The Sun.
London, England, 1865-01-04 00:00:00

precipitate and almost violent manner in which he
cancelled the whole proceeding, and probably
enabled six great criminals to escape from the hands
of justice. A warrant has of course been signed by
the Governor-General, but we fear that it is exceed-
ingly unlikely that these prisoners will be recaptured
in so vast, so thickly wooded, and so thinly peopled
a country as Canada, where there must be many
Confederate refugees who would strain every nerve
to facilitate their escape. But we go a step further,
and maintain that if the Judge had no alternative
but to act in the way that he did, the authorities of
Montreal ought to have taken upon themselves the
risk and the responsibility of detaining these pri-
soners, even without legal warrant, for the
very brief period which would have been re-
quired to obtain the requisite warrant signed
by the Governor-General. The question was one
of great importance ; on it might have .de-
pended the issues of peace and war, and any one
refusing to allow the ends of justice and the very
legitimate demands of a neighbouring nation to be
defeated by a merely technical objection might
reckon with the utmost confidence on obtaining a
legislative indemnity for his conduct. We do not
know where the Governor-General was, but he
probably was riot beyond Quebec on the north, or
Toronto on the south, and might, therefore, have
been communicated with by railway and telegraph
in a few hours. We are not in possession of infor-
mation sufficient to enable us to state on whom,
beyond the Judge, the blame of this signal miscar-
riage of justice attaches ; but strong and unjusti-
fiable as the language of the American journals has
been, we certainly feel that they have good ground
for feeling indignant at a transaction that contrasts so
unfavourably with the prompt and efficient assist-
ance which they gave us in the case of Muller. We
must not expect that in the heat of a tremendous
civil war persons having a legitimate subject of com-
plaint will confine themselves within the exact
bounds of reason and justice ; and we have every
reason to be satisfied with the decision of the Ame-
rican President, which has so opportunely checked
a fermentation the results of which no man could
foresee. At the same time we would point out that
the Executive Government is not responsible for the
miscarriage of a Judge, and that one of the prin-
cipal objects of the institutions under which we
live is to remove our tribunals, so far as possible,
from any such influence. But nothing appears to
be alleged against the authorities of Canada beyond
the timidity which prevented them from taking a
very bold and hazardous resolution, on a very diffi-
cult question, on a very sudden occasion ; and
whatever fault may be found ultimately to attach to
the colonial authorities, judicial or executive, the
people and Government of this country had no
power in the matter, and have no other wish
than that the provisions of the Extradition Treaty
shall be carried out with the utmost fairness and
fulness, in a spirit of strict impartiality, neither
straining the law to promote the escape of the
guilty nor to bring the innocent within the power
of their enemies.

HERALD.—In the speech made by Mr. Bright at
the opening of the New Exchange at Birmingham,
on Monday, we are glad to recognise a moderation
which is not often discoverable in the orations of this
able but somewhat misguided gentleman. For once
in his life he makes no direct attack on the House
of Lords and the aristocracy ; he allows the British
lion to wag its tail in peace, and forbears to de-
nounce the constitution, the law of primogeniture,
and the National Church. For once he is content
to speak of the American war in terms with which
we do not feel much inclined to quarrel, describing
it as " an inevitable but temporary struggle, at
which mankind look on with wonder and with bated
breath." For once, too, he speaks kindly of his
country, and says that we may be " deemed the
greatest people on the face of the earth." An orator
who has been wont to indulge in the gloomiest
cynicism—who has favoured us from time to time
with the darkest predictions of the future of a State
whose misfortune it is to be ridden rough-shod by
a " governing class," warmed, perhaps, by the
genial influences of the banquet, flies off into a
strain of optimism which is in strange contrast to
the usual tone of his discourses. The time is com;
ing, he tells us, when war will cease on the earth,
when the nations will reduce their armaments and
live in peace. Wars of conquest are gone by, there
is no more jealousy between nations. "We stand
on a loftier eminence than our forefathers did. We
stand as it were on the shoulders of preceding gene-
rations." With the dreamer in Locksley Hall he
imagines already the advent of the age of reason.
He fancies that he lives in the time of which it may

be said=
Now the war drum throbs no longer, and the battle flags
are furled,
'Tis the parliament of man, the federation of the world;
Nov the common-sense of most shall hold a fretful realm
in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapped in universal
law.

