The Sun.
London, England, 1849-09-14 00:00:00

relates to the head of cruelty and oppression, which
alone could furnish any excuse for the desertion of the
two prosecutors, and in establishing which, as it appears
to us, they were not equally successful. It consisted, in
part, of loose statements of opinion, on which it was im-
possible for the Court to act without manifest impropriety.
One officer thought Captain Pitman "inconsistent and
severe." Another considered him "strict." A third en-
tertained no opinion on the subject. The practice of
ornamenting the heads of the ship's boys with a copper
funnel, by way of an imitation of a foolscap—a favourite
mode of correction with Captain Pitman—does not seem
to call for any severe punishment. The heavy wooden
clog sometimes substituted—which we hesitate whether
to pronounce a plagiarism from the Chinese, or an adap-
tation from the ingenious Jeffrey Gambado—must have
been, if less ignominious, far more uncomfortable.
Of the specific instances alleged, one or two will not bear
a close examination. White, a private of Marines, being
found dirty at quarters, was sent forward to scrub him.
self. Mr. Elliott says that he heard Captain Pitman
threaten him (White) with a flogging. This the accused
denies. Be this as it may, White walked forward under
the charge of one of his comrades, disappeared for a
moment under a soil, and directly afterwards was found
to have jumped, or fallen, overboard. He was seen
to strike out, as if swimming, and a host was lowered
to pick him up, but without success. White had
been heard to say that rather than be flogged he
would drown himself, and it was surmised that he
had jumped overboard to avoid the threatened four
dozen. Whether he had really done so or not, had ob-
viously no bearing on the case; the question was, whether
the punishment was really threatened, and whether, if
so, the act of threatening it was an act of cruelty anal
oppression. The same observation applies to the case
of the marine Haig. Haig was flogged, as Captain Pits
man says, for repeated thefts, and was afterwards kept
on the gratings, and made to sleep under the forecastle.
Haig had fractured his skull some years before—a T-
em stance of which the captain says he knew nothing
until the punishment was over. He afterwards went mad.
Whether his derangement was in any degree attributable
to his punishment whilst on board the Childers does not
appear—nor is it necessary that it should; all that the
Court had to decide was, whether the punishment was ex-
cessive in proportion to the offence. Other cases of alleged
cruelty, on which the prosecutors rely (one of which
—that of the boy Cloverton—reminds us, it must bo
owned, disagreeably of certain distiches in Crabbe's
" Peter Grimes"), show pretty clearly that Captain
Pitman was a man of warm, if not violent temper, and,
to use the mildest term, a severe disciplinarian; but they
are not, in our judgment, so carefully sifted as to war-
rant us in saying that they prove anything more. Cap-
tain Pitman, dismissed from the service, is of course a
ruined man. Whether the evidence was sufficient to
warrant so severe a sentence may perhaps appear ques-
tionable to such of our non-professional readers as are
inclined to think more of the hardship to the individual,
and less of the exigencies of the service, than the judges
of a court-martial. But, be this as it may, we cannot
refrain from observing that the prosecutors have tailed
to establish a single act of oppression or cruelty towards
themselves individually, and that they return to Exeter
gaol without having produced any justification whatever
for the breach of duty which sent them thither.

