The Sun.
London, England, 1860-08-07 00:00:00

pets comes—the Indian Forces Bill—and the ever-
lasting Mr. HoRsMAN is told he may go
on till Christmas if he likes, but Lord
PALMERSTON means to carry it, and forthwith
the exacerbated tongue of the member for Stroud
cools and is quiet. Next, because he will show who
is master when his opponents want to force from
his side a colleague with whom he has little sym-
pathy, he simply says—" You shall not, I will
send you to the country first." And the House of
Commens, by a majority, considerable for a party
struggle of this session, refuses to pluck the for-
bidden fruit.
The debate itself was carried on with consider-
able spirit. The principal speakers all made some
good points, bnt most certainly the arguments on
each side were so well put that nothing but some
extraneous motive could have induced the house to
reverse its usual policy by refusing to give fair
time to the large and important trade which feared
a grievance. The main argument, it seems to us,
stands quite unshaken—the prohibition of the
export of French rags, or heavy duties on them, is
a bounty to the French manufacturer, and a tax
on ours, after all that Mr. GLADSTONE'S ingenuity
could urge to the contrary. If, as he endeavoured
to make out, ours is a cheap rag market, why don't
Frenchmen come here, while, it seems, they only
ask our woollen rags for manure ? Why also are
Frenchmen so determined to retain the prohibition ;
that it is pretended even their absolute EMPEROR
cannot repeal it ? Plainly Mr. GLADSTONE is under
some illusion on this point, and is afraid to allow
time and facts to dispel it. As to the treaty, what
can we do when two such men as Sir HUGH
CAIRNS and Sir R. BETHELL, the certain future
Lord Chancellors of the kingdom, differ so ably ?
What can humbler reasoners add ? The fact, how-
ever, that the EMPEROR does not press the treaty
on this point, is both creditable to his sense of
decency, and also cuts that ground from under Mr.
GLADSTONE'S feet. The latter, indeed, has cut the
ground from under his own feet by maintaining a
differential duty on English hops, which iu regard
to the treaty are placed in the same position as
paper. But paper was Mr. GLADSTONE'S hobby.
Hops were not.

For ourselves we have every reason to be satis-
fied. We must be gainers, if there be anything to
gain ; but we have been honestly desirous to advo-
cate what we believe to be simple justice, and also
thoroughly consistent with Free-trade principles.
Nor can we think it any advantage to those prin-
ciples to strain them as Mr. GLADSTONE has just
done. We do not doubt that things will, at much
sacrifice, however, soon readjust themselves. Raw
material will rise in France. English capital, in-
deed, will go abroad and raise its price, and the level
will betfound. And if there really was any danger

to the Ministry, we must confess we should be sorry

to see Lord PALMERSTON and Lord J. RUSSELL dis-
placed till Italian liberties are fully consolidated.
Their policy south of the Alps has always com-
manded our most cordial support. Lord PAL3IER-
ITON was wise in adverting to it on Ilonday at a
meeting called to talk of customs duties. The
Liberals present sacrificed the latter for the sake of
the ferraer.

It is an old saying enough that one half of the
world little knows how the other half lives. It is
a saying, too, that is most frequently applied to
the mutual ignorance of each other's existence ob-
servable in St. Giles's and St. James's, in Belgravia
and Alsatia, in the " gilded saloons" of the Court
end of the town and the swarming dens of the
back slums and rookeries of Whitechapel. All
this is painfully true, of course, but it is only half
the truth. The darkest holes and corners of Tom-
. all-alone's have had light thrown into them of late
years from various directions—by the genius of a
great writer of fiction like CHARLES DICKENS,
by the bull's-eye of the policeman's lantern,
by the official investigations instituted by our sani-
tary commissioners and by the ex-official researches
conducted, from time to time, with affecting ear-
nestness by such true-hearted, and large-hearted,
and pure-hearted philanthropists as the Earl of
SHAFTESBURY. Yet, after all, as we have said, this
is only half the truth. We have thus obtained, in
abundance, an accumulation of appalling evidence
as to the fact that Lord ....11t1AcauLaY spoke not (or
rather wrote not) at random when referring to a
nameless throng of miserable fellow-mortals and
brother citizens of us all who are to be accurately
described only as " heathens in the midst of Chris-
tianity, and savages in the midst of civilization ! "
Who has forgotten Jo in DICKENS'S Bleak House?
Who has yet lost a recollection of BECK, that other
crossing-sweeper previously described by Sir
BULWER LYTTON in his terrible romance of
Lucretia ? Has any reader of DISRAELI'S AFyba
either quite dropped a remembrance of those two
deplorable " cadgers stretched after nightfall on
the grass of one of the west end parks, com-
paring notes there as to the delicacy of the
flavour of cat's-meat ? Our principal novelists
have especially directed their energies towards
the more and more vivid enforcement of the
truths thrust upon our recognition by these terrible
social revelations. Still, while all this good work
has been in progress among the more generous
labourers in politics, in science, and especially in
literature—we have only been getting (we must
repeat) thus at half the *truth. We have been
" realising" the Evil—by way of securing a
powerful incentive to our benevolence. We have
been overlooking the Good—that might neverthe-
less have acted benignly as an encouragement.
Besides which, we have all the while been looking
peculiarly and almost exclusively to ourselves. We
have been scrutinising almost alone our own condi-
tion as a people—scarcely ever contrasting it for good
or for evil, with the social condition elsewhere
observable beyond the boundaries of our dominion.
There has been a great deal too much said in the
way of derision of anything like a trans-oceanic
philanthropy. Yet in itself is there nothing so
very ludicrous, after all, in the Christian charity
that disdains not to look eren beyond the distant
horizon to the squalor and wretchedness, the
ignorance and depravity infesting the remote
African regions of a Boorioboolagah. Say
whether there is, or whether there is
not, noble-minded, brave-hearted DAVID LIVING-
STONE! Upon the evidence adduceable from the
words penned by that one daring African traveller
let the conclusion arrived at by the impartial in-
quirer be based. It will then be clearly understood
that humanity by necessity has no limit whatever—
no limit whether of clime, or creed, or race, or
language, for its beneficent operation. When the
literal and absolute reality of this simple truth
shall have been effectually understood and *appre-
ciated, then, but not till then, the halcyon dream
of the people's poet of Scotland may indeed be
realised, and—

" Man to man, the warld o'er,
Shall brothers lie, for a' that I"

It is the plain and obvious epitome of the whole
Chrii,tian philosophy—rain-a ivrAXo,uat Iva
agar; are ciAXiXovcr—the sympathy required from
each for each being of an universal and not of a
merely partial or restricted application.

For the furtherance of the application of this
sympathy it is particularly noticeable, we conceive,
that, evtry
now and then, we have fresh justifies,-