurences at Warsaw, and in
other parts of Russian Poland where funeral pro-
cessions, patriotic hymns, and mourning garments
have been eagerly seized upon by the hireling agents
of the Russian autocracy as pretexts for the perpe-
tration of cruelties so devillish.in their barbarity
that, as the latest incident among them, we had to
relate yesterday in the columns of this journal, the
dreadful death, on the 23d ultimo, of ALEXANDER
ZAMOYSKI, Editor of a Polish newspaper, this un-
happy man (if we are to believe the detailed narra-
tive given in the .Breslau Gazette, in preference to
the vague denial of the Journal des Debats) having
been literally flayed alive by the thongs
of the scourges of his Russian tormentors,
each blow of the knotted whip stripping
off his flesh in ribbons, and so seriously injuring
his spine that the sufferer eventually expired
under the lash. This, remember, is but a solitary
instance of barbarities that have of late, in War
saw and Russian Poland, been frightfully multi-
plied. It is the last of them that has come to
our knowledge here in England. But hardly
have the miserable tidings of the judicial murder
of ALEXANDER ZAMOYSKI come to these shores,
when a cry of indignation and horror has been
raised in the British House of Commons—a cry
that will now be echoed across Europe (GoD grant
not without effect!) even to the palace of the
Russian Autocrat at St. Petersburg, even to the
Imperial Cabinet of the Czar ALEXANDER.

It is due to England versus America, and to
Captain COWPER COLES versus official neglect of
original ability, to call attention to the fact that
Captain COLES, not Captain ERICSSON, is the inven-
tor of the far-famed ship the Monitor, and that
Captain COLES' invention preceded that of Captain
ERICSSON by at least six or seven years. Now that
the repulse of the Merrimac by the Monitor makes
the latter the most famous ship of the day, and, that
Captain ERICSSON names her the Monitor because,
as he says, she is to be a monitor to Downing-
street—it is interesting to know that England had
so many years ago a monitor in an able captain
of her own, bat that unfortunately the monitor was
without honour in his own country.

We point our readers, therefore, with pleasure
and pride—in the captain, not in the Admiralty
—to his letter in another column ; it esta-
blishes beyond all question his claim to be consi-
dered not merely the projector, but the inventor of.
vessels of the new class. Experience in the Black
Sea and the Baltic taught him, in 1855, the neces-
sity of ships which could attack forts with impunity
in shallow waters. He then planned a vessel for
the purpose almost identical in construction with
the Monitor, except in not mounting the guns on
a turn-table, which was superseded by the rapidity
with which the ship could come round. He was
sent for home to discuss his plans—but it was only
to find, as hundreds had done before him, the use-
lessness " of arguing against prejudice and theory,"
and the hopelessness of introducing into the navy " a
novel invention, the offspring of practical observa-
tions in actual warfare."

Discouraged by officials, Captain COLES turned ,
to men of kindred spirit. He applied to Mr.
BRUNEL, whom he found already engaged in a
somewhat similar scheme. But, with the nobility
of genius, the great engineer at once acknowledged
the superiority of Captain COLES' plans, gave him
the full aid of his own great engineering abilities
and knowledge, placed his own draughtsmen at his
service, declined to accept any remuneration from a
naval officer, who was trying to benefit his country, i
and, with the inspiration and confidence of genius,
said to him at parting, "Go on, persevere,
and you will succeed." We can all sympathise
with the encouragement which these words, from
such a man, afforded the Captain "under the greatest
discouragements ;" and well can we comprehend
the mortification with which he records that he did
persevere; but, for the result so little honourable to
his country, that America, not England, should have
the honour of floating the first Monitor.
In the beginning of 1859, however, hope began
to dawn on the inventor. Admiral Sir GEORGE
GREY had the sense to perceive the feasibility of
his proposals. Through him he was introduced to
the PRINCE CONSORT, whom he found both disposed
and competent to enter fully into them down to the
mechanical details ; indeed, the Prince had already
turned his attention to the came subject. He had now
gained a friend, whose recommendations he could
feel assured must meet with respectful attention, still
so slow has been his progress even with such aid to
back him, that it was only when the Naval Esti-
mates were announced, this year, we learned for the
first time that the Government had determined to
give Captain COLES & fair trial by building a ship
expressly constructed for his cupolas, with the turn-
tables and apparatus complete according to his own
drawings. Too late this, unhappily, for the honour
of the English Administration, but happily not too
late, for the honour of English inventors, and for
the safety of England's harbours. The captain's
final statement is well worthy attention after all
that has passed—We need, he says, two classes
of iron plated vessels ; one to keep the
sea, like the Warrior, and the Black
Prince, another to defend our harbours and coasts.
Of the latter class he can build two for £60,000
each, shot proof, carrying 300-pounders, and which
would inevitably dispute the entrance to Spithead
with the Warrior, and vessels of her class, and
" either destroy her or drive her away." After all
that has now transpired, the country will doubt-
less be disposed to place entire reliance on the
proposals of Captain COLES, and his name must
henceforth rank amongst the great inventors in
naval warfare.

The Earl and Countess Stanhope will leave town
in a few days for Chevening Park, Kent, for the holidays.
The Earl and Countess of Tankerville arrived at
the Pavilion Hotel, Folkestone, on Thursday, from the
continent, and left the following day for London.
Lord and Lady Lilford have left Farrance's Hotel
for Lilford Hall, near Oundle.
RAILWAY AND PUBLIC COMPANIES IN PARLIA-
MENT.—Yesterday, after a fortnight's inquiry, the bill of
the Barnsley Coal Extension Railway Company, which was
opposed by the London and North-Western and Lanca-
shire and Yorkshire Railway Companies, was thrown out,
and the bill is consequently lost. The bill of the Mid
Sussex and Midhurst Railway Company was passed in Mr.
Scholefield's committee, and the clauses of it settled. In
the case of the Crystal Palace and Brighton Railway Com-
pany's new lines the clauses on behalf of the Grand Surrey
Canal Company were settled, and the committee adjourned
until Tuesday, to consider the negotiations now pending for
an arrangement of matters between the London, Chatham,
and Dover, and Brighton Railway Companies. Evidence
in favour of the Bristol and South-Western Railway is
still proceeding in Mr.
Ad i s committee. The
case of the Merionethshire a:id Welsh Coast Railways
was closed in Lord Stanley's committee, who will
decide ou the competing schemes on Monday--
The further consideration of the Tewkesbury and
Malvern Railway was adjourned until after Easter to enable
the parties to come to a settlement. The clauses of the Mid-
land Company's Rowsley and Buxton Extension were con-
sidered, the London and North Western and Great Northern
declining to accept them, and reserving their hostility to
them until the bill goes up to the Lords. In theaLords'
committee the bill of the Dundalk and Enniskillen WAN
pasgst and the clawies settled.