---
HERALD.—Notwithstanding all the efforts of Pre-
sident Bonaparte, and the needy adventurers and adven-
turing clique by whom he is surrounded, to get up an
imperial cry, or an imperial demonstration—notwith-
standing all the efforts of the President himself, as puffer
general and speechmaker to various railroads—notwith-
standing the President's power of locomotion and
digestion as a diner-out of the first magnitude, in various
departments, east, west, north, end south—the indus-
trious efforts of the early Italian revolutionist, of the
Swiss soldier, of the conspirator of Strasburg and Bou-
logne, and of the prisoner of Ham, have been hitherto
unsuccessful, and he still continues plain, unaristocratie
Citizen Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, President of the
French Republic, and not Louis Napoleon 1., Emperor
of the French. The councils •general of the eighty-six
departments, from whom the Ministerial morning paper,
and that paper's French correspondent, expected so
much, have been discreetly and ominously silent, and not
one among them all has ventured to recommend, as we
were told would be the case, the doffing of the title of
First Citizen and President, and the assumption of the
Imperial purple, by a man very willing to divest himself
of the one, and very eager and ready to wear the other.
In fact, the game of empiro has been, as we predicted it
would be, a decided failure ; and now the President, to
recover the ground which he had lost by a leaning to pure
Carlism, as a stepping-stone, and by the sending of the
French army to Rome, is actually obliged to retrace his
Imperial and Autocratic steps, and to write liberal and
anti-Papistical letters to M. Edgar Ney—is obliged to
lean, not on the devout M. de Falloux and the priest
party, but on that honest, incorruptible, and conscienti-
ous man Dufaure, the ablest administrator and best man
of business that France has produced in our day. They
who calculate that France is, in the year of our Lord
1149, about to retrograde—is about to abet a slavish or
sacerdotal dominion at Rome, calculate without their
host. The man, or the Ministry, who could, would, or
should abet such a dominion, would, notwithstanding the
suspension of the Constitution, be sent to the right-about
as speedily and much more ignominiously than either
Charles 1. or the Monarch of the Barricades. It is rot
because M. Thiers and the Constitutionnel have not seen
this would inevitably occur, that the thing is not true.
Except as a party and a pampheteer writer of great
vigour and pungency, and as a clear conversational and,
occasionally, ad captandum speaker, M. Thiers is the
most over-rated man in Europe, not even except-
ing our own darling pink of sit.c, rity and can-
dour, the right h, nourable the pseudo planter of
Connaught. Though holding a brilliant and facile
pen, M. Thiers has, on every occasion, showed himself
to have been without political judgment or foresight, to
be ignorant of the present, and to grossly miscalculate
the future. When, in addition to this Rant of perspi-
cacity, it is to be remembered that the little man is now
steeped to the very lips in all sorts of intrigue, his errors
of judgment, natural or prepense, are not in the h ast to
be wondered at. Be this, however, as it mac—let the
Carlist, Louis Philippiet, Orleanisr, Joinrilli , Mont-
pensier, Buonapartist, or Imperialist intrigues be what
they may, oue fact is only clear, and that is, that the
French nation will not tolerate a reactionary policy in
reference to Rome, or an imperial policy in ref. rence to
France. The one and the other are connexive and con-
sentaneous. Whatever certain daily and weekly Lon-
' don newspapers may say, and for a will understood
cause, about Hungary, the battle of continental and
Italian freedom is to be really fought at Rome. Wa
were not insensible to the importance of the struggle
going on in Hungary, but in many respects we did
not sympathise with that struggle, and in all
respects we stood aloof from the corrupt influence
so extensively applied by Hungarian diplomatists, not
merely in London but in the provinces. But those who
were loudest about Hungary made little noise about
Rome, and suffered the cause not merely of freedom and
free opinion, but of the emancipation of the human
mind, to perish for a time in the Eternal City. But
freedom is not yet dead in Rome—it only sleepetb, and
we have that confidence in the omnipotence of truth,
that we are sure before 1850 shall have passed over our
heads the era of pontiffs and inquisitors will have perished
for ever in the Eternal City. The editor of the French
Journal des Debuts is good enough to call us an ultra-
Conservative journal, and to intimate that we prodi-
giously exaggerate, if we do nut misrepresent, the
benefits conferred on Rome by the Roman Triumvirate.
Now, admitting to the full extent the "soft impeach-
ment" of Conservatism, we deny that in Conservatism or
in anything else we are ultra. Our aim is not—like our
Ministerial contemporary the limes—to follow and
flatter the trade wind of popular opinion, but to be in
advance of it. We have ever thought that the best way
to do away with seditious is to remove the causes of
them, and ho in our mind
ois the best Conservative r
s ll:st and
the soundest Protootin who the eandd
earliest reformer. In such sort we have given
our feeble support to Mazzini, to Armellini, to
Saffi, to Rusconi, and other Roman patriots. Though
the worthy editor of the Dibat.• is greatly our senior in
years, and is a man of very varied accomplishments, yet
we deny that he has had the opportunity of knowing
Italy or Rome that it has fallen to our lot to possess.
For more than twenty years we have personally known
Armellini—for more than a quarter of a century, from
our very boyhood, we have known public opinion in
Rome—and we are prepared to maintain that the trium-
virate in 1849 proclaimed no principles or views of publis
affairs that bad not prevailed and found acceptance in
1524.5 amen the instructed classes—proclaimed no
principles that were not professed and combatted for by
M. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, himself an Italian—a Ro-
man rebel, in 1831 and 1332. As to M. Mazzini, we
know nothing of him personally, and are only acquainted
with his characters by his public acts and by report.
But from his public acts, state papers, and negotia-
tions, we judge him not merely to be a man of honour
n.of
and honesty, but of the very highest capacity, d
large and statesmanlike views. With Mazainiwaaet_a
feel
that France committed an atrocious and unjust c
violation not merely of common justiceheanEd
oemquainty,but
kn
of the law of nations, in underta g
expe-
dition. France played in Italy with infinitely less tpre-
tence—with infinitely less reason—the part
of Russia in
Poland—anat
Mil andof
v Russiae Venice—of ea and Austria
Austria in
at
Bologna,Hungary—of
Ancona,Aust
r
ia
and Ferrara. If George Canning had lived in our day,
even Viscount Castlereagh, or Spencer Perceval, any
orone
of these statesmen would have comprehended the
going on at Rome when the Triumvirs were in
great tribune of the people, either like Fox
OPsrtorwSueghrge A
Sheridan, idan, would have caused the very stones of West-
minster and London to mutiny against any unworthy
apathy of the English people in reference to that struggle._
But in 1849 we are without gteat Ministers. The
principle for which Mazzini and Armellini struggled,
whatever it was in name, was a Protestant principle, in
essence, for it was the struggle of free opinion against
spiritual tyranny and despotism—of light against dark-
ness. For the moment Malzini and Armellini have
been unsuccessful—the Inquisition has been established,
the gaols have been filled—secret tribunals are insti-
tuted, priests and cardinals monopolise all employments,
and the scrip and securities of the Triumvirs are de-
preciated and run down. But unless the French army
sustain these enormities by despotically dragonadiug
the Italian citizens, the gorge of the Roman people Is
sure, sooner or later; to rise again, arid cardinals and
priests will be ultimately, and at no distant day, expell, d
—never to return. It, however, the French army
submit to become the Swiss of a reactionist Pope, the
people of France will en revanche rise both
.against
President slid army,
audrebtylreaslis
ththeec bhaalnagnacrenitenrsthaenidr
own peculiar and summary way—notwithstanding the
provision made and vaunted
Rulhierea of our day.

GREAT NORTH Or SCOTLAND RAILWAT.—The
Duke of Richmond and other landed proprietors inte-
rested in the construction of this line from Aberdeen
through Elgin Forres and Nairn to Inverness held a
meeting a few days since at Gordon Castle, with the view
of carrying the project into almotion.