The Sun.
London, England, 1854-04-21 00:00:00

LONDON, FRIDAY, APRIL 21, 1854.

~ A fatality, if one might so speak, has long
seemed to hang over the Greek Government. As
to the precise nature of the evil-influence latterly
guiding the councils of the Athenian Cabinet—of
that we can only as yet judge by hearsay, by put-
ting (as the saying is) two and two together, in
other words, by the juxta-position of facts, many
of which have by this time become sufficiently
notorious. Regarding the policy carried out for
some time past in that direction, we can already,
by the light of these facts, recognise an amount
of turpitude which has rapidly led to the estrange-
ment from Greece, one after another, of the ma-
jority of the more powerful Scates of Christendom.
A faithlessness on the part of the reigning dynasty
so flagrant, so enormous, so undeniable, that it
has led, we rep eat, to the estrangA)aent from it
of the majority of the great European Govern-
ments.
It cannot be forgotten how very recently, in
reply to a question put to her MAJESTY'S Ministers
by the hon. gentleman the member for Pontefract
—it cannot be forgotten how, on the evening of
Thursday, the 6th of this present month of April,
Lord JOHN RUSSELL declared to the House of
Commons his firm conviction that the recent dis-
t nrbanees in the Greek provinces had been got up
designedly, for the purpose of weakening the au-
thority of the Sultan, and that there were nume-
rous Proofs----{mark these words ! and remember
they are words uttered by a Minister of the
Crown, by the Leader of the House of Commons,
and, as such, by one of the principal members of
her Britannic MAJESTY'S Government]---" that
there were numerous PROOFS of the. King and
Queen. of Greece haring given, the greatest en-
couragement to the insurrectionas. is I" The na-
ture of those proofs has as yet to be learnt.
It can only be known precisely on the publication
of official documents relating to tie
mysterious
transactions. Fortunately, such a publication,
the substantial form of a blue-book, may beLiwn
very speedily anticipated. It has, in a manner,
been formally promised, and that promise must
soon be redeemed.
Nothing having as yet appeared, however, in
the nature of any such authoritative or detailed
statement, we are left, as we have before remarked,
to form merely conjectural opinions, from
facts
already known, from incidents already observed,
from occurrences already notorious, in regard to
bility of the Greek Govern-
the presumed culpa
ment. •
a. few of the more
Consider, fur a moment,
prominent of these facts, or incidents, or occur-
rences, renees, or whatever else they may be designated.
Compare them with one another, place them side
by side, blend them together—and you will arrive
at the same natural and inevitable deduction,
under each and every one of these circumstances.
Remember the startling declaration already
referred to—the declaration made by Lord
Join'T RUSSELL on the 6th instant, in the House
of Commons, to the effect that the greatest encou-
ragement had been given to the insurrectionists
by the Greek Sovereigns ! That there are
" numerous PROOFS " of the KENO and QC LEVY of
Greece h ing gi yen that encouralemeat--- to whom?

Recollect—to the friends of the CZAR, and the
enemies of the Turkish Government.
Remember, moreover, the extraordinary cir-
cular addressed towards the close of last month,
dated, in fact, the 29th of March, to all the Eng-
lish Consuls in the Levant by her Britannic
MAJESTY'S Ambassador at Constantinople ! A
document viewing with "indignant sorrow and
reprobation" [these are the very expressions of
Lord STRATVORD DE REDCLIFFE] "a movement
which operates only in favour of Russia, while it
has not even the merit of being spontaneous." Bear
those last few syllables especially in remem-
brance !

Recollect, moreover, that eight days after that
circular was penned at Constantinople by our
Ambassador, Lord JOHN RUSSELL declared, in
the House of Commons, in the sitting to
which we hare already made more than one
referenc-, that the movement regarded by her
MAJESTY'S representative at the Sublime Porte as
being "only iu favour of R Issia," and as not
having " even the merit of being spontaneous,"
was in reality strongly encouraged, if it were nut
actually origixated, by the infatuated Greek Sove-
reigns.

