The Sun.
London, England, 1870-09-20 00:00:00

repudiated by an outraged country, and the war, for
a moment interrupted, recommenced with greater
ferocity than ever.

'EVERYTHING considered nevertheless, the de-
parture of M. JULES FAVRE, Foreign Minister
to the French Republic, for the Prussian head-
quarters, must on consideration be regarded as
a promising symptom in more respects than one.
The French people, including those of Paris,
are unmistakeably anxious for peace. M. FavnE's
second circular shews that he, too, is animated
by the same good wishes; and he now departs in the
hope of realising the desire of the whole world.
Such a journey would scarcely be ur.d.ertakeh unless
there were, at least, a chance of success.
Moreover, the consent of Count BISMARCK to
receive the French Ambassador is in great measure a
proof that the KING and his advisers disclaim the
pretensions put forth in their name to maintain the
EMPEROR as the sovereign of France, to treat
only with him or somebody representing him, and
to decline to treat with the Republic. So
obviously wild was such a scheme that the
Prussian Government has already felt the necess►ty
of repudiating it. If King WILLIAM refused any
dealings with that very unpleasant result of his
own conquests, a Republic, would he set up a Go-
vernment of his own ? The EMPEROR cannot be the
ruler, for he is a prisoner, and in the measures of Go-
vernment adopted by the present Ministry many
cherished items of Imperial policy have been • de-
liberately set aside. The present system of rule
is as different from that which it has sup-
planted as the system of Queen VICTORIA' is
different from that of Queen ELIZABETH.
The Provisional Ministry are in power ; they direct
the affairs of the nation, so far as in such a time of
trouble those affairs can be directed. The Prussian
sovereign urges that General TnocHu's Government
has been recognised only by the mob of Paris.
But no attempt has been made anywhere,
except on a trivial scale at Lyons, to repudiate
its sway. And it is equally certain that
no town or district of France has striven to prop up
the falling Empire. The present Ministry has
convened the Constituent Assembly with all
possible rapidity, and a body which really
represents the nation, will soon be sitting to
ratify terms with the invaders. So far from the
Republican Ministry being unfitted to conclude a
treaty of peace, no men of France could with such
propriety undertake the thankless duty. If the mob
of Paris approved this war, the deputies of the Left
who now form the Government did not. Their con-
sciences are clear. They have through years of
obloquy protested not only against the aggression
of July 15, but against all similar aggression. No
party; then, could so appropriately come forward to
rescue their country from this great strait as that
which has had no share whatever in involving her in
it. The war being utterly unjust it is only the
national men of peace who can justly make peace.
This is the least that can be said to their credit. It
is to be hoped their mission will succeed. •

AN announcement has been made to the effect
. that orders have been given- at Chatham Dockyard
to expedite the completion of H.M.S. Sultan with all
possible speed. It is to be presumed that the loss of
the Captain has induced the Admiralty to take this
step. The sudden destruction of a vessel which was
described as the most powerful ship afloat has,whether
that description be strictly accurate or not, left a
blank in the British navy which has to be filled. The
Sultan will be to a certain extent an experimental
ship, as her predecessor was. But whereas the Cap-
tain was the embodiment of the turret system, the
Sultan will be the embodiment of what we may
term the battery system. The two ships
may, in fact, be considered represent-
atives of rival systems—the first that which
was upheld by the lamented Captain CowrEn
COLES, the second that which Mr. REED, steadfastly
condemning the other, has always upheld. The
Sultan will have an upper-deck midship armour
plated battery, and the guns to be mounted therein
will command a nearly all-round fire. The advantage
of this upper deck is that the guns will be so high out
of the water that they can be fought in any weather
and when it would be impossible to open the main deck
battery ports. In the battery above mentioned it is
intended at present to place two 121-ton 300 pounder
guns. We, say purposely "at present," for it is
possible that guns of a much greater calibre will be
mounted there—guns, in fact, of nearly three times
the weight. At the present time Mr. FRASER,
under the superintendence of Colonel CAMPDELL,
is constructing at Woolwich a gun which is
to weigh no less than thirty-five tons. This
gun, when finished, will have a bore of nearly 112

LONDON, TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 1870,

THE injustice of the conditions upon which Prussia
announces, through the lips of Count BISMARCK,
that she will alone make peace with France, is surely
indicated by the fact that the two strongholds she
insists upon retaining are neither of them as yet in
her possession ! Strasburg and Metz alike
hold out with heroic persistence against
German horse, foot, and artillery. Yt, under
any circumstances, the CHANCELLOR of the North
German Confederation declares, in the plainest pos-
sible terms, that the armies of his royal master, those
victors on a dozen terrific battlefields from Wiessem-
bourg and Woerth, to Sedan and Carignan, will
never consent to sheath the sword, until those two
I very strongholds of Metz and Strasburg have been for-
mally guaranteed, together with Alsace and Lorraine,
as thenceforth from the date of this
prospective proposition—belonging not to France but
to Germany. An indemnity in hard cash for the
expenses of the war will have to be extorted—that
as a matter of course. Conjecture has even fixed
the sum at 200,000,000 francs. It may be that half
the navy of France will be required to be
transferred by the defeated nation to the
conquerors. But in any case, quoth the mouthpiece
of Germany, quoth the alter ego of KING WILLIAM,
quoth the oracular mouth of Count BISMARCK,
Alsace and Lorraine must be handed over to the
victors, and together with Alsace and Lorraine, the
still uncaptured strongholds of Metz and Strasburg.
The chivalrous UHRICH and the dauntless BAZAINE
are virtually laughing to scorn these most arrogant,
not to say audacious, pretensions. Ilow anything

