The Sun.
London, England, 1860-08-01 00:00:00

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THE SUN.

LONDON, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1, 1860,

Let us beat our swords into ploughshares, and
learn war no more! France is all for peace, and
if France desires peace who now will stir up war ?
The letter itself, which Lord JOHN RUSSELL told
us last night was a private one, was this morning
communicated by two of our morning contempo-
raries to the whole of England. As this of course,
"my dear PERSIGNY " would not have done
without the permission of the writer, we are at
liberty to regard. the letter itself as addressed,
through the Count, to all the people of England,
aid to " my dear Lord PALMERSTON " in parti-
cular. For him, indeed, a special paragraph is
concocted. " Lord PALMERSTON knows me, and
when I affirm anything will believe me." To
which kind claim to personal acquaintance, and
the logical inference from it, we imagine Lord
PALMERSTON only replying—" Hem !" After
recovering a little from his surprise, we may also
imagine our Premier beginning to mutter some-
thing about Savoy and Nice, and even " rags."
Oh, Savoy and Nice, rejoins the letter, that was
only an afterthought. I had, you know, renounced
them. But—but—they were essentially French
provinces—within our natural boundaries that
is—and, then, without that protection, Piedmont,
strengthened by Tuscany and the Duehies, might
have overpowered France at any time, so I merely
took her Alpine fortresses into my own hand. That
is why, he might have added, I felt compelled
to make Europe suspect me as a liar and
a thief. But Lord PALMERSTON knows me.
He knows I am neither. " Let us, then, under-
stand one another in good faith like honest
men as we are, and not like thieves who desire to
cheat each other." What said " the eminent men
at the head of the English Government to these
plural and reciprocal pronouns " Us," " we,"
" one another"—" each other ?" We rather fancy
Lord PALMERSTON and Lord JOHN RUSSELL would
have much preferred not to have been bracketed ;
thus with the EMPEROR, who has to hunt about
fur a man who will " believe a thing when he
affirms it," and who must tell people that he
is an " honest man" and no " thief." 'We
fancy our two English noblemen would be
inclined to remark—we, neither of us should
ever have thought of telling any one that we were
not thieves and liars. Our bitterest enemies not
only would never suspect us of being so, but would
not have believed it of us if any one had told them

Very free and easy, to be sure, the letter—but
gentlemen in England are not accustomed to advert
to the possibility of their word or their integrity
being matter of doubt. Yet somehow the origin
of the whole letter is that " mistrust is excited
everywhere since the war in Italy " and, he
should have added, since I told you that fib about
Savoy and Nice. That, far more than the Italian
war was the beginning of the mistrust. Lord JOHN
RUSSELL told him it must be so. For a war be-
tween nations, there may, as in a quarrel be-
tween; gentlemen, be many causes which would
not lead either the combatants or their friends to
doubt the honour of the belligerents. But for a
deliberate act of deceit, and that in order to ap-
propii
a.e what does not belong to you, an Eng-
lish gentlentan knows no forgiveness. lie cuts the
man for ever. It is the Savoy and Nice business
whicl i has shown that the old habit of taking-in by
oaths and protestations at the coup detat, has
not been broken off. Europe would be glad
to believe that the " frankness„
is not of the same
chary cter as that which placed the representatives
of Fr ante in
dungeons, banished her ablest gene-
rals, and which
has subverted all her liberties down
to thi's hour. Or, as that which tricked
into a. treaty, while acts were secretly in progress,
which, had they not been denied, would have been
fatal to the treaty and all connected with it.

As to the naval and military assurances we muse

in perfect frankness" say, that we do not believe
a word of them. Just in the same style in the
spring of last year, he denied that France was
armed or arming—yet, a few weeks later, he
launches an army of 150,000 men on Italy, had
another large army of observation on the Rhine,
and plenty to spare also to repress all liberal
manifestations at home. With hardly more than
a single colony to defend, France does not want
the 600,000 soldiers to which he confesses.
France does not want them for peaceful purposes.
One half that number would be far more than
enough for a Power which as certainly meant to

Leave other Powers alone, as other Powers are

As to the

indisposed to meddle with her.
navy—that, we doubt not, is a very
sore point. It was intended to get quietly
a-head of us. It is not, and cannot be
denied, that that object was nearly attained, but
the design was noticed. England wakes. Her
dockyards and steam-engine factories resound with
the adze and the hanmer, and the mortified EM-

PEROR sees our navy now in a condition to sweep
his from the sea, and to assert again successfully
the rule of Britannia over the ocean.

Hence, in great part, this loving letter. But the
immediate occasion doubtless was, that at last
England has not only acted, but spoken out. " And
thou, too, Lord PALMERSTON"-fOr thee to do it—
you who " know" me; for you to say, what all Europe
is so perverse as to say—what all the common
people of England were saying—for you, the
Prime Minister of England, in your place in the
House of Commons, to pronounce that France could
not want her army and navy for honest purposes !
Oh, it was " the unkindest cut of all." Now,
therefore, was the time to write " in all frank-
ness" to my dear PERsIGNY," and get him to
publish the letter to all England, and to convince
these misled Islanders that he do not contemplate
fulfilling the third part of his programme, " to
avenge a defeat." Peace and commerce are his
only thoughts. Armies and navies are but acci-
, dents of his position.

