The Sun.
London, England, 1862-10-22 00:00:00

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THE SUN.
LONDON, WEDNESDAY, OCT. 22, 1862.

The contributions for the relief of the distress in
Lancashire are pouring in amain. Yesterday the
Lord Mayor received a sum of £lO,OOO sterling
towards that benevolent object. This magnificent
contribution being, however, but the first instal-
ment of a splendid subscription, to the amount of
£25,000 sterling, poured with a lavish hand into
the funds by the inhabitants of Bombay. A con-
tribution of £25,000, collected at a meeting of those
inhabitants of Bombay at a great gathering, pre-
sided over by his Excellency Sir BARTLE FRERE.
Who shall say, with facts like these before us, that
the British Empire is not one in feeling and in
spirit—that the populations of its most remote and
scattered possessions, differing in race, in religion, in
language, in manners and customs, are not bound
together by our all-embracing bond of sympathy P
The loyal and patriotic devotion to the interests of
the innocent sufferers in the old fatherland, from
the effects of the unnatural civil war so
long raging in the once United States of Ame-
rica : the profound and earnest sympathy
felt for the miseries of the unfortunate operatives
in the manufacturing districts in the north of Eng-
land—a sympathy, a devotion, manifested alike to
the West in Canada, to the East in Hindostan, to
the far off Soath in Australasia—augurs, in truth,
wonderfully for the preservation in its full and
complete integrity of that vast empire whose consti-
tuent portions are distributed far and wide over
the four quarters of the habitable globe ! That
empire which, nevertheless, one of the most learned
and gifted among the very numerous body of the
Mr. SMITHS in England is strangely bent upon
breaking up altogether. Professor GOLDWIN
SMITH'S proposition, involving not alone the con-
cession of an absolute independence to gigantic ter-
ritories, like Hindostan, or the two Canadas, or that
noble group of colonies into which the fifth conti-
nent, the Antarctic continent of Australia, is
already parcelled, His notion actually going to
the length that lesser items—helping, however
moderately, to make up the grand sum
total of the British Empire—items such as
Gibraltar, and Malta and St. Helena, and so forth,
should be cast loose from our authority—and given
—to whom ? Gibraltar to Spain, of course—as a
conciliatory offering, the memory of which
must, Professor SMITH argues, bind the sym-
pathies of the Cabinet of Madrid everlastingly
with those of the Cabinet of St. James's. Malta—
to what power ? Perhaps Professor SMITH, out of
the same conciliatory spirit, would suggest to our
imperial neighbour and ally, France. For, to
France, Malta belonged—no matter for how brief a
space—before ever it belonged to England: It
were idle to dream of resuscitating the long since
dead and buried religious order of knighthood, the
knights of St. John—appointing another Grand
Master to lord it over his band of preux chevaliers
at Valetta. An attempt, that would be, not one
jot less of an
anachronism than the installation
again of a newly created band of Knights Templars
down at our Templ® (Inner and Middle) between
Temple Bar and the River Thames—driving
away the lawyers now haunting that locality, and
replacing the present reverend and respected Master
of the Temple by a new reverend and gallant
Viiatvr of the
__Knights Tomplaro, Cou4ent to the

r disintegratingprocess
tsuggested b
perversey t ha to f
s very
0,.
disant patriots, Professor GOLDWIN SMITH—and
d lopyesst,
while yielding up Gibraltar to Spain, you must
needs hand over Malta to either France or Italy—
precisely as upon going further eastwards you
must give up the lonian Islands to Greece. Alto-
gether, as we have before now had occasion to
insist, a most suicidal course of proceedings.
Nothing less, in point of fact, than untying
the fasces of Britannia. hers being a grander and
a more world-wide rule than any ever dreamt of by
the lords of Ancient Rome. Grander and more
world-wide than any vision of dominion that ever
entered into ALEXANDER'S imagination. Centuries
after the brief rising and falling of the empire
carved out by the conquering sword of the young
Macedonian—centuries after the protracted sway
and gradual downfall and disruption of the vast
empire of the C.ESARS, the other half of this globe
of ours having been discovered by COLUMBUS and
his companions. And of that new hemisphere—
how large a proportion appertains to this
Empire of our own ? The two Canadas—
British Columbia—Nova Scotia—New Brunswick
—the West Indies—Vancouver—New Zealand—a
swarm of little islands scattered all about Oceania,
and the whole of the vast island or rather continent
of Australasia. Of all the extravagant crotchets
ever conceived by a learned bookworm turned into
a political daydreamer, this is surely one of the most
extravagant, if it be not actually the most extrava-
gant. Yet some are disposed seriously to discuss
this phantasy of Professor SMITH'S, ae if it were a
proposition that the British Government could ever
for an instant seriously entertain ! Happily, in
the midst of the discussion of these exaggerated
notions of what would be magnanimous
in the view of Mr. SMITH, of what to everybody
else almost but Mr. SMITH would be the very
-height of absurdity—come these affecting attesta-
tions of the oneness of feeling prevailing all over the
Empire this learned Professor would fain destroy !
A oneness of feeling, a fullness of sympathy, a fer-
vour of loyalty and patriotism which is being prac-
tically manifested by the pouring in abundantly of
many thousands sterling for the relief of the starv-
ing operatives in one corner of the beloved old
fatherland. The cordiality of feeling thus binding
together in one family the many millions owning
allegiance to the Crown of VICTORIA, re-
quires but one material aid to secure to
it the attribute of permanence. And
that? We have long since argued in the columns
of The Sun—with this very result in view—in
favour of the steady, and systematic, and rapid ex-
tension, over-land and under-sea, of a connected net-
work of electric telegraphs. Once let the electric
telegraph link together—as it surely will and must
eventually—the whole of our numerous and world-
wide possessions in Europe, Asia, Africa,
and even at our antipodes in Australasia,
—and the securest of all the material bonds that
could possibly be devised for it would be bound
around the rods of the fasces of England. The fasces
of the British Empire would be held together, visi-
bly and materially then, by the coil of the overland
wires, and of the submarine cables of the Electric
Telegraph. Already they are held together, it is
true, by that most potent of electric sympathies or
affinities, the loyal patriotism of a free people
benignly presided over by a Constitutional Govern-
ment. To this, however, it is only reasonable that
there should be added, as it is certain beyond a
doubt that sooner or later there will be added, that
additional and material guarantee for the mainten-
ance of the integrity of the British Empire, the
extension in every possibly direction, north, south,
east, and west from London, of the mystic fibres of
the Electric Telegraph.