Let it not be forgotten that these are formid-
able imputations cast by no obscure hand, but by
that of a leading Minister of the Crown of Eng-
land, against King arrio, some time [in 1832]
Prince of Bavaria, and against his Queen, some
time [in 1836] Princess AMELIA of Oldenburg.
The "numerous PROOFS" of the criminal con-
nivance of -the KING and QUEEN of Greece with
these insurgents in the cause of the Russian
Amerces—the proofs spoken of so confidently on
the 6th instant by the Noble Lord the Leader of
the House. of Commons—have yet, of course, to
be adduced in justification of the charge, and
thereupon, in the substantial form of a blue-book,
laid upon the table of the Imperial Legislature.
Nevertheless, although that promised blue-book
has yet to be printed, or at any rate has yet to
be published—rna.y we 'not already perceive in
various events which have actually transpired
strong confirmation of the truth of the very
grave charges directed against the Court of Athens
by the Noble Leader of the House of Commons
speaking in the name of her Britannic MAJESTY'S
Government ?

Can we ? It is a rather serious question.
Can we not already discover that these bold asser-
tions from the lips of Lord Jorm RUSSELL have
been accompanied By events somewhat remarkable
in the way of corroboration or enforcement ?
Can we not perceive this not merely in the
abrupt dismissal by the Sublime Porte of the
Greek Ambassador to the Court of the SULTAN,
but also, peremptorily, of the various Greek sub-
jects hitherto resident at Constantinople ?
Above all, is there not powerful and direct con-
firmation of every syllable uttered on the 6th of
April, in the House of Commons, by Lord JOHN
RUSSELL, in the circumstance notified by us in our
impression of last Monday, that, by a curious coin-
cidence, on that same 6th of April, at Athens, the
English, Austrian, French, and Swedish Ministers
did not attend at the solemn Te Lewin there and
then chaunted before King Orno and Queen AN-
GELIA ?—that memorable 6th being the day when
the anniversary of the independence of Greece was
celebrated !

Observe that announcement---4or just now it is
especially significant. The English Minister was
not present. The French Minister was not pre-
sent. Neither was the Swedish nor the Austriaq!
Somewhat propitious, we take it, that latter inti
mation. Not a word about the Russian or—
mark this particularly !—about the Prussian Am
bassador ! Consequently, the obvious deduction
from the silence preserved in regard to them
that they were both present at the Te neum from
which not only the English and the French, but
even the Austrian and Swedish Ministers alieuted
themselves. Naturally, of --course, the Russian
Ambassador wai present after the movement made
[we quote half from Lord JOHN RussELL and half
from Lord STRATFORD DE REDCLIFFEZ] in favour of
the Czia at the instigation, or at least with the
encouragement, of the Greek Sovereigns. But the
Prussian Ambassador t There' the rub. Verily the
straw thrown up at Athens, shows more pointedly
the direction of the wind (for Prussia) than even
the Berlin weathercock.

Verily, too—And the reflection i 3 just now yet
more worthy of zemark-the day of reckoning is
fast approaching for the infatuated Greek Go-
vernment.

