The Sun.
London, England, 1865-05-02 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

Ties.—The American residents in London yes-
terday did fitting honour to the memory of their
late:President. Men in their position are more than
usually sensitive to patriotic impressions. When
people live at home, seeing few but countrymen,
distracted by party politics, and engaged to some
extent in every public transaction, patriotism,
though a strong, is a quiescent feeling. But abroad
their country is too far away to be ever out of
their thoughts. The presence of a strange nationality
leads them by contrast to dwell upon their own ;
association and mutual friendly services bind the
little community by a bond of which national feel-
ing supplies the links, and anything that affects the
common country finds them united and almost
unanimous. What wonder, then, that the Ameri-
cans in London should have been prompt to mark
their sense of the bereavement which their nation
has sustained ? They have for four years beheld
from a distance the struggle in which it has been
engaged ' • they know the effect of that struggle on
the minds of European nations, and particularly on
English society.; and they are aware how much they
have lost in the man who has just been taken away.
To a patriotic American, looking upon the war from
across the ocean, it will seem that Abraham Lincoln
was pre-eminently one to bear rule at such a time.
His countrymen here have seen how his practical
and tentative statesmanship has succeeded, while
the dogmatism of a more trained politician might
have erred ; they have noticed that even the faults
with which his opponents charged him have won him
favour in the Old World, and that the geniality of
his fresh Western nature has enabled him to live
through one of the most terrible revolutions in his-
tory without committing a single cruelty, and to go
down to the grave without making a single enemy.
They can understand that which strikes all on this
side the ocean who have watched his career—the
moral ascendancy which during his term of office
the President gained over the experienced poli-
ticians who surrounded him, and gradually over
the public opinion of his own country and the world.
To these feelings Mr. Adams gave utterance yes-
terday. It was but natural that the United States'
Minister should see in Mr. Lincoln the representa-
tive of the country—the servant, indeed, rather than
the leader. Mr. Adams has been engaged familiarly
in the transactions of this war. He has known the
ideas with which it was begun, the changes which
came over men's minds alit advanced, the new views
taken by politicians of all parties in his own coun-
try, and the effect which the tremendous succession
of events produced at home and abroad. He may,
then, fairly consider Mr. Lincoln the embodiment of
the national resolutions, as a man through whom
the republic spoke at each crisis of its fortunes. But
this certainly does not detract from his merits. If
the North has achieved success, it has been mainly
by his means. If it spoke through him, it was only
because his own feelings were those of the great
mass of his section of the republic. Whatever fame
belongs to a successful statesman is his, for from the
first days of his assumption of office he devoted
himself to the policy which has now triumphed. He
declared his intention of retaking the forts and pro-
perty of the United States, he called out 75,000
volunteers and then hundreds of thousands, he issued
the proclamation emancipating the slaves, he bore
up against all the discouragement produced by two
years of constant defeat : and in all this he is said
to have taken his own line, and to have been in re-
ality, as he was in law, the head of the government.
It is, therefore, in the highest sense of representa-
tion that Mr. Lincoln represented the Northern
States during the present contest. Every American
may be content to see in him a bold leader who did
what thousands would have shrunk from, what no-
toriously some of the most experienced politicians
in the country shrank from. But there is a part of
his character which at this time will command even
more admiration than his firmness and courage. He
was not only the most determined in policy, but he
was the least swayed by passion, of all the leading
statesmen of his party. There is no utterance to be
recorded of him which could offend the government
of any other country or could shock humanity. He
was never captious, nor defiant, nor menacing. Any
indiscretion of his military or naval subordinates
he promptly repaired, and, as far as he could, he en-
deavoured to keep peace with all the world. But it
is his policy towards the vanquished Confederates
which will chiefly give him honour. He has been,
beyond all doubt, one of the most moderate men in
the United States in his ideas of the treatment which
the South should receive. For the Confederate
Generals and their soldiers, even for the political
leaders of the South, he had, unless report err, only
schemes of amnesty. So much was this the case
that the crime which has placed another in his seat
is looked upon as likely to lead to a fiercer rule by
taking away one who had pledged himself to conci-
liation. Of the ominous speculations of Mr. Adams
concerning the policy of President Xohnson we need
say little. " May be he will colour his policy with a
little more of the sternness gatheredfrom the severity
of his own trials. He will give a greater prominence
to the image of Justice than to that of Mercy in
dealing with notorious offenders." Such are the
anticipations of the American Minister as expressed
to his own countrymen. We can only trust that
they will prove unfounded, and that official respon-
sibility in the most exalted post of the Republic will
moderate the fiery zeal of the late Governor of Ten-
nessee. Of this, at least, we are sure—that if
anything can increase the regret of Europe that an
assassin has taken away the late President's life, it
will be the knowledge that his policy is abandoned.
