The Sun.
London, England, 1860-06-23 00:00:00

a formality, and would have learned that blind
obedience to priests cannot supply the place of
honest and deep convictions. The English religious
armies, as MACAULAY tells us, had no fear of man,
because they feared GOD. The priest-drilled
Neapolitans feared neither GOD nor unarmed men,
but fled, though ten to one, before earnest believers
in that Divine Right of Man—Liberty. The KING
does not seem to have doubted their quality as soldiers,

and while they had mere townsmen to fight against,he

seems to have had no reason to mistrust them.

They easily put down the insurrection of ill-armed
inhabitants ; they also had artillery, and they pre-
ferred to make attacks of the mountaineers a pre-

:ext for plundering the town, to following the for•

mer into the mountains. But there their courage
seems to have ended. Pretext for pillage was all

;hat was wanted.

The KING'S foreign levies have been much spoken
of. The truth seems to have leaked out at last.

Well, as the KING thought of his army so well
that he lost the Swiss through their refusal to be

amalgamated with it, he has always wanted foreign
help: His auxiliaries are now even Bavarians. In
point of fact, however, the great majority of three
battalions formed since last summer are Austrians !

They had orders to call themselves Bavarians to
avoid compromising Austria. The Bavarians are
very few indeed. Now that this is known the King
of SARDINIA will feel under no restraint, we trust ;
his subjects are eager to enlist for Sicily, he has
checked them, he has even detained the 12,000
muskets purchased by GARIBALDI with his sub-
scriptions. He will now surely give them his
blessing to aid in liberating Naples and Sicily from
, these Austrian Bavarians.

Such were the men ; the officers, in their way,
were little more trustworthy. The commissioned
officers could not be taken from the better classes
of society, because these were just the classes most
disaffected to the King's Government. They are
chiefly, therefore, " antiquated officers," the remains
of former armies, men obliged to stick to their trade,
and partly men who had worked their way up from
the ranks ; to these may be added a few of the
younger members of the aristocracy pleased to wear
a uniform. The non-commissioned officers were if
anything worse adapted to the real object for which
the army was created. The poorer classes were
not sufficiently educated to furnish them, they had
therefore to be taken from such young men among
the bourgeoise as had not the means of escaping the
conscription, and thus the most dangerous element
in Neapolitan society became the binding link be -
tween officer and soldier.
It was an army thus officered and composed of
such materials—old superior officers, disaffected
non-commissioned officers, and conscripts, to whom
booty, not fighting, was the soldier's glory—that
GARIBALDI met for the first time at Calata Fimi—
not more, it is computed, than 500 of the Caccio-
tori, -without firing a single cannon shot, drove about
4,000 of the Neapolitans from one strong po-
sition after another at the point of the bayonet,
capturing one gun, and defeating them completely.
A defeat with such odds in their favour stunned the
Neapolitans. They never recovered from it. It may
be hoped they never will—never till FRANCIS 11. has
packed up for Vienna or Munich, and all the
Neapolitan soldiers worth retaining have turned
over their allegiance to GARIBALDI and his master.
The system which GARIBALDI is now pursuing
seems to be a masterly one. He at first intended
to rely mainly on his own men, and employ the
squadre for outpost duties. He has now, however,
divided his cacciatori into small cadres, or as we
might term them, skeletons, of brigades ; these he
is filling up with recruits from the most able-bodied
of the Sicilians, and dismissing the rest. At the
same time every one is inquiring for arms. They
are the universal passion. There will be, therefore,
a country armed, and two brigades already created,
and being drilled by GARIBALDI for action. The
Sicilians are marksmen already, and they are fast
becoming soldiers. A foundry in Palermo is cast-
ing serviceable cannon ; but most heartily do we
wish that in some way the gallant General could
try the merits of our rifled cannon, and of our
ARMSTRONG gun, on the unlucky men whose busi-
ness it is to hold Messina as long as they can for
the miserable young tyrant—the tyrant against
whom our Premier has already levelled the artil-
lery of a statesman in the British House of Com-
mons.

We do not wonder that the reports are of various
character as to the intentions of GARIBALDI.
Reinforcements are certainly reaching him.
Rumour says that 12,000 men, at least,
will join him from Genoa, as soon as
they can ; and Sicilians are, as we have
seen, being rapidly disciplined to regular work.
And to work it is. Pipeclay and all that sort of
thing is discarded—" his secret is to do away as
much as possible with useless and pedantic forma-
lities, and to simplify everything." No knapsacks,
no baggage, a spare shirt and a towel in the pocket
of the blouse, provisions in a havresack, ammuni-
tion in a pouch,—it is with such equipments he
makes his rapid marches, and was in Palermo, when
LANZA and LETIZIA had gone to bed the night be-
fore congratulating themselves that GARIBALDI and
his band were defeated beyond giving further
trouble.
Whether with such an army he will contrive to
land a considerable number in Calabria ; and,
masking Messina for the present, march with the
ever ready Calabrians, straight for the capital re-
I mains to be seen. If he does, we have the utmost
confidence in his skill as well as his dash ; and no
regiments of the Royal army will probably venture
to give him battle. The brutal young despot will
be off, the guilty police will run also for their lives,
and it is by no means unlikely, this time, that our
ships of war will have to afford these runaways from
justice, the shelter they have had to give sometimes
to patriots.

Almost simultaneously there have been noticeable
recently in military circles two great bi-centenary
commemorations. The commemoration of the two
hundredth anniversary of the formation of the
celebrated regiment of the Grenadier Guards—
followed, a day or two afterwards, by a similar
festivity in celebration of the two hundredth anni-
versary of the formation of the Scots Fusiliers.
The colonelcies of these two favoured regiments,
named severally above, are holden by princes of the
blood Royal—that of the Grenadiers by his Royal
Highness the PRINCE CosoßT, that of the Fusiliers
by his Royal Highness the Cowman der-in-Chief. In
each instance, therefore, as in leed could alone have
been deemed fitting under the circumstances, his
Royal Highness the Colonel, respectively, occupied
the chair at the banquet given by his Royal High-
ness's regiment. As it fortunately happens, more-
over, both of the Princes are sufficiently clear at
an after-dinner speech to render the discharge of
the duties of chairman by each of them in turn
rather agreeable than otherwise to the guests
assembled round the board. The Duke of CAM-
BRIDGE, without making any pretensions to the
Possession of the more delightful gifts of oratory,
has manifested for some time past, in every word
that has fallen from his lips in public, a manly
common sense, at all times agreeable to the ears of
Englishmen. The PRINCE CONSORT has often