The Sun.
London, England, 1856-08-27 00:00:00

WATER AT LONDON BRIDGE.

TEM DAT—Morn. 0 min. aft. o—Evening 56 min. aft. 11
I"-11O' ROV—Morn.26 min. aft.l2—Evening 51 min. aft.l2

THE WEATHER—SUN OFFICE, AUGUST 27.
THERXONETER, IN Tag SHAD&
69 —highest since noon yesterday.
82 —lowest this morning and during the night.
73 —this day at noon.

PAlovirrves, 2'x•BB.
WlNO—Variable from S.W. to W.N.W.; rather fresh,
!with fine sunshiny and cloudy weather.

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Tfb 5:11,11
•

LONDON, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 27, 1856.

If asked to name the distinguishing quality of
the genuine despot, we should say it was malig-
nant brutality. Not the brutality of the drunken
husband or the rude savage, but the brutality of
a mind which relishes the torture and degrada-
tion it inflicts. There have been men who were
despots by accident, like a NERVA or a TRAJAN ;
but they could have been happy enough with
united power, and could rather have submitted
to lose somewhat of it than to revel in the tor-
tures of their fellow-creatures. There have been
others like CROMWELL, who, though merciful at
heart, could make all yield to their energetic
wills, from an enlightened consciousness that
they were serving the commonwealth in a na-
tional crisis, but who would rather have cut off
their own right hand than sign the order to tor-
ture another. Severely just they could be—
oruel they could not be. But the true despot is
consciously a guilty being ; he is a political
Satan ; his very nature is enmity to political good
—he can but bate civil and religious liberty,
while he can neither blind his eyes to the excel-
lence of what he hates, and the nobleness of
its advocates, nor to the selfish baseness of his
own despotic nature. He therefore hates patriots
as ABEL hated CAIN; he malignantly envies the
approbation they enjoy, because it not only
thwarts, if possible, his tyranny, but mirrors to
himself as well as to the world the odiousness of
his own disposition. Hence, from the times of
the tyrants immortalised by Greek history, or
even by the Sacred recDrds, to this hour, these
curses of humanity have been distinguished, at
some period of their lives, by the malignant
propensity to torture or degrade, or both, the
noble patriots who could not forget their own
rights and those of their fellow-citizens.
Our readers will excuse us if a glance at the
world just now has betrayed us into a kind of
philosophising strain. The illustrations of our
remarks from things as they are are so glaring
that any one may be pardoned for letting them
fall. Two European Rulers, in particular,
are now thrust upon our attention by their resist-
ance to the counsels of England especially, as un-
disguised tyrants, and the insane cruelty of
their conduct is raising a universal groan of dis-
gust with them, and sympathy with their victims.
Naples keeping Austria in countenance, and
Austria repaying by upholding the southern Mo-
narch against his subjects. It must be confessed
that the dark inspirations of Jesuitism have long
co-operated with the hereditary cruelty of the
Bourbon and Hapsburg races. Superstition
and bigotry, its offspring, have always delighted
in torturing those whose superior light they
could not extinguish, or whom they could not
compel to hypocrisy ; and when the cruelly of
religious fanaticism and that of enraged tyranny
combine, of course they convert the human being
almost into a fiend. It is also a deplorable ag-
gravation of the evil that the despot, as the
enemy of the human race, is essentially suspicious,
that he cannot imagine himself safe without a
host of spies and informers, and a bribed military
guard, and that hence thousand; innocent of any-
thing but the common hatred of oppression, are
denounced and tortured as actual conspirators.
Brit the other day we had to record an atrocity
--the savage murder of CICERUACCIIIO and his
eons and companions—which broke down even the
stilted moderation of the Times itself, and brought
forth a peal of stately thunder. What but a ran-
corous pleasure in cruelty could have induced a
Prince of the Imperial family to shoot men driven
ashore by stress of weather, men owing no alle-
giance to Austria, and who had violated no law ;
voluntary exiles merely from Rome when the
President of the French Republic strangled the
liberties of the Roman Republic ; their leader a

man of distinguished probity, endeared to all

classes of Roman citizens, his two sons, one but
nineteen, the other but thirteen years of age-
-what, we repeat, must have been th© malignity
nd the cruelty which could butcher such an inof-
fensive band with every circumstance of atrocity,
`--peeling the skin off the head tend fingers of