It were too bad to pass over in silence the annual
Essex Tory fete at Castle Hedingham. It is the
one agricultural gathering which boasts of freedom
from the rule—" no politics." It has a tacit rule
which supersedes the common one, that the politics
shall all be Tory politics, and Tories of the rural
class are the only tolerated speakers. The stout
old squire, gouty too, we are sorry to add, is repre-
sented by Major BERESFORD, the glorious W. B.
of FRAIL and Derby memory. 'The young country
squires are represented by the dapper Du CANE,
with a few other rustic CICEROS of the same poli-
tical temper, but not so well known to the, political
world. On this occasion the county M.P,'s give
an account of their Stewardship to admiring audi-
ditors, and to auditors who, if they do not admire,
are required by their landlords to cheer their land-
lords' representatives. Nothing, therefore, can be
more harmonious; each man is the very counter-
part of his fellow; the farmers, under the mighty
landlord power, are as politically similar, super-
ficially, as the sheets of paper in a powerful
hydrostatic pres&

And what do we find as the distinctive charac-
teristics of the srccies Essex Tory ? We ought to
have something very choice here. It is no mere
DISRAELI Toryism ; none of the out of office Tory-
ism, which to keep in office would propose Reform
Bills, or to get into office would vote for reduction
of expenditure; your Essex Toryism is something
almost as much superior to that sort of thing
as the man to the Gorilla. It is the
finest specimen of what the " Darwinian
principle of selection " can do in the department of
politics. It not only stands by Church-rates, illi-
mitable expenditure, refusal of every shred of re-
form, and every'ancient and every modern abuse,
but abroad it denounces revolution, except when it
is to split up a republic, and sympathises with the
Southern States and slavery, because they are agri-
cultural States, and the planters the perfection of
Tory Squires. " Civil and Religious absolutism
all the world over" is the toast they would prefer.
The POPE, the King of PRUSSIA, JEFFERSON DAVIS,
are their heroes of the hour; the Emperor of the
FRENCH would merit their cheers for his adminis-
tration, but then he is ever making that cursed
appeal to the origin of his power—that odious uni-
versal suffrage.

We were told of the quietness of the departed
Session, and the tribute offered to the SOVEREIGN
by this sympathising truce to party warfare;
the Right Hon. BENJAMAN DISRAELI, " sixth time
Knight of the Shire for Bucks," coming in for an
Essex rap on the knuckles for having ventured to
endanger the truce, and that too for the hideous
purpose of reducing the national expenditure, and
diminishing occupations for younger sons of the
landed gentry. We were, however, informed that
the truce could last no longer. Next session ground
must be broken. The Tories must give battle for
party objects again, though for what object but that
of place, was not specified ; still Lord PALMER-
STON is warned that fight will be shown; and the
gouty W. B. even announced that his malady made
it his duty to retire, an announcement loudly ob-
jected to, but persisted in by the major. So de-
termined is to be the predicted battle that it
will demand, he says, a younger man, and one
whose aching limbs do not compel him to absence
from important divisions. In fact a Tory
conscription is proclaimed for the session
of 1863. The Tories mean to take possession of the
Treasury benches, and a second time to have in
their own hands the dissolution of Parliament. Let
mgl packet contrutors And Ui4l2 priests open their