The Sun.
London, England, 1869-12-31 00:00:00

SPIRIT OP THE PUBLIC JOURNALS'

The runes declares that .the year just passed away has,
loth at home and abroad, been marked by the uneasiness
:•tvhich forebodes political change. More than one event of
'undoubted historical importance awaits the interpretation
-which will be only supplied by its results. The Irish
Church Establishment has been abolished; Parliamentary
Government has once more been -conceded to France;
Vie Suez Canal has been opened; and, after an interval
of three centuries, a General Council of the Boman
Catholic Church has assembled in the Vatican. The
Ppanish Revolution, " which at the beginning of the
rear had already begun to disappoint sanguine
enthhusiasts, has failed to justify itself, either by the
r3form of ancient abuses or by the consolidation of a
regular Government. The chronic embarrassments of the
I alian Government afford another illustration of the diffl-
• of regenerating a nation. The dread of a great
iropean war, which had since 1866 impended over the
(',ntinent, has, by lapse of time and through the pressure
o domestic questions in France, happily in a great ram-
s :re subsided. The mutual relations of the Great Powers
h ye leen temporarily or permanently modified by the
r !taxation of the respective intimacies of France with Aus-
t is and of the North-German Confederation with Russia.
T he risk of collisions which might have brought the Eastern
q testion to a crisis has been more than once averted by
cl.plomatie prudence. To Englishmen primarily interested
in the welfare of their own country the passing year has
a fordcd little satisfaction. Although more than three
y jars have now elapsed since the great commercial and
fi tancial shock of 1866, there has been no healthy revival
o trade. The cotton mills are still suffering under an
insufficient and clear supply of raw material and a demand
hich is stagnant under the influence of high prices. One
c Luse of the continued commercial depression is to be
f .und in the discredit which has attached to joint-
s .ock enterprise since the discovery that liability
cn shares of which only a small part was called np might
be practically unlimited. The ruinous litigation in the
',recess of winding up companies also exercises a deterring
e 'feet ; and a series of criminal prosecutions of directors
I.)r alleged misrepresentation has necessarily caused men
cf commercial experience and reputation to decline a
thankless and hazardous office. The recent acquittal of
the directors of the limited company of Overend and
Gurney on an indictment for alleged conspiracy and mis-
representation will probably discourage the repetition of
similar proceedings, except in case of definite fraud.
The Daily News thinks that in England,lB69 is politically
memorable as being the first year of the Parliament of
Household Suffrage and of the Gladstone Administration
which was the immediate product of household Suffrage,
'ithout the constitutional intervention cf the House of
Commons. Two main results mark the parliamentary
year—one of them legislative ; the other, though it has
slot taken formal shape, not less real and important. The
Irish Church Establishment has been abolished; and, in
the act of abolishing it, the relations which must hence-
forth subsist between the elective and the hereditary
Chambers have been discerned and decided. The House
of ' Lords has practically abandoned its pretensions to
be an independent and equal power in legislation. It
tried its strength, only to confess its weakness. By cen-

k.entinn• prae4ieally to assume the position of a consultative
'body, with a merely suspensive veto on the decisions of the
House of Commons, the House of Lords narrows the
sphere of its operations, but in so doing it may brine its
entire strength to bear on objects which it can really
accomplish. Amendment and revision, the more perfect
adjustment of means to ends, and the nicer adaptation of
changes to the existing order on which they innovate, are
the proper province of a second chamber. If the Peers set
themselves in good faith to this work, and if in the intro-
duction of new members their power of contributing to it
is chiefly regarded, the House of Loris may look forward
to a long and not ignoble future. The nececeity may not
arise of theoretically limiting its functions, any more than
f imposing a limit on the legal powers of the Crown. It
is thus that the unwritten constitution of England adapts
self to the changing conditions of society, and is trans-
f orreed by continuous growth, instead of by violent dis-
I. aption. The passage of the Irish Church Bill through
the Lords puts the seal on a great, though gradual consti-
tutional change which has been in progress for more than

generation

Whether 1370 will be like Ys prcdeceesor, or more
eventful, more joyous, or more terrible, who can tell ?asks
the Standard. Behind that mystical veil of Isis which no
naan can lift lie those chances of a future which may be
misspent by nations as by men. Every year will find some
nations more advancing, others more retrograde; some
races dying out from the world, others busily engaged in
replenishing the earth and subduing it ; some ideas making
slow progress, and others fading out of mind becau-e
Pprosed to the feeling of the age ; will find new
refashioning the daily life of man,
new opportunities of work opening 112 for the
industrious :;11,1 inteftigent. n I so it ,will go or,

