The Sun.
London, England, 1862-12-30 00:00:00

TIMES.—We have strangely changed sides with
America. Twice within 10 years she has been the
quiet and self-complacent spectator of struggles
which she believed to be the death-throes of our
European influence and our Indian Empire. On
these occasions she thanked Heaven that she was
not as other nations, oven as England. She grew
corn and Cotton ; she pushed her way into the wil-
derness ; she covered the sea with ships and a con-
tinent with railways; by the end of the century
she would be a hundred million strong, and in a
condition to lay down the law to her neighbours.
Her enormous resources, her ever-doubling crops,
her overwhelming exports, her diminishing debt,
almost taxed the power of arithmetic. All this
was the reward of high principle, a generous
independence, a just regard for natural rights, and
a righteous abhorrence of tyranny and monopoly
in all their hateful forms. Of course, we looked
very small in the contrast ; indeed, what State of
the Old World did not look small as it was invited
to creep under the legs of the American Colossus P
All our figures went the other way deep into the
abyss of unprofitable expenditure. It took a very
long plummet-line to fathom the deep sea of our
Crimean or our Indian expenditure. When the
waves became calm enough for financial sounding,
and it appeared that we had thrown the nice round
sum of a hundred millions into the Black Sea,
and scattered not much less on the sands of
India, then America returned with renewed zest
to her more agreeable though not less monstrous
calculations. A new style of eloquence was invented
for the due display of American greatness, and
the British reader, wearied with the feats of enu-
meration necessary for sums of ten or a dozen figures,
began to long for the harmless platitudes of his own
country, generally constructed on a plan to save
mental toil. All this was but the other day. The
calculations of corn,--toe, and tobacco, of acres,
railways, and ships, of human beings, pigs, cattle,
and what not, still encumber our table. It really was
some satisfaction to think that if our own stupid
jealousy or ambition should ruin us past hope
there was a land of plenty not far off only too glad
to receive us. The tables are turned, England has
season enough to be humble, and therefore it is
needless to dwell on the fact that in her own little
way her revenue, and even her trade, is improving.
There is a most cheering Revenue return to come
out for the quarter to-morrow night. But that is
not the point we select for our contrast. The two
opposites that present themselves to us just now are
the stupendous, indefinite, conjectural, untrustwor-
thy estimates of the actual debt and future expen-
diture in the Federal Budget on the one side, and
on the other the quiet, exact, nicely calculated little
tale of destitution and relief given by our own Mr.
Chase to a set of holyday folks in a concert-room
at Chester. Mr. Gladstone has applied himself with
his wonted diligence to get up all the figures of the
Lancashire and Cheshire distress. As for the veri-
table Mr. Chase, who is pouring a Niagara of paper
money over the Northern States, we are happily
relieved from the necessity of exactness in that side
of the contrast. There are people who undertake
to tell us how many gallons of water fall over Nia-
gara in a year, a day, or a minute ; and we can
conceive some difference of estimate between them.
There is quite as much difference between all the
estimates of Federal expenditure. Whether it be
already £250,000,000, of British money, or
£400,000,000 ; how much has be en borrowed, how
much issued in paper, how much is owing to con-
tractors, and what prospect there is of eventual re-
payment, in any possible period, at any percentage,
are all points on which a man has only to make a
statement, and he is sure of an immediate contradic-
tion. If the telegraph says one thing the letters
say another ; if Mr. Chase commits himself, the
American papers tell him ho has made a mistake,
and he confesses to an oversight. It is, however,
all but certain that long before the quarrel is made
up the debts of the two belligerents will amount to
our own national debt. That is a burden which
has become light to us, for under it we have more
than doubled our tax-bearing power. The expe-
rience of half a century shows that we can increase,
and multiply, and thrive, and acquire power and
empire under what once was thought a crushing
weight. But England is peculiarly adapted for taxa-
tion. No financier could imagine a country more
within the gripe of almost any financial system,
whether bearing chiefly on consumption, on expen-
diture, on home produce, or on imports. There is
no escaping the tax-gatherer here. But the United
States, for the very reason that it is the most open,
the most undeveloped, more expansive, and by na-
ture the freest country in the world, so it can most
easily evade the tax gatherer. However the war
may be settled, another thunder-cloud hangs over
the country, in the arrangement of the debt and the
extraction of taxes from a race taught to regard
taxes as a badge of Old World slavery.

And now for our own share of this great misery
and perplexity—the Budget of Charity, as epito-
mised by Mr. Gladstone. The figures are not small,
but they don't run into the infinite and impossib:e.
The story is limited to a space, a populaticn, and a
time, and a small margin comprises what is less
known or less certain. The number of the persons
employed in cotton manufacture is about 400,000
half are unemployed, an eighth are fully employed,
three-eighths on half time, The loss of weekly wages
is put at £150,000 a week, or nearly £8,000,000 a
year. The 27 Unions charged by law with the miti-
gation of this calamity contain rather more than
two millions of people and property estimated for the
rates at above £5,500,000 a year. On the face of
the figures, therefore, the property itself is not un-
equal to the burden, supposing it not to last so long
as to render the property unproductive and worth-
less. However, England has not left the matter to
the relieving officer and the rate collector. While
about 250,000 persons are receiving relief from the
rates, about 190,000 are relieved only from chari-