The Sun.
London, England, 1860-12-10 00:00:00

and BOWLBY unaccounted foe—signifying, in
other words, we fear, that they, too, have been
swept from the face of the earth by the pitiless
hands of the Chinese. There is, of course, hope of
some sort that they may after all turn up" again
still living, and even it may happily prove alto-
gether unscathed. But the experience we have had
of the cruel and lawless doings of the Chinese
during the three wars waged between them and
ourselves, drives us to an unwilling apprehension
that in hoping anything like this we shall be
doing little better or more rational than just
" hoping against hope." " While there is life
(however) there is hope"—says the old consolatory
proverb—and we have yet certainly to learn that
death of any kind has actually taken either Messrs.
BOWLBY or BRABAZON. How gladly should we
not each and all of us hail the welcome tidings
that both those gentlemen have teturned to the
allied head-quarters ! With what delighted curio-
sity and poignant eagerness should we not every
one of us turn to the perusal of another of those
brilliant narratives addressed to our chief contem-
porary by the graphic pen of the captured limes'
Correspondent !

Reverting to the te7.?gram—the next sentence is
surely pleasant reading enough—'"The EMPEROR'S
summer palace taken and saated, affording immense
spoil !" One's imagination takes 'Wings to itself at the
adjective, for the English upon the subject of spoil
are not usually given to exaggeration. And when
the booty is•spoken of as noth;ng less than " im-
mense," and that too in a matter-of-fact telegram—
we may be quite certain that the plun,'ler taken was
something really worth having. It is
tantalizing
to come at the next line plump upon the it, timation

—" EMPEROR fled into Tartary." His Im'yerial
Majesty, associated by ties of such intimate fela
_ _

tionship with the Sun and the Moon and th
Stars, would have been so extremely interesting

a hostage. It would have been so agreeable to have
held him in possession as about the most compact
and portable of all the material guarantees we

could have secured. And now we have—at any
rate for the time being—lost the golden oppor-

tunity. It will be a disappointment, we should
imagine, at Madame TASSAUD'S wax-work estab-
lishment in Baker-street. HIEN YUNG would have
formed so considerable an attraction there, under

the circumstances. For we may be tolerably certain
there would have been every probability that
he must have gone farther (westwards) without
by any means necessarily faring worse than old
Commissioner YEll, who passed the last portion of
his existence in durance vile at Calcutta. Who
knows but that the Emperor HIEN FUNG might
by next spring have created quite as
great a sensation as Prince LEBoO in the
salons of Paris and " the gilded saloons" of
London ! His apparition in Western Europe
might even have tempted BARNUM to hasten back
once more from his transatlantic retirement
with the programme at least (supposing it never to
have gone beyond a mere programme) of another
and yet grander speculation than any the Prince
of Showmen ever before ventured upon ! Who
knows ! But, alas, while we are ourselves thus
speculating upon these supposititious speculations—
th e Telegram glares before us that shortest and the
least welcome, if not the most important of its
eight startling sentences—to wit " EMPEROR
fled into Tartary." To follow him thither
would, of course, be the next thought
inevitably—but an afterthought (thereupon coming
upon us quite as inevitably) impresses upon the
common sense of an European the conviction that
the expedition would be of the vaguest ! Advancing
into Tartary in pursuit of the fugitive Emperor of
the CHINESE, the Allies might " hamd in hand,"
like ADAM and EVE, through any place, however,
rather than Eden, take their solitary way—

" With all the world before them where to choose 1 "
Instead of " beating the air " thus idly, the Allied
Commanders-in-Chief appear, from the nature of the
telegram, to have instantaneously appreciated the
only wise course remaining to them, there and then,
with Pekin in their hands and the EMPEROR fled,
and his Summer Palace taken and sacked, and all
this in the month of November—" Forces
to winter at Pekin and Tientsin." A judicious
intimation, followed by yet another equally judici-
ous and sententious, completing the Telegram—
namely, " The two Ambassadors at Pekin and Tien-
tsin." lier MAJESTY'S Ministers have not, there-
fore, been waiting idly in expectation of the
Chinese mail. More important news from the seat
of war than that conveyed to them by this tele-
gram could not have been received by the French
and English Governments.

The only rational course open to the Allied
Forces at the commencement of the campaign in
Northern China—the course we ourselves distinctly
pointed out and insisted upon from the very outset
as the one path to be traversed—has now, it ap-
pears, been followed up to the point of rendezvous, to
the ultimate destination of the Anglo-French arma-
ments. Our forces are there—at Pekin—in possession
of Pekin—and from that superior 'vantage ground
of the capital of the Chinese EMPEROR, the Am-
bassadors of France and England may now dic-
tate the terms of a secure and reasonable treaty to
the EMPEROR of the Chinese and his ad-
visers, with every prospect that at length a
solid and lasting peace may result from their
negotiations. Heaven grant it ! And with
it—with this once grand result of the recent
campaign of the Allied Forces in Northern China—
Heaven grant, too, that the Chinese nation itself
may be drawn at last out of its barbarous seclusion
from the rest of the nations of the earth, and as-
sume its place in the onward march of civilisation.