The Sun.
London, England, 1860-11-23 00:00:00

Yet, not satisfied with this, Russia, as we
know, is ever striving to advance her titanic
power, to extend her giant dominions,
further and further and further in all directions.
Her attempted incursion westwards, it will be re-
membered, cost Europe the last great war, the
war of the Crimea. It was the insolent endeavour
of the Muscovite despotism to plant its standard at
Constantinople that constrained the allied Powers
of Western Europe to send their maritime arma-
ments hurriedly to the Golden Horn, and to dis-
embark their military forces successively at Varna
and Eupatoria. Driven back there, the Russians
have since been sedulously endeavouring to com-
pensate themselves in the south-east and in the
north-east simultaneously for that most bitter dis-
appointment. They have been carrying fire and
sword with ruthless determination from one
extremity to the other of the Caucasus. They
there a year or two back drove at last to bay, by
those deadly and reiterated acts of fury—
drove at last to bay there in his rocky stronghold
that dauntless warrior, whose name we have
already particularized. The subjugation of those
regions remaining since then apparently complete,
ever since SCIIAMYL was captured, and his keen
bold blade restored to its sheath. Simultaneously
with these pitiless onslaughts upon the Caucasian
mountaineers, the Russian Autocracy has been
steadily and resolutely pushing forward, by the
baser means of intrigue and chicane, along the
northern boundaries of China. Everywhere, in
fact, along her own boundaries, north and south,
east and west, Russia is striving after opportuni-
ties for aggression and absorption. The pressure
of her power in this way upon surrounding
nations is, in a manner, inevitable. The force of it is
that, so to speak, of the mere vis inertia. NAPOLEON
the GREAT in the calmness of his last years at St.
Helena—[and remember in regard to this those
noble lines of the poet CAMPBELL—
" The sunset of life has a mystical lore,
And coming events cast their shadows before I")—
NAPOLEON the GREAT, in the calmness of the sun-
set of his wondrous life as it closed upon the ocean-
rock of St. Helena, recognised this innate force and
impulse of Russia with a prophetic eye, recognised
it as a Necessity. "In fifty years Europe will be
Cossack or Republican !" In effect that memorable
prediction is already fulfilled. The Cossack power
has been rolled back upon itself from the date of
the Crimean War by the indignant impulse of
Western Europe: And it has been rolled
backed upon itself all the more effectually
from the fact of " the slope of Russia
being to the east" as was finely said by LAMARTINE.
Everywhere but in Russia the haughty and
dominant power of mere brute despotism has died
out, or is dying out past redemption—as effec-
tually as though Europe had become or were
becoming Republican. Austria is shaken to her
centre. Lombardy has been torn from her. The
allegiance of Hungary is in perpetual jeopardy.
The tyrannous power once wielded at Vienna by
the KAISER is virtually at this moment at once
bankrupt and paralysed. Prussia has long since
had to harmonise its own despotic system with
the liberal institutions expressed under the forms
and titles of a constitutional and representative
Government. The Sultan CALIPH has for years
and years found his only security for the pre-
servation of his turban-crown, and of his

sceptre in political, and social, and religious

concessions suited to the spirit of the age, or
what is called the genius of modern civilisation.

Even that great armed revival of the Napoleonian
Empire upon the opposite shores of the Channel

reveals to us a Chief, who boasts that his power is
the result of a free election by Universal Suffrage,
a chief who is always ostentatiously avowing him-
self to be amenable to the influence and authority
of Public Opinion. Everywhere the power of
Autocracy is dying out, we repeat, but in Russia—
everywhere, even in that stubborn old stand-still
Empire of China, where it is notorious that during
these five or six years last past the imperial autho-
rity has been confronted, and bearded, and in

_every way imperilled by an armed, a wide spread,
and hitherto, for the most part, a triumphant insur-
rection ! Autocracy, in effect, is clearly doomed—
•on all sides—even in Russia, where the CZAR
himself has had his nobler ambition directed to the
emancipation of the serfs ! It is idle, then, even for
this still strong and vigorous despotism of the Im-
perial Government of St. Petersburg—it is idle
even for the great Muscovite Autocracy to dream
any longer these old-world dreams of complete
political subjugation and territorial aggrandise-
ment. The hug of the _Russian Bear is even shaken
off by the little Caucasian province of Daghestan
May a brighter era for those hitherto unhappy races
date from the day of the defeat of BARIATINSRI

The Orangemen of Belfast seem to be emulous
of their comrades at Kingston and Toronto. It
would indeed be a sad thing for the provincial
zealots to win the belt from those of the very
metropolis of Orangeism ; so, as the Canadians
mobbed their Prince and a Duke, the Irialamen
mobbed their Dichop. As to success in their
operations both are pretty mucia -;,,i . par. The
Canadian kept their Prince f:eom landing at one
place, and dragged him, he not knowing it, under
an Orange arch 5.a another. The Belfast mob
drove their Bishop, three-fourths of the clergy
present, and a deputation from London, all
oil the platform together. They beat decidedly.
As to the personages 'vanquished, a Prince and
athaa Duke are, we suppose, greater folk, socially,
a Bishop and a dozen or so of clergy-
men ; but, then,
was an ecclesiasticaleelesiastie abl
the Bishop was a spiritual
Lord, an
atitlreanwdeeew;
ilalnndotas 'dtehniys
that the Belfast mob
relatively, the religious, may have beaten,
greater man.
Perhaps, .however, if
we refer to the same umpire
would
HEENAN and SAYERS as decided between
, he
both Canadian and Irish Orang award a belt to
emen. We cer-
tainly
cannot easily tell which hit hardest all the
laws of decency.
The time selected by Orangemen for mobbing a
Bishop was the vary appropriate one of a meeting
in the town,
of the " Society for the Propagation of
Bis
the Gospel in Foreign .Parts." One might suppose

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