inches, and will fire a 6001 b. projectile with 1201 b.
of pellet powder. It is to cost £2,500. If it answers
the expectations formed of it, it will be the most
powerful piece of ordnance the world has ever seen.
The welding of certain portions of it together at the
Royal Gun Factory latety was one of the greatest feats
ever performed by the stalwart Sons of Vulcan. A
mass of iron raised to a white heat, and weighing
twehty-eight tons, had to be handled. The tongs
used in accomplishing this weighed no less than
fourteen tons. If the remainder of the work turns
out as well as the recent forging, the success will be

great. in that case it is intended to construct three
more of these guns, and place all four of them on
board' the Sultan.

It is difficult to estimate what is really meant by
these figures. To raise 351 b. requires considerable
exertion on the part of a man of ordinary strength.
But one of these guns will weigh more than sixty
times as much. And yet this prodigious weight
will have to be as completely under the control
of a ship's crew as if it were a ladies' travelling
box. It will have to be raised, lowered, run
in and out, and all this will have to be done under
the most difficult circumstances, a rolling sea, and in
the face of a hostile fire. The work to be accom-
plished ha been well described in a professional
paper. Given, says the Engineer, one of the Penin-
sular and Oriental steamers, say 3,000 tons
burthen, also a heavy sea, also a tank loco-
motive, weight thirty-five tons, mounted on
the upper deck of the said steamer, locomotive
to stand across the deck with the smoke.-box towards

can possibly come from personal interviews on
the one hand between- M. TRIERS and
Earl GRANVILLE, and on the other between
M. RILES FAVRE and Count BISMARCK, with a
view 'to the carrying out to a happy issue of their
amicable negotiations in the interests of peace—so
long as these exorbitant and even extortionate de-

mands are insisted upon in the dominant name of
Germany, certainly passes our own comprehen-
sion. Make the transfer to Germany of
Metz and Strasburg, now, at this stage of the war,
while they are both of them yet holding out
heroically, to the whole world's admiration, a sine
qua non for the negotiating of any pacific arrange-
ment between the belligerents, and those belligerents
are by that one single fact, doomed to the continuance
of the conflict coute qui coute to its bitter end--the
war is thereby rendered a war a outrance ! Sup-
posing for the sake of argument that any Government

the bulwark ; required :—means for running said
tank locomotive in and out through a distance of six
feet; also means for training the after end of said
engine through an arc of eighty degrees, without
going half an inch in advance, or
stopping short half an inch behind a
given point ; also means for lifting said
engine bodily about two feet ; also means
for lifting, first the rear, and afterwards the front end
of the said engine, so that a line passing through
the centre of the boiler can be ranged through sixteen
or eighteen degrees of the arc—all to be done in
a heavy sea, the ship pitching and rolling all the
while—these are the conditions of a problem which
very few engineers would care to solve. Yet it has
been solved, not by an engineer, but by a naval
officer, Captain ROBERT SCOTT. He has devised
mechanism by which the heaviest gun yet existing

burg.

installed in power at Paris—call it Republican, call it
Provisional, call it a Ministry of Defence, call it a
Dictatorship, call it anything you please—supposing,
for the sake of argument, any Cabinet, acting for
France, could at this stage of the war consent to
negotiate peace on those terms, its very
assent to a pacific arrangement upon those terms
would be the deliberate dooming of its
own existence. A Government so craven as, thus, to
lick the dust at the feet of the German invaders,
would no sooner have saved Paris from bombardment
by subjecting the now more than ever sensitive pride
of France to that supreme humiliation, than it would
find its ignoble self, and its most despicable policy,

can be worked, and which is equally applicable to
_ _ _

heavier guns, even if we should hereafter exceed the

35 tons which constitute our as yet intended maxi-

mum. In fact thefeat which hd has accomplished isnot

adequately described by the above comparison. The

'SUN, LONDON, TUESDA Y, SEPTEMBER 20, 1870

hypothetical locomotive had merely to be moved
and raised.. Ji'he actual gun has to stand charges of
1201 b: of powder and shot, weighing over 0 cwt., and
the tremendous recoil which must follow, so pro-
digious a discharge has to be regulated and renlered
innocuous:

The idea of a 35-ton gun would
ten years ago, have been thought as insane,
as a train going fifty miles an hour would have
seemed to the men who laughed at STEPHENSON for
venturing to say that his locomotive would attain
one-fifth of that speed. It would have been said,
"Even supposing you get your gun, what will you do
with it ? You will be like ROBINSON CRusoE, who
made himself a ship, and then found that it was too
heavy for him to move." And the sceptics would
have been justified in their incredulity at that time.
It then seemed as though, however large our siege
guns might be, we could never get much beyond
the old 64-pounders for our ships, simply
from the impossibility of working them,
Captain SCOTT has overcome this difficulty so
triumphantly that at the present time there is not a
single large gun in the navy which is not mounted on
his principle. If the comparatively light guns on
board the Inconstant had been so mounted we should
have heard nothing of the recent lamentable acci-
dent on board that vossel, and a British captain
would have been spared the censure of a British
jury.