know nothing whatever of Mr. MATTHEW,
of geyWood, who lectured the turnouts of Stock-
port last 'week on the political economy of their
poiitiv). :but certainly if such balderdash can be
paasa:atit to the poor men as irrefutable argu-
ment Material will never be wanting for persuad-
ing themAliat they are grievously wronged, and
do well to be angry. Mr. MATTHEW may be, and
we suppose is, a respectable man, and endowed
with the requisite faculties for addressing an open-
air meeting ; and perhaps a rnperior thinker,
with inferior tact and physical powers, would
haVe come off but second best, mill-lasses
being judges, in an encounter with an Orator
pleading against masters, and for the idolised
ten per cent. We would fain hope, how-
ever, that there were among the shrewd over-
lookers, and other long-headed Lancashire then
present, many who had learned enough at Mecha-
nics' Institutes, or by their mother wit, to shrug
their shoulders at arguments which elicited loud
plaudits from the younger portion of the audience.
Mr. MATTHEW began with an imposing nega-
tive " he denied that capital and labour were
identical in their interests." The wealthy mas-
ters and their needy operatives, he wished it to be
understood, were natural enemies, and it was as
glorious for poverty to do battle against wealth as
for the Turks to resist the Russians. We fancy
we see some long-headed, and, perhaps, smutty-
faced operative, ready to exclaim, though
repressed by fear of hisses, " A'weel, Mr.
MATTHEW, may be most masters get us to
work as cheap as they can, but how could they put
us to work at all if they had na' capital to pay
our wages with till the brass came in from the
cloth we had wade ?" lii the Gospel according
to this MATTHEW, however, the capitalist is the
arch enemy of the poor man—the fiend from
whom he must pray to be delivered ; and all be-
cause he does what the poor 'man himself does,
that is, gets his work done as cheap as he can.
We should like to know whether Mr. MATTHEW,.
or any man of his audience, would not get his
shoes mended by the cheapest hand that would
work for him ; nay, whether any one of
all his numerous female• Bearers would not
rush to the shop which sold the very gowns
their own hands had weaved to save a farthing a
yard ; that is, whether these patriotic ladies
would not endeavour to get the mill work done for
a farthing a yard less, since if raw material and
other thing remain at the same average, or rise
to a higher one, all the cheapness must come out
of chea.pened. labour. Not to travel to foreign
countries, let Mr. MATTHEW explain to his hear-
ers, why, hitherto, Irish wretchedness has not
been notoriously least, wherever capital has, as in
Ulster, been most secure and plentiful ; and whe-
ther of late years it has not diminished just in
the proportion that property has been attracted to
that unhappy land ? In the hope that these lines
may meet the eye of some Stockport operatives,
NN"e would repeat what most of our readers well
know, that, indirectly of course, the very money
saved by reductions of wages, supposing that the
reduction is not a mere precaution against ruinous
loss, returns again to the workmen. It sometimes,
indeed, employs another class of operatives, but
more commonly the wealthy manufacturer en-
larges his mill, or builds a new one, and thus in.,
creased the demand for new hands, or prevents
the growing populatiost kora pressing upon each
other ; but whichever elLet it produce, wages are
either raised or kept from falling. The an-
tagonism of capital and labour is only one of
the many oases in which the pressure on
each other of seemingly opposite interests sup-
, ports the whole fabric of society ; indeed,
identity is stagnation, and antagonism is life and
activity. To the antagonism of chemical elements
we OWO all the invaluable compounds of the labo-
ratory and of nature; to qv antagonism of the mag-

netie and of the electric currents, the space anni-
hilating telegraph ; nay, to the natural antagonism
of fire and water we owe the very power which
makes Stockport and Preston what they have been,
and what we trust they will yet be.; and to what,
in this sense, may be called the antagonism of
capital and labour, we owe, in great part, the
existence, the support, and the increase of all our
great manufactures.

Mr. MATTHEW considered that " the power of
masters to put up a notice in their mills to take
away their wages, showed that there was a power
that should not exist." We are bold to affirm
that not only is it absurd to deny a man the right
to pay what wages he pleases ; but that without
this power, manufactures never Gould have been
begun ; never been carried on ; and that if carried
on, masters would be bankrupts, and men beggars.
The state of the markets presses on the master,
the pressure on the master naturally propagates
itself to the men, and if this natural cause of
things be rudely stopped, injury to both must be
the eventual result.

