The Sun.
London, England, 1851-07-24 00:00:00

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LONDON, THURSDAY, JULY 24, 1851.

The House of Commons held a morning sitting yes-
terday.
Mr. G. F. YOUNG took the oaths and his seat.

The Administration of Criminal Justice Improvement
Bill and the Valuation (Ireland) Bill were respectively
passed through Committee.

Our comical friends, the self-elected Apostles of Ar-
bitration, are at it again. They really appear to be
incorrigible—incorrigible we mean not only
in their
pertinacity, but in a stupidity that surpassess all com-
prehension. Exeter-hall—the Hall of Humbugs—
has been selected for their present demonstration.
From its platform the orators of the Congress are
crying "Peace, peace, when there is no peace.'
Added to this they are declaiming with all
the force of their lungs and their rhetoric
against the horrors of war. As if any one
had been eulogizing it ! Why upon this subject
the whole world is more or less agreed already. It
needs no persuasion of the delegates to convince the
mind of any individual that war is reprehensible, or
that peace is a thing to be desiderated. Each of these
great truths has time out of mind been recognised and
appreciated universally. Consequently the world could
very well dispense with all this exceedingly virtuous
rhodomontade. But, no—the Peace Association is
to effect more than has been accomplished even
by Christianity, its principal members are to be
recognised by mankind as the precursors of
the millennium. TIIIIAL CAIN is to be eclipsed by
each of them as an ingenious fabricator, for it is by
their hands (if we would but credit them) that
swords are to be beaten into ploughshares, and spears
twisted into reaping hooks. VAN Amntracil bad
better look to his laurels betimes, for the lion is at
length to lie down with the lamb at the bidding of
these sticklers for arbitration. Against their pre-
posterous pretensions we cannot enter our protest too
emphatically. There is to us in the whole scheme a
self-sufficiency so enormous, an assumption of
moral superiority so contemptible, and, as it
appears to us, an absolute impiety so gross
and reprehensible, that we must enter our objections
to their proceedings whensoever and wheresoever the
society in question may please to indulge themselves
with a new demonstration. What we insist upon is
simply this, that society did not wait to be informed
of the curse of war, or of the blessing of peace, by
these intensely Pecksniffian philanthropists. Why,
peace is the boon which every noble-minded and pa-
triotic administrator has striven to secure to his
age and to his country from periods of the remotest
antiquity down to the middle of this nineteenth century.
War, no less, has been the evil which every truly great
statesman has endeavoured to avoid by all the con-
trivances of statecraft, and by all the adroitness of
diplomacy. Besides which, the more prominent in-
dividuals selected to go about from one capital of
Europe to another preaching the advantages of in-
ternational tranquillity, are about the last persons who
should ever have presumed to proffer advice upon the
matter to their contemporaries.
Observe the features of the most conspicuous dele

gates now clustered together upon the Exeter Hall
platform. There is Sir D. BREWSTER, as President—a
very gifted man, no doubt, an excellent chemist,
an admirable mechanic, in short, an intelligent in-
quirer into almost all of the physical sciences—but, at
the same time, an intense lover of, and a notorious
participator in, those stormy controversies which not
unfrequently cast discredit upon the students of
philosophy. There is Mr. HonsmAN, however—
surely, some will insist, he may pass muster in the
assemblage of the Peace Association. Well, Mr.
HOESMAN is a capital scrutineer of the bench of
bishops, that's true, but as for his advocating pacific
principles in the guidance of public life, we really
cannot see for the life of us that he has
earned a right to enter upon any such course of pro-
ceeding by virtue of any sweetness of temperament

he has ever indicated. Then there's Mr. COBDEN,
renowned as the champion of Free Trade, and as the
most redoubtable of all the antagonists of Protection
—but almost equally notorious as beingcontinaally
involved in political squabbles of some kind or another
—squabbles carried on each of them through the means
of a ♦ery peppery correspondence, spiced to a remark-
able degree with the most stinging personalities.

Turning from our countrymen, we perceive the
countenance of no less remarkable a per-

sonage than M. DB CORMENIN, better known
by his pamphleteering sobriquet of TIMON. Admir-

ing as we do the singular and brilliant eloquence of
M. DE CORMENIN, we, nevertheless, cannot look upon
him as very well qualified to advocate the doctrines
upheld by the Peace Association, seeing that, during
the last quarter of a century, it appears to have been
his office to asperse everybody and anybody, who
happened to come within the range of his
vituperations. Then latest, and most glaring
anomaly of all, there is recognisable on the
Exeter Hall platform the countenance of M.

EMILE DE GIRARDIN, the oddest certainly among
all these eccentric advocates of peace—EMlLE DE
GIRARDIN, the most bellicose journalist of France--
EMILE DE GIRARDIN, who is perpetually stimulating
the evil passions of his countrymen through the co-
lumns of his newspaper La Presse—EMlLE DE
GIRARDIN, the noisiest among the Boanerges of re-

hellion, the promoter of every factious agitation in
Paris, the deserter from every cause that gives pro-
mise to secure his country's tranquillity, the sup-
porter of every public man whose triumph
seems to necessitate either external war or

internal revolution ! Such are the motley de-

legates grouped together upon the platform
of th© association, and arrogating to themselves the

right to disseminate the doctrines of peace and amity

among the nations of Christendom.

Fantastic projects of one species or another have
been indulged in by nearly every successive genera-
tion. People have chased now a jack o' lantern like
the South Sea Bubble—now a mirage like the
Mississippi scheme—now a fata morgana like El

Dorado or Cibolo ; they have gone mad for a while
in their dreams of the golden rivers of Ci-

pango, and the purple

islands of Cathay,

and the fabulous empire of that PRESTER JoriN
who was surrounded, in legendary belief, with a
magnificence like the pomp of Hlaourf-AL-Rasciun.
Yet, extravagant as these delusions have been, they

have been altogether surpassed in exaggeration and ab-
surdity by this foolish child-vision of governing the
world all at once by arbitration, and of talking the

people into peace, so that they should suddenly send

their armies to the right about, and blow off the re-
sidue of their gunpowder in honour of the fes-
tivities inaugurative of the millennium. Frivolous
though these meetings of the Peace Congress may
appear, nevertheless, it would be a mistake to regard
them as altogether harmless, seeing that they are cal-
culated to bring what they are intended to serve into
discredit. Therefore it is that we avail ourselves of
every
reasonable opportunity to protest against the
proceedings
of these self-satisfied apostles of tran-
quillity, dreading as we do the ridicule which may
attach in consequence of those proceedings to a
cause so eminently entitled to veneration.

The London and South-Western Railway Company
appear to have a reasonable ground of complaint
against the Emigration Commissioners, for a course
of proceeding, on the part of the latter body, which
may be gathered from the following brief statement
of circumstances :—ln the early part of the present
year the Commissioners, desirous to effect a saving
upon the prices hitherto paid for the emigration de.
pUt service, advertised for tenders for the board and
lodging of emigrants in suitable depots at London
and Plymouth, or at London and Southampton. The
South-Western Railway sent in their tenders, pro-
Posing to place at the disposal of the Commissioners,
rent free, a large and commodious building at Nine
Elms for the London dep6t, and another on the Dock
quay at Southampton, for the depot at that port,
which on being opened were found to be considerably
lower than those put in, both by a party at Deptford
and by cloth:: at Plymouth. mesa two tendon 04