The latest intelligence from Naples is not the
very brightest ; yet it indicates substantial advance.
A telegram of the 30th from that city tells us that
GARIBALDI and General CLARY,;the commander-in-
chief at Messina, have concluded a military con-
vention, by which the Neapolitans are to remain in
possession of the three fortresses they yet hold,
Syracuse, Agosto, and Messina, with free access to
the towns. Melazzo is not mentioned, and we may
presume therefore that Bosco and his men have
had to capitulate. The citadel is not to fire on the
to-wc —not to repeat the atrocities of 1848 and of
Palermo in 1860. The Patriot and Royal flags are
to have equal rank, and the navigation of the Strait
of Messina is to be free.

What does all this imply. Is GARIBALDI merely
acting with the prudence and caution which have
distinguished his military plans, quite as much as
his courage and dash ; or, is he really influenced
by advice ?

Either would account for this convention. After
the dreadful fight at Melazzo which has found so
competent a witness and describer in Du:um,
though he inflicted such tremendous losses on his
opponents, yet his own was severe ; and it may
well be that, though able to march on at once, and
to occupy the town of Messina, he was not in a con-
dition to attack the fortifications, the citadel
especially. He might need many more guns and men
also, and delay might have been essential to him,
especially since he could hardly lose anything by
it. Not only would his own resources increase
continually, but the state of things in the island
garrisons, and on the mainland also, would become
more and more unsettled—the seeds of dissatisfac-
tion with the Royal cause being so abundantly
sown that he may calculate on the weakness of his
opponents, and his own strength increasing
together. Indeed, we should not at all be sur-
prised if the rumour prove true, that while the con-
vention is Ili force the Royal troops will evacuate
the citadel of Messina.

On the other hand, we know that the King of
SARDINIA did write an autograph letter and for-
ward it by an adjutant to GARIBALDI. What pur-
ports to be a copy of that letter is now published ;
and the KING, of course, writes in it, what he must
do, if the letter was to be published to all Europe—
" The KING did not approve the expedition ori-
ginally; but, under present circumstances, it would
be wise for GARIBALDI, if the King of NAPLES
would evacuate Sicily and abide by the fair vote of
the Sicilians, not to attack the mainland,"
and so forth. One of the greatest essayists of the
last generation wrote his essays in the shape of
letters to a lady whom he was wooing at the time,
and the preface states that each published letter
was accompanied by another letter—many of his
readers thought they should like to see that "other
letter" also. And in the present case we should
like much indeed to see the " other letter" of the
King of "SARDINIA, which went with the official
one ; or at least to know what the Adjutant under-
stood, when he left Turin, that GARIBALDI was to
understand from the whole communication.

We have, indeed, letters from Naples two days
prior to the telegrams which bring the news of the
armistice, which asserts " that GARIBALDI had
refused to c3nclude the armistice advised by King
VICTOR EMMANUEL, and had replied that he him-
self could alone judge concerning the real state of
things." GARIBALDI is also asserted to have added
that "he would not pause until the cause of
national unity had triumphed." They also add—
" that the disembarkation of GARIBALDI on the main-
land was immediately expected." These accounts
are not inconsistent. It may be equally true that
the General has refused to engage to turn aside
from his groat project of liberating Italy, yet that
he has concluded:a 2nilitary convention merely, with
General CLARY at Messina. We must, however,
be as patient as GARIBALDI himself, and await the
full development of his plans, only-devoutly hoping
for one ultimate issue, that on which the heart of
GARIBALDI himself is set. That such will be the
result of Italy left to itself, as the Emperor of the
FRENCH now proposes, we can hardly doubt.

The blundering of the Chief Commissioner of
Public Works is really inexplicable. His first pro-
ceeding gave good auguries for his administration.
But, alas ! the gleam of that fair omen has proved
nothing better than an illusory flash in the pan.
Mr. HAwKsLEY's Filtration Scheme has certainly
been set aside as a very dirty attempt at cleanli-
ness. The residue of the £17,000 voted for the
payment of it by the House of Commons has been
snatched like a brand from the burning. The north-
western extremity of the Serpentine is no longer
destined to be haunted evermore by the wheezing
ghosts of so many unseen, but neither unheard nor
unsmclt stationary engines, everlastingly pumping
up the bilge water of Bayswater! There are still
those tea-gardening vases and statues in stone and
stucco littering the spot designed originally by Mr.
lIAWKSLEY to be the scene of such filthy secret
ceremonials behind a veil of flowering shrubs and
Cockney statuary. If we have escaped the engi-
neering experiments of this adventurous gentleman,
we are unhappily not so well quit of his
ridiculous little subsidiary experiments at