The Sun.
London, England, 1860-04-23 00:00:00

belief that retrenchment may be possible without
the aid of a revolution. COBBETT'S proposition of
the wet sponge is never dreamt of, even by the
wildest of our political day dreamers, either with
regard to the current year's charge of £70,000,000,
or in respect to the appalling sum total of
the national debt of £800,000,000. Whatever
may have been the callous determination
of Pennsylvania—England at any rate has no
thought of dragging her banner through the mire
of repudiation. We groan under the burden of
our most unequally distributed system of taxation,
but we have all of us alike an instinctive and
ineradicable repugnance to the mere idea that the
national repute should, by an evasion of duty, be
in any way tarnished, much less that it should be
actually sacrificed. And while lamenting the ex-
travagance of these disbursements upon a single
twelvemonth of £70,000,000 sterling, the House
of Commons votes the supplies resolutely and
manfully. No department of the public
service is to be cut down forcibly in the
amount of its expenditure. With a darkened brow,
but with an open hand, JOHN BULL pays to the
last doit the moneys required by the Public ser-
vants of the State. Least of all does he grudge a
single sixpence of the magnificent amount set apart
for his soldiers and sailors—the grand sum in all,
upon the current year, 0f£30,000,000. The peace-at-
any-price people may clamour as much as they like
about the profligate nature, as they call it, of this
expenditure; they may insist upon it that
.£10,000,000 at the outside would be ample to cover
the expenses of the War Department in this time of
peace—at least of peace nominally. The country
knows far better than this, and the Commons
happily are not slow at arriving at pre-
cisely the same conclusion. The reasons
of these diametrically opposite views on the part of
the majority being very readily explicable. First
and foremost—it is a fact sufficiently notorious,
even, we might say, indisputable, that while there
is, of course, at the present juncture, peace, or, at
any rate, no open declaration or intimation of war
in Europe, there is every probability, or we may at
least venture to say possibility, of a collision, before
long, between two or more of the Great Powers of
Christendom, Again, the Alliance between
England and France has recently been
very seriously shaken this, too, upon
the very morrow of that vaunted Commercial
Treaty from which we were almost taught to be-
lieve might be dated the commencement of the
Millennium. Besides, it is in no way to be
denied that France possesses in this time of peace
not only an army of 600,000 soldiers almost match-
less in discipline, but beyond that a steam fleet the
like of which her most ambitious rulers never
dreamt of her ever possessing. Startled into a re-
cognition of these wholly undeniable facts—Eng-
land has recently awakened at last from her long
torpor in regard to the dilapidated condition
of her defences. She understood fully and
thoroughly that unless she bestirred herself at once
and energetically, she was open at any time to the
peril of a surprise. It was but yesterday as it were
that she was without any Channel fleet whatever.
It was but very recently that her ordnance
was reduced upon a sudden to insignifi-
cance, nearly to worthlessness, by the contrivance
of the rifled cannon of Sir WILLIAM ARMSTRONG.
And scarcely had it been determined upon that the
invention of ARMSTRONG should be applied without
delay to the national artillery, when the discoveries
of WHITWORTH demonstrated anew that the whole
system of our projectiles must be regarded as in a
state of transition. As well rely upon the martillos
for the defence of our shores as upon our old pieces
of ordnance for the proper armament of our war-
ships and our land batteries. A total transforma-
tion of the military and maritime soiences has re-
sulted hardly less from discoveries like the needle
gun and the minie bullet, or still more from the
formidable long-range cannon of ARMSTRONG
and Winrwoßni, than from the application
by land and by sea of the marvellous inventions of
the steam engine and the electric telegraph. Eng-
land, if she would hold her place among the na-
tions, must keep pace with the genius and enter-
prize of the age. So that when Mr. BRIGHT talks
of reducing our war expenditure—even during this
period almost facetiously spoken of as one of peace
—from £30,000,000 upon the year to a maximum
of £10,000,000, he might just as reasonably recom-
mend our foot soldiers to stick to Brown Bess, our
artillerymen to eschew the innovations of WIIIT-
WORTH and ARMSTRONG, our Admiralty to forego
all the advantages accruing from the steam-engine
and the screw-propeller—nay, he might about just
as rationally advise our defenders, both upon shore
and upon the ocean, to be armed just like their
ancestors by no other weapons more formidable
than the sling, the spear, and the cross-bow. The
Manchester proposition for retrenchment is—in
in this instance—applied to the wrong half ! Our
expenditure upon the year is £70,000,000. Granted
—and granted, too, that out of that £70,000,000
there is nearly one moiety, or at any rate
£30,000,000 applied to the improvement of our
national defences. It is in regard to the modo of
squandering the other £40,000,000 that the rational
and patriotic economist ought to direct his energies
with a view to the discovery of some safe and salu-
tary means of introducing a series of wholesome
efforts at retrenchment.

The chief display of Foreign matters in Paris
seems at present to belong to the so-called " an-
nexations" of Savoy and Nice, and, judging from
the accounts, all goes on as well as it has been " ar-
ranged." Thzre never was a greater piece of " make
believe" practised in the open face of day. It is
a perfect caricature on truth—yet the versimilitudo
is so got up as to puzzle the eye, while it une-
quivocally offends the judgment. As to the dis-
patches and counter dispatches on the subject, the
mere attempt to explain seems designed to mystify
matters the more irretrievably till the magician is
lost in the web of his own fanciful diplo-
macy. The thing may impose for a time,
but cannot last long, nor lead to good.
As to the sham of" voting"—it is worthy of the
plotters, but the reaction is coming to falsify the
assumed " enthusiasm"of the population. This is felt
too in Paris as the following paragraph pictures too
truly—" No small apprehension prevails in the com-
mercial world of future annexations, and of the con-
sequences that may arise from them. This feeling
paralyzes all speculation, and capitalists leave their
money idle in the bank rather than part with it,
except for such operations as promise a quick re-
turn. The retail trade of Paris feels the effect of
this state of affairs, and many shopkeepers declare
have not experienced so bad a season since
the
eat they
rev
olution of 1848. Accounts from the manu-
facturing districts state that business is somewhat
better, and that a favourable reaction might ba ex-
pected, but that some uncertainty still prevails as
to the period when the import duty on cotton and
wool is to be removed."

A letter from St. Petersburg states that some of
the tribes of the Caucasus who had not made their submis-
sion suddenly assembled, and, making an attack in the
night on a battalion of Russian troops, nearly destroyed the.
whole of them. Most of the officers were either killed or:
taken prisoners. The Emperor is said to be deeply afflicted
by this news,