We wish much that we could go along with
Mr. Bright in his rhapsody, as we differ from him
when in his jaundiced vein. The one seems as
unnatural and as overstrained as the other. We
have yet to learn that the world is so much better
than it used to be 7 • that the jealousies, heartburn;
ings, and rivalries, which in nll ages past have led
to strife between nations, have ceased to operate as
occasions of deadly enmity. In that millenium yet
to come, when evil passions shall have become ex-
tinct in individual minds, and not till then, can we
hope to meet with them no more in those vast aggre-
gates which are but made up of individuals. At the
close of a decade which has seen every nation in the
world at war, which has witnessed the war in the
Crimea, the war in Italy, the war in Denmark, the
war in India, with numberless lesser conflicts in
Asia and Africa, which leaves us in the midst of a
strife on the Western continent so vast in its pro-
portiOns, and so destructive in its progress that we
cannot find a parallel for it in ancient or in modern
history, it seems somewhat premature to speak of
universal peace. It is an insult to our understand-
ings to tell us that the nations have no further de-
sire for territorial aggrandisement, that wars of
conquest are to be regarded as things of the past.
Are we to be persuaded that the Emperor Nicholas
had no desigs upon Turkey ; that the Piedmontese
in 1859 entertained no ambitious projects ; that the
annexation of Savoy was forced upon the Emperor
of the French ; that the Germans never really in-
tended to dismember Denmark ; that the Prussians
at this moment have no hankering after Schleswig-
Holstein ? What is the American war but a most
audacious and persevering attempt to subdue, by
force of arms, an independent people that has just
as good a right to its nationality as the people of
the North ? Perhaps it would be difficult to find
any ten years in the history of the world in which
there has been more strife and bloodshed, in which
ambitious designs have been more openly avowed
and more daringly carried out than in the period
between the end of 1854 and the end of 1864. It
is hardly yet time to tune our voices to the hymn
of universal peace. The opening of a building which
is designed for commercial uses suggested to Mr.
Bright the leading idea of his speech. Mr. Bright
has his panacea for the ills of the times. Is it
in the levelling of class distinctions, the destruc-
tion of the throne and the aristocracy, the organ-
isation of Government on a basis of universal
suffrage ? We might have anticipated that he
would have laid some stress upon these ; that he
would at least have alluded to his favourite scheme
for the Americanisation of the effete institutions of
this country. He did nothing of the sort. By an
ingenious tour de force he transferred his stand-
point to a newer and more promising level. It is a
trick not unknown to able logicians, to lay hold of
the taunts of an enemy and transmute them some-
how into an occasion of congratulation ; to seize
upon the premises of an adversary, and deduce from
them conclusions exactly the reverse of his. The
greatest and most dangerous of England's enemies
once gibed at us as a " nation of shopkeepers." Mr.
Bright adopts the title, and enrols it proudly on his
escutcheon. Those • who envy our power and in-
fluence have compared us to Carthage, and pre-
dicted for us her fall. Mr. Bright accepts the
parallel, and boasts of the resemblance. He tells us,
and certainly we never,heard it before, that " ma-
nufacturers and merchants are too modest." "They
are becoming more important in the world than
warriors and statesmen, and even than monarchs
themselves." " The power of these heretofore great
authorities is waning," whereas " the power of the
industrial interest is waxing greater." Labour,which
was the curse of the first man, is the glory of his
posterity. The triumphs of the hand, in which man
competes with the brute and with brute forces, are
nobler than those of the mind, in which he takes his
place with angels and emulates God. The manu-
facturer of carpets is greater than the poet who
" lived not for an age but for all time." The
superintendent of power-looms is the superior in
every respect of the statesman who struggled with
-Napoleon and shaped an epoch. The seller of cot-
ton is greater than the hero of Trafalgar, or the
mighty genius who conquered at Waterloo. It is
written that " as mortar sticketh between the joints
of a wall, so cloth sin lie between buying and
selling." Mr.'Bright does not seem to be of this
opinion. Virtue and barter with him are exchange-
able terms, and a perfect state of society can only
be anticipated when every one does his best to
emulate the successful pedlar. Perhaps the nearest
approach to his Utopia is to be met with among
those countrymen in remote parts of Norway who
extemporise an exchange of their own by every
fjeld and fiord, who welcome the traveller by ask-
ing whether he will " trade" for his carriole, make
a bid for his brandy-flask, and ask how much he
will take for his gun. There are classes in Eng-
land who neither know anything of trade nor aspire
to know anything of it. We suppose they are to