Mr. MATTHEW actually deprecated foreign trade !
" The working classes did not want to clothe the
backs of people across the seas." We do not
doubt the limited range of Mr. ALATTazw's bene-
volence, and we must own that those misers, the
capitalists, are probably as indifferent to the con-
dition of Chinese, Brazilian, or AmeriCan backs as
Mr. M. and the operatives are ; but (perhaps
through our stupidity or perversity) we cannot
for the life of us comprehend the orator's doctrine
about the depreciation of the prices of our manu-
factures by a foreign demand for them. "Every
inch a ship sailed from our shores the cloths on
board of her depreciated in value : he. could not walk
to the other end of the. platforna..with so little
depreciation as if he walked to the middle only,
and so of our cloths sent abroad." We have
no doubt of Mr. MATTHEW'S depreciation in value
from venturing unto the Stockport platform, but
how any of our manufacturers could be induced
to send their goods to the very Antipodes, unless
theygot fully as much for them as at home, leaving
their customers abroad to pay all charges of trans-
port, we are entirely unable to comprehend. Or
how sending goods out of the country should
have any other effect than that of making them
dearer at home, and sustaining, therefore, home
wages, is to us equally unintelligible. But we
suspect that our operative hearer, before referred
to, must have sadly longed, to shout out, "Na-a-y,
Master MATTHEW, that 'onl do ; I only wish I
was sure of some thumping orders in from the dig-
gins, or Brazil, or anywhere else, and they'd soon
give us our ten per cent." If, indeed, the
speaker were addressing some old " Strikers"
they would tell him that a time when large orders
were in, home or foreign, it mattered not which,
was just the time that they chose, if they could,
for demanding increased wages. Mr. MATTHEW
summed up by the emphatic'dec!aration, that the
impoverishment of the workman was in propor-
tion to the extent of our exportation ! We .will
not' insult the understanding of a Stockport opera-
tive, by attempting to refute the doctrine that bite
more there is for him to do the worse he is prid.
Ho has felt too often, practically, the difference
between a busy and a slack time, to need a word
in refat,.tion of so monstrous an assertion.

Mr. COWELL, we see, did nut endorse the rea-
sonings of him of Heywood, though, of course,
too polite to contradict them. He mentioned,
however, as the reason for their absurd demand
of a uniform 10 per cent., that the " time was
come fur the people to reap a portion of the bene-
fits and profits of Free Trade." Away, there-
fore, in one breath, he b:ew the who's of Mr.
MATTHEW'S laborious nonsense ; for what the pro-
fits of Free Trade should be, but profits on our
exportations, as well as our importations, Mr.
MATTHEW himself could not tell us. If the
benefits of Free Trade be the basis of the
demand for ten per cent., assuredly our profits
must have resulted from " clothing the backs of
people across the seas." We hope Mr. M. will
not essay political economy to operatives again.
Wd surmise that had he been at some good.school,
and yet in his teens, such an essay on. the sub-
ject would. have endangered his undergoing an
operation the opposite of "clothing the back, and
bringing down upon him the only arguments by
which certain persons can be enlightened.

COURT CIRCULAR.

WINDSOR, APRIL 20.

The dinner party at the Castle yesterday included her
Royal Highnem the Duchess of Kent, the Belgian Min-
ister and Madame Van de Weyer, Lady Anna Maria
Dawson, Colonel the Hon. Charles and Mrs. Grey, the
Baroness de Speth, and Colonel the Right Hon. C.
Forester (commanding officer, Royal Horse Guards).
The band of the 97th Regiment attended during din-
ner, and played the following selection :

Overture, " Haydee" - Aubor.
Aria. " Inveir col sesso" (L'Ajo) Donizetti.
Duetto, " Deh conte" (Norma) Bellini.
Waltz Summer Flo a ers Tinney.
Introduziene, " Il•Barbiere" Rossini.
Galop, L'Eclair D'Albert.
Her Majesty's private band was in attendance in the
evening, and performed the following music

Overture, " Egraont" Beethoven.
Prire, Barcarolle, Air, and Chcsur (L'Etoile
du Nord) Meyerbeer.
The Queen and Prince, accompanied by the Prince
of Wales and Prince Alfred, rode out on horseback yes-
terday afternoon, attended by the Countess of Desart,
Lord Charles Fitzroy, and Lieutenant-Colonel F. H.
Seymour.
Tile Princess Royal and Princess Alice took a carriage
drive. •

