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

not received it while we write, but cannnot doubt
that its spirit and substance are quite in accordance
with what we have just quoted from Count CA-
TOUR'S address to the Chambers. The late subjects
Of King FRANCIS seem indeed to have acted very
promptly on the suggestions of the Piedmontese
Government, for we learn that deputations
are arriving from every province of the
Neapolitan States, bearing resolutions from the
Municipalities, and other public bodies, which pro-
claim VICTOR EMMANUEL King, and solicit his
presence ; and that the Governors and Magistrates
of the different provinces have signed an act of
submission and of homage to the KING'S Govern-
ment. This is all that can be done at present,
when there is no regular Government, and it is the
kind of formal justification of the KING in the move
he has just made.
Whatever the legitimate Sovereigns of Europe
may do after the King of SARDINIA is in possession
in Southern Italy, neither he nor the Italians care
in the least. FRANCIS 11. will share the fate of
former wandering despots— a moment's pity for
dethroned legitimacy, and then forgotten for
ever. Would that he could be joined in his
travels by another FRANCIS, at whose departure
Hungary and Venetia would ring with shouts of
joy that would be heard in every capital of Europe.

The silence of the Count DE MONTEMOLIN is sig-
nificant. His Royal Highness's "younger" brother.
DoN JUAN, has recently been putting forward his
claim to the throne of the Spanish BOURBONS, to
the sovereignty of the Iberian peninsula. Very
recently we took occasion to comment in these
columns upon a document in which these claims
were formally advanced by Prince JOHN DE BOUR-
BON, and since then H.R.H. has, if possible, still
more formally endorsed that document by a com-
munication (forcibly insisting upon the validity of
his " rights") addressed by the royal exile to the
chief of our morning contemporaries. It was this
supplementary argument, signed " JorIN DE Bon-
BON," which we submitted to our readers in
our impression of last evening. And those who may
have glanced at it can hardly have failed to observe
the emphatic and deliberate manner in which the
prior and superior claims of H.R.H.'s elder
brother, Don CARLOS, otherwise Count DE MONTE-
MOLIN, have been—ignored. An opportunity for
the adoption of such a course as that which
has been thus entered upon by DON JUAN
Wits undoubtedly afforded to the last-men-
tioned personage by the late extraordinary, and,
in the interests of the chief aspirant to the Crown
of Spain, it may be said the most untoward and cala-
mitous escapade of the Count DE MONTEMOLIN.
Of that opportunity the second son of the late Don
CARLOS (i.e., Prince JUAN DE BOURBON) has not
been slow to avail himself. The resignation
by the Count DE MONTEMOLIN, while a prisoner
of the reigning Spanish Sovereign, Queen
Is ABELLA ll.—the formal and explicit abandonment
by his Royal Highness of all his claims to the
sceptre wielded by his ancestors during so many
centuries—this, of itself, constituted Don JUAN'S
opportunity. True, that since then this anticipatory
abdication, as it might be called, sworn, signed,
and sealed by the Count DE MONTEMOLIN, while
in duresse, has been as explicitly, as for-
m ally, and as deliberately withdrawn, or
abcrogated, since his Royal Highness's
restoration to liberty. But—it can hardly be sur-
prising under the circumstances—that the Count's
firtst act and not his second should have been ac.
cepted by Don JUAN as the one most decisive and
cctnclusive. So regarding it, the latter Prince, the
second brother, has ever since then assumed to him-
self the right of representing the dignity of which
hi'A elder brother has been hitherto incontestibly the
rmognised chief survivor, and of which he himself
as; incontestibly has been heretofore no more that
time heir presumptive to whatever latent claims
tl tere were to the rights of Sovereignty.
Now, matters are distinctly held by Don
J VAN, and apparently by others also, to be changed
al:logether. The Count DE MONTEMOLIN appears
to be regarded as politically dead—his claims,
Binh as they were, being deemed to have expired
t the very moment when he affixed his signature
to that, for himself, most ill-advised document,
b y which he resigned into the hands of Queen
I. SABELLA his dynastic rights as the head of the
elder branch of the Royal House of the Spanish
BOURBONS. Prince JOHN has so regarded it, and
h its written and acted accordingly. And the docu-
ments in which Prince JOHN has assumed to him-
so lf the position previously occupied by his elder
b irother have remained altogether unno-
ti'Jced and uncommented upon by that elder
brother—the Count DE MONTEMOLIN preserv-
in gto this moment an inflexible silenee. But
ox le construction can be put by the public at large
u on that silence—namely, the recognition by the
Count DE MONTEMOLIN of the validity of the right
anis assumed, of the claims thus advanced by Prince
JOHN to the Spanish sovereignty. Nor are the
claims now pnt forward by Don JUAN altogether
those merely of the almost dead and gone school of
the old world legitimists. As we have already re-
marked, when referring to them upon a pre-
vious occasion, Don JUAN, though a Spa-
nish Prince, writes in the light of the
1 ater half of this nineteenth century ! If he
claims to be King by the right of inheritance, he
Lopes to be so yet more by the free-will of the
Spanish population. Aspiring to be JOHN 111. of
Spain, he aspires to be both by the grace of GOD
and the will of the People. Thus viewed—it is a
noble and, in every sense of the word, a most
legitimate aspiration. The prize he hopes to win—
not through the blood of a civil war, but through
the light of reason—is certainly one not unworthy
of kindling such aspiration. The territory of the
Spanish kingdom alone is one-half longer in dimen-
tions than this group of the British archipelago ! It
comprises within its constitutional area no less than
15,000,000 inhabitants. If it has lost, as one
might say, a half of the world in Mexico, Peru,
and Brazil, it has yet, like pendant jewels from its
diadem, the Canary Islands, Annobon, and Fer-
nando Po; the Ladrone Islands and the Philip-
pines; above all, Cuba, Pinos, and Porto Rico.
That the mother country herself has not reached
the position which she certainly ought by this time
to have attained is, we presume, long since tolera-
bly beyond the reach of contradiction. " You will
derive information"—writes Prince JOHN, in his
letter to the English journalist—" You will
derive information on the liberty enjoyed in Spain
from all the newspapers which are not in the pay of
the Government, and from the 100,000 men who
are compelled to be soldiers against their will ; of
its credit from the Stock Exchanges of London and
Amsterdam ; of its toleration from the Jews, and
from all the other foreigners who dissent from the
Catholic religion ; of its prosperity you will be
taught by its waste lands and the thousand enter-
Prises which die for want of credit ; to the efficacy
of the colonial system the inhabitants of Cuba can
i;estify, governed as they are by the laws of the
'ladies of the time of Philip II.; and as to
the goodness of the econonzical system, the op-
pressed contributors can say a word about
that !" All which, we take it, is as true and un-
deniable as it is shrewdly and cuttingly sarcastic.