The Sun.
London, England, 1848-11-09 00:00:00

livat t: Lit

LONDON, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1848.

Everything odious is said of the destruction of Li..
TOUR, nothing whatever is said condemnatory of the
wholesale butchery of the Viennese. Is one man's life
then to outweigh in importance the lives of thousands,
merely because those thousands were simply ;the

people, and because that unit was an aristocrat, the
holder of a ministerial portfolio, and the accomplice of
an Emperor? These superstitions must really be

dissipated ; they have survived the annihilation of feu-
dahty too long. Men must begin to comprehend in
some rational measure the equal inviolability of life,
whether with the most august dignitary or the most
lowly artizan. We are reminded again and again by
the apologists of absolutism cf the excesses perpe-
trated by the multitude in some moment of extraor-
dinary excitement; we read recitals couched in
the most violent terms of abhorrence of the
shooting of a Count, no matter though that
Count was the most heinous of conspirators ; of the
sacking of an arsenal, no matter though that arsenal
was stocked with arms and ammunition to be em-
ployel against the population ; or of the burning of
a solitary barrack, no matter though the walls of that
barrack sheltered the jannisaries of despotism while
ranks of
tearing up thethe people with a withering
discharge
o.f
mmusketryAyet when these obse.
quious panegyrists of arbitrary
earvernment are re-
cording the atrocities perpetrated the nam3 of some
ghu sufficiently
his preternatural
eternatura
exalted potentate, they find
language sufficiently
l
eulogistic for the designation
of i
atrocities. They exult over the desolation f
over the massacre of a population, overthoea province,
tion of a city, over the rapine and murder,aZneagr,a-
and unbridled licentiousness which are the hivcartra.ehityie
accompaniments: of the successful bombardment of
capital. Rap, and murder, and pillage, are exalted
into deeds •f virtue and patriotism, so they be only
practised by the soldiery in fighting the victories of
some unprincipled ruler. It is with this perversion
of sentiment that the late occurrences at Vienna have
been commemorated by our Tory contemporaries.
According to them Prince WINDISCIIGRATZ has
covered his name with everlasting glory for having
beaten down the walls of the chief city of his native
land, and for having delivered over its inhabitants to
the fury and lust of his troopers. The representatives
elected by the millions of the Austrian empire, and
sitting in solemn conclave in its metropolis, are re-
viled as though they were the basest miscreants and
the most besotted barbarians in Christendom—
although the Members of the Diet, without any other
authority saving that derived from their own moral
dignity and collective reputation, have been enabled,
during a period of more than three week, to preserve
order and sobriety in a capital just emerged from the
chaos of a revolution !
Happily the Argus-vigilance of the million is not
to be cheated by the flickering deceits of a rhe-
toric debased to such unworthy purposes
by the eulogists of FERDINAND. The ghastly
truth glares through all these gandy and transparent
schemes of misrepresentation. The brutality of the
system defended by the guns of Prince WINDI9CII-
GnaTZ .is as apparent as that which was formerly
championed by the Captaias of the Duke of VALEN.