After saying thus much, we are ashamed to add
anything more. And yet it must be said. Captain
SCOTT, to whom this country is indebted for having
beyond all question the most powerful navy in the
world, has hitherto received no reward for all
his labours. Other men with far less claims
to compensation have been remunerated handsomely,
but the inventor of the gun carriage without which
our Monarchs and Sultans would have been
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean,
has received absolutely nothing. Nay, worse than
that; he has been left to work out this
invention at his own cost, and has not been
repaid a farthing of the fortune which he has spent
in so doing. This conduct towards a great national
benefactor is unworthy of a great nation. We are
sure that the people of England have only to become.
acquainted with the facts in order to demand that some-
thing more than bare justice—even that has hitherto
been denied—shall be done. True-hearted Englishmen,
who value their country's good name, must feel
disgraced so long as Captain SCOTT continues
defrauded of his well-earned reward.

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

THE MISSION OF M. TRIERS.

M. Thiers has sailed from England ior St. Peters-
burg in the French Imperial yacht Jerome Napoleon
in order to secure the co-operation of Russia in
negotiating the terms of peace. The Jerome
Napoleon steamed up to Woolwich dock-
yard on Saturday and saluted the fl: g-
ship Fisgard. After sending an officer on board
for information, she dropped down to the Royal
Arsenal, and with the approval of the Fisgard was
moored to the red buoy. H.M.S. Fox was lying off
the Arsenal, but the French did not acknowledge
her in the usual fashion, and the etiquette of the
navy would not permit the British vessel
to offer an unsolicited salute. The commander
came ashore at the Arsenal landing stairs, but he
was not allowed to enter the establishment, not pos-
sessing a special order. He then went to Charing-
cross by rail, and some time after instructions were
telegraphed from head-quarters to allow the officers
and crew of the ship to pass to and fro. At nine
o'clock the Jerome Napoleon proceeded down the
river, and it was thought at the time -she would
return, the movement being simply to avoid a breach
of the Queen's proclamation. She did not, however,
return, and it subsequently transpired that M.
'fliers was on board and had sailed for St. Peters-

MEDICAL DEFECTS IN THE FRENCH ARMY.

According to the published returns the effective
strength of the French army in January, 1869, was
441,437 men, and for this number there were 423
medical officers employed in the hospitals, and 586
in the regimental services, or one to 437 on a peace
footing. In war time, however, the proportions

are not the same ; a regiment of 1,500
or 1,800 whilst in garrison is raised to 3,000 for a
campaign, and, inasmuch as it leaves a medical
officer at the depot, it has but one medical officer to

1,500 men. In the next place, they are not properly
utilised, not being employed in the ambulances.
Of 423 hospital medical officers only about 200 are
employed in treating cases in the ambulances, not
one-half of these practising surgery. This being so,
if the rules were rigorously adhered to, not above
100 surgeons are disposable for ambulance service.
These figures indicate the defective condition of the
French medical staff. The fact that most of the
French wounded have been left in the hands of the
Germans renders their inferiority of little or no
account, but had they been victorious they would
have suffered terribly. In fine, the military system
of France seems in all respects to have been imper-
fect in its organisation.

SYMPATHY WITH THE FRENCH REPUBLIC.

Thu expected demonstration of the Irish National

party in London, in favour of the French Republic,
did not take place on Sunday. It was explained
that some of the prominent initiators of the move-
ment had had to leave London, and in their absence
the meeting could not take place as arranged. There
was a goodly attendance of Frenchmen, who in loud
and excited voices discussed the position of affairs in
their native country. Germans, too, were present ;
but, although they engaged the Frenchmen in a
controversial spirit, no encounter of an objectionable
character was noticed. The occasion was improved
upon by several leaders of the Land and Labour
League, and the well known political
lecturer, Mr. Owen, addressed the throng in
advocacy of Republicanism. A Mr. • Johnson pro-
posed, and was of course successful in marrying, a
resolution congratulating the French people on the
establishment of a Republic, and demanding its re-
cognition by the English Government. The Presi-
dent of the Land and Labour League, in proposing
an address to the German and French peoples
calling upon them to insist upon their Governments
making peace and disbanding their armies, is re-
ported to have been very forcible in pointing out the
evils of a standing army. Other intended demon-
strations are announced.