The Sun.
London, England, 1854-05-25 00:00:00

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LONDON, THURSDAY, MAY 25, 1854.

Half-a-dozen months ago more value might
have attached to the announcement which we are
enabled to make this evening, to the effect that
the Four Powers have entered into some sort of
amicable agreement that England, France,
Austria, and Prussia have come to some kind of
satisfactory understanding. As matters stand at
present, after all that has occurred during the
past year and a half, we believe that the public
at large has altogether lost faith in the value of
treaties, or seneds, or notes, or protocols. The
time has gone by when intelligence of the arrange-
ment said to have been entered into yesterday at
Vienna between the assembled plenipotentiaries
from the Courts of St. James, the Tuileries, Char-
lottenburg, and Schoenbrunn, could he reasonably
expected to excite anything like the enthusiasm of
hope or confidence in the population. The cordial
co-operation of Austria and Prussia with France and
England has been too long questioned to be re-
garded now as matter of instant credibility. Nay,
the very nature of the treaty of alliance recently
concluded between the Cabinets of Berlin and
Vienna—that specious but suspicious document
-we last evening took occasion in these columns to
analyse somewhat minutely—would be amply suffi-
cient of itself to provoke suspicion, even in the
presence of the most auspicious information. I
Wherefore it would be idle to estimate the ac-
count coming to us to-day from the Austrian ca-
pital as of that magnitude of importance that it
can bs expected to bring the war at once to a
satisfactory termination. Against the probability,
or rather we might even go so far as to assert
against the possibility, of any such happy issue to
events now transpiring, there are enormous and at
any rate seemingly insurmountable obstructions—
impediments only too easy of enumeration. There
is the notorious duplicity of the King
of PRUSSIA.
There is the Czka's known infuriation against
Turkey and her allies, the two great Powers of
Western Christendom. There is the reli-
gious fanaticism excited among the Rus-
sians--a fanaticism that cannot be
conjured
away by a protocol. There are all those
compli-
cations in regard to the Eastern question which
after another in Epirus and
have sprung up one
Thessaly, in Finland and Macedonia, in Greece and
Montenegro. The battle must be fought out now
by sea and by land, for once and for all, in the
Euxine and in the Baltic, before Cronstadt and
before Sebastopol, on the Neva and on the Danube
—in spite of all the efforts that may still be made
to the contrary by ABERDEEN Ministers or Vien-
nese plenipotentiaries.

The Income Tax Bill, No 2, stands among the
orders of the day for second reading. It is pos-
sible, although not very probable, that it may
come on during the very next sitting of the House.
Hon. Gentlemen should, therefore, at ouce deter-

mine ou the course they intend adopting in refer-
lace
if: t • very important question—which
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