But it is diffiult to believe that the course of mercy,
which is that of true wisdom, should be thus de-
parted from. Mr. Johnson is, perhaps, a man of
even more originality and strength of character than
Mr. Lincoln, and such a man always intends to do
what is most serviceable, even though a storm of
passion may sometimes bscure his judgment. We
have, therefore, a well-founded hope that there will
not be this additional reason for deploring the death
of Mr. Lincoln. For the present we can only join
the American community in their regrets. They do
not require to be told how deep is the sympathy of
the British nation. From the Queen to the humblest
citizen there has been but one voice. Over the
grave of Abraham Lincoln all differences are hushed,
and the two nations mourn as one the high-minded
and good-natured magistrate. Under men like him
the Republic will have no cause to fear either timid
or tyrannical counsels.
POST.—Admiral Fitzroy, who may be said to have
originated and popularised a science which has for
its direct object the salvation of human life on a
scale of great magnitude, has succumbed to the fate
of those who perish from an over-taxed brain. In
devising the means for preserving the lives of others
he has lost his own. His famous weather forecasts
had become known all over the world, and there
was no region so remote—provided only that its
inhabitants went down to the sea in ships and
transacted business on the great waters—but what
has directly or indirectly profited by his most useful
labours. He has given an impetus to the investi-
gation of practical meteorology which had never
been known or even contemplated before. The
proverb about the inconstancy of the weather has
lost its force under his investigations. He has
shown that in this difficult department of knowledge
chance is only another name for human ignorance,
and that the apparently most capricious atmospheric
changes are governed by laws as fixed and regular
as those which keep the planets in their orbits, so
that we have only to study those laws, which are
indeed among the most abstruse in nature, to be
able to predict the weather as certainly as we can
predict the eclipses. If Admiral Fitzroy had done
no more than to illustrate by another demonstration
the great truth that there is no such thing as chance
in nature, even in those departments where uncer-
tainty appears to prevail the most, he would have
deserved to rank high among our greatest scientific
discoverers. But, besides this, there was a practical
utility in his labours which sets their value far above
the solution of mere theoretical and abstract pro-
blems, however abstruse their nature or general
their application. So great and so successful were
the labours under which his brain has at length given
way, that, paradox as it may sound, we shall not
miss him, as a public benefactor, so much as we
should have done had his abilities been less and his
success more restricted. But the fact is that he has
so far completed the science he undertook to formu-
late and to utilise that the machinery he has con-
trived will now go on working by itself. The mas-
ter's hand is withdrawn from the helm, but so well
have the crew been trained that they will be able to
steer the ship in her proper course. Had Admiral
Fitzßoy's genius been inferior to what it was, so
perfect a state of working order would not have been
arrived at in a machine so complicated as the
" weather office ;" and when its chief was withdrawn,
it might have got out of gear, or stopped altogether.
But the creations of genius are immortal, and, when
once perfected, survive in after ages to tell posterity
of their author's skill and power, when the poor
frail body has long mouldered into dust. Admiral
Fitzßoy appears to have been for some days past in
a state of great depression, the result of over study
and too great mental toil. Probably, also, the late
unseasonably hot weather may have had something
to do with his indisposition. Sudden atmospheric
changes, whether from hot to cold or the reverse,
act more or less powerfully on the brain and nerves,
and even on the stomach, which is known to exer-
cise so great, though indirect, an influence on the
mind itself. We are not ourselves when nature,
being oppressed, commands the mind to suffer with
the body. There are conditions of the nervous
system in which an amount of mental labour which
in ordinary health would scarcely be felt may yet
make the brain reel under it. In what may be called
the more mechanical of the departments of mental