The Sun.
London, England, 1853-01-28 00:00:00

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LONDON, FRIDAY, JANUARY 28, 1853.

Quibbles are already heard in one or two quar-
ters, in, answer (save the mark !) to that pamphlet
of Mr. COBDEN'S, the argument of -which is as clear
as a mathematical demonstration. Well, quibbles
are the only things that can be brought to bear
upon the question of the still obdurate, though long
obsolete, apelogiste of the .twenty-two years' war
against the French revolution. It may be worth
while, therefore, considering some of them in de-
tail, as they appear, and treating them succinctly
in the " way of exposure. An illustration
may at once be afforded of the ehufiling
insincerity evinced upon this subject by
those who applaud as just, and as, indeed,
inevitable, the last struggle against France and
England—the struggle beginning in 1793, and end-
ing in 1815, a struggle which saddled England
with a debt of 500,000,0001. sterling, and France
with an old Bourbon Sovereign—France having
shaken off the Sovereign since then, and not only
the Sovereign, but both the elder and the younger
branch of the worn-out dynasty, but England not
having, by any means, yet shaken off the debt !
The illustration is one, it must be confessed,
mewhat remarkable in its character. It has
aken some little time, it would seem, to pre-
pare it ; for already this is our third day's
reference to the brochure of the Honourable
Gentleman the Member for the West Riding
of Yorkshire, and yet it was only this
morning that the first allusion to the pamphlet
(an allusion containing the quibble about to be
referred to) was made in the columns of our chief
morning contemporary. Remember, therefore,
that the quibble is not lightly advanced by the
Times—it is only advanced, it would appear, after
mature and lengthened deliberation. It is this.
Mr. COBDEN is admitted, "for the sake of argu-
ment" (of course only "for the sake of argument"),
to be correct in asserting that the rupture of 1793
was " our own doing exclusively," that England,
in short, was the aggressor—BUT—the other war,
the war which ensued a little later, meaning, of
course, the war which followed the rupture of the
Treaty of Amiens, was a war in which England
stood simply on the defensive—a war in which the
aggressor was France, or rather the chieftain of
=,France--NApoLEoN. Now, this is the quibble.
2-NVe have react Mr. COBDEN'S pamphlet very erro-
neously, if his argument does not go to show that
the crime of the whole struggle, not the contest of
the first eight or ten years, but .of the whole
twenty-two years, beginning with 1793 and ending
with 1815, devolves solely and directly upon the
British Government. We have read history very
mistakingly, if it does not prove this as clearly as
any one of the rudiments of arithmetic, or as any one
of the elementary truths of natural philosophy.
It is the merest evasion to take Mr. COBDEN'S ar-
gument as applying simply to the contest prior to
the Treaty of Amiens, instead of to the whole of
the struggle from first to last, from Lours XVl.'e
e:xecution to NAPOLEON L's avowed and final abdi-
cation. The pamphlet asserts this plainly enough
throughout. The pamphleteer speaks over and
over again of the twenty-two years' war, not of
the nine years war, but of the war up to
the night of the battle of Waterloo. England
is shown by Mr. COBDEN, is proved by history,
to have been guilty, before GOD aucl man, of
the enormous crime of provoking that struggle
against the French Revolution. Here, however,
in that very phrase—the "war against the French
the
prevarication. discoverable the germ 01.
the
prevarication. It is objected, that up la
to
Treaty of Amiens, it was, if you will, a war
against the •
French Revolution, but that after-
wards it was a war against—NAroLEoN. What
miserable quibbling indeed is this ? Why, the
struggle was renewed against NAPOLEON—simply
because he was the incarnation or representative
of the Revolution, the child born of it, the hero
who reduced it to order, and therefore made i

really formidable. It is merely begging the
queaion, consequently, to maintain that the
contest which followed the rupture of the Treaty
of Amiens was a war against NAPOLEON, and not
a war against the Revolution. The struggle both
before and after was identical—and what history
proves is this, that throughout, from 1793 to
1815, during the whole of those two-and-twenty
years the crime of the war rested with England,
because England was the A.ggressor.
It must be confessed that Mr. COZDEN has in a
Droaore laid himself open in hiik Pamphlet to this