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oi° hari.aii:,ns like that w!,i.;;11 .wept away the civ:li4au:oti
the ancient wonl,l. In ail probability ISio will be
Jauch thou: that went before it. 'We have not
(i trite "rung out the thousand wars cf oid," n---
Lope yet to " ring in the thouFand years of peace." -To
1; in this country war has been unknown fur centuries,
but there are things worse than war. The spread of
avarice, and the decrease of a regard for truth and
honesty, the increase of superstition and discontent
Among the poor, faults which our censors have attributed
to us of late years, may sap the foundations of our
body politic and our social health, may injure our
well-being as a people, and prepare the way for our decay
as a power in the world, more surely than if we were
iwept away by the invader as were the plains of Bohemia.
,X.et us hope that our worse part will not develope, that
our better part will grow, that along with the spread of
education there will he a moral advancement which will
make us men in a truer sense of the word, that our England
of 1870 will be purer and nobler and greater than our
Is land of 16G9, holding ever more firmly among the.
nations of the earth that prominent position which does
not depend on bayonets, but upon an unseen force which
is mightier than a thousand armies.

r can yie

The Telejraph considers there is no better proscenium
for the retrospect of the year than a good coal fire. Vcluei
in speculunz—in the ruddy cavernous depths may you be-
hold the entire cosmorama of 1:3G9. Look earnestly, look
Intently; see how vividly distinct ;:-e the places and the
people, and yet how imperceptibly they fade and merge
into objects quite different! A cathedral dissolves into a
gaol ; a Fenian procession changes into a theatrical ballet;
the Pope joins in a phantom dance with the Pasha of
Egypt. Yonder crimson speck looks like the Tycoon of
Japan—but it is really the Wood-green murderer.
There is decidedly a strong ecclesiastical element
in the fire as we gaze at it on this 31st of
December. Right in the centre, long-drawn aisles and
clustered columns, storeyed windows and ribbed arches ap-
pear. See that interminable procession of divines in sur-
plices and bands. Hearken to the solemn pealing of the
organ. Dr. Archibald Campbell Tait, translated from
London to the Metropolitan See, is being enthroned
Archbishop of Canterbury. Curiously, by the very side
of the archiepiscopal throne appears the likeness of
n bedchamber near an English watering-place, and
upon the bed lies the Primate of All England;
struck down with his own earnest work, but not yet
lost to us. The scene changes, and we are once more in a
church, or rather in a chapel. Why should we seem to
hear the sound of bagpipes in a chapel? For what reason
but that "Doctor Cumming of Scotland" is writing "in
ecclesiastical Latin" to the Pope? Yet his Holiness will
have none of him, and pretends that he never heard of the
doctor save through the medium of the "Ephemerides,"
or newspapers. Again an altered aspect. We see a pulpit
in the fire, and a pale-faced man with a shaven crown,
who is shaking his fist at Rome, furiously. Mr.
Mackonochie turns away, shocked ; Mr. l'urchaa averts
his face, but the pale man is terribly in earnest ;
and, donning a lay habit sails across the Atlantic
to New York—where the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher en-
tertains him with tea and buckwheat cakes, and he is
"interviewed?' by the reporter of the .1%-eto leek TV,rl,l.
His name is Father Hyacinthe. A strange fire—and
strange things are to be seen in it ! The Church clement
grows stronger. Mr. Voysey is prosecuted for heresy; Dr.
Trower assails the animated theologian who disturbs the
Spiritual preserve of Exeter, but cannot prevent Dr.
Temple from mounting, the episcopal throne ; Dr. Wilber-
force changes his mitre of Oxford mixture for a Win-
chester bushel; Mr. Clarke, of Cambridge,, finds out that
lie has made a great mistake in remaining so long a clergy-
man, and straightway secularises himself, as Horne Tooke
did.

The Post remarks that the Council summoned by the
Pope is the great event of the closing year. Superstition,
religious fraud, and the craft of those who practise on
credulous piety are common to all ages and countries.
ut there are now at Rome, in this Council, highly edu-
cated mon who profess to believe that which they do not
believe, and who hold up to reverence that which in
their hearts they contemn—men who persuade them•
selves, by some inconceivable sophistry, that there
• can he high religious purposes in things which tin it oNvn
enlightened understanding must infcrin them are neither
moro nor less than an imposture or a delusion. They 'nave
been summoned to assiit r the declaration of a dogma—
that there can be no doubt was one nf the principal objects in-
tended to bc attained by the Councii,although the fops now,
it would seem, hesitates to press tile Aubject. If the Cetinci:,
instead of prcclaiming the infallibility of the ~•-upr--tric
Pontiff, were to compass the de.,iecniari,ation of the Holy
See, it in breathe the 1 rcath of life into the dry hones
of the Church; but, as far as we can see, time dissension
and disintegration, even in the heart of the Church, which
Ii is actually disclosing, and is ii-el-; t- widen an! inten
Nify, will compel nations as will iinTividnals to cheese
betveen the usurpations of the l'apazy and the interests
of Catholicism. In this country, and for our part,
-we have at inset r,:liev el the national conscience
bV the recognition ^,'•l fulfiment of a long-
delayed national obligati:in. We have acted not cult'
,vith the conviction that there ca'nid be no peace fcr Ire-
-1:,:nl—or for England in connection with Ireland—no real
union, and no geod feeling between the two countries until
the union between the State and a Church which nobody
tver thought of as a national Church, was dissolved. On
'the whole, therefore, the balance on the year's account is
Non the right side.

At a meeting of the Canada Company the dircc-

tors' report was adopted.