The Duke and Duchess of Wellington, on their return
from the French capital, will take possession of Apsley
House for the season, which celebrated mansion will not,
however, be complete in its embetlishinents until the
end of the year. •
. . .
Tile Earl of CaWdor has left South An,lley-street for
Paris. Tie countess has left town on a visit to the
venerable Lady Grenville, at Dropinore.
The Earl and. Countess of Harrowby return to Gros-
venor-square at the end of next week, from Sandou Hall,
Stafford-.hire, for the season.

Toe Esri and Gnintess of MAhneshury, who have
been yrs-sing the holidays in Paris, are expected to arrive
in Whitehall-gardens at the close of the ensuing week
for the season.

Tile 'Viscount and Viscountess Canning have left
Grosvenor-square, on a visit to Mr. Henry and the Lady
Harriet Drurnruond, at Aliiury P.,rk, where the hon.
memner for Surrey is entertaining a select party during
the recess.

BANQUET TO THE DUKE OW 13EAUFORT.—The Society
of Merchants of Bristol intend giving a grand banquet
to hi; Grace the Duke of Beaufort, who has recently
succeeded to the title and estates, on Wednesday, the
7th of June.

DEATH OP COLONEL ACTON, LATE M.P.—We have
to reuori the de,uise of this high-minded gentleman, who
for so many years represented the county of Wicklow on
Conservative principles. fie died at his beautiful seat,
West Aston, on the 10th inst. Colonel Acton's oppo-
nent generally was the Right Hon. James Grattan, son
of the celebrated statesman of that name. The contests
in Wicklow involving so many petitions cost him up-
wards of 30,0001.
THE DAY OF lIIIIIILIATION.—Owing to a want of
precision in the proclamation issued for the observance
of Wednesday next as a holyday, the merchants and
hankers throughout the United Kingdom are in a state
of complete uncertainty whether that day can legally be
regarded in the same light as Sundays, Christmas-day,
and Good Friday, with respect to the payment of bills
of exchange. According to the act of the 7th and Bth
of George IV., the occasions on which public holydays
can be declared by proclamation are limited to "solemn
fasts, or days of thanksgiving," while, in the present
instance, the proclamation is worded for "a day of
general humiliation and prayer." It is therefore evi-
dent that, under a literal interpretation of the law, no
exemption will exist on Wednesday next from any of
the common legal liabilities of ordinary days. In this
state of affairs application has been made to the G-overn-
merit, in order that the matter may be immediately
cleared up.
PROHIBITION OF THE EXPORT OF IRON TO THE CON-
TINENT.—Sudden inconvenience, of a serious character,
has just been experienced by the Loudon firms in the
iron trade from a resolution. conveyed to them through
the Customs the day before yesterday, prohibiting the
exportation of all kinds of iron to the Continent of
Europe. Marry shipments have thus been stopped to
Hamburg and Rostock, and other ports in the Baltic,
which, inasmuch as they were in execution of orders,
cannot be suspended without loss or difficulty. It is
presumed that some regulations will beforthwith issued
to facilitate the continuance of the regular trade, under
such restrictions and securities as may be deemed suffi-
cient ; but unless these are of a simple nature, and are
issued promptly, great damage will be inflicted in many
quarters.
THE COLONY OF VICTORIA.—The revenue of the
colony of Victoria in the year 1853 amounted to
3,302,2491., being more Ulan double the revenue of the
previous year. The proceeds of the gold licenses rose
from 399,1381, in 1852, to 060,833/. in 1853 ; the Cue.
tuns duty on. spirits imported, from 186,4911. to
561,11171. ; the proc.eds of the .al- of land, from
703,8551. to 1,396,7131. The population at the close of
the-year was e:itituated at 233,000-