The Sun.
London, England, 1860-09-15 00:00:00

THE SUN.

LONDON, SATURDAY, SEPT.:IS, 1860.

The Americans are said to be a " fast" people,
but we think some people or their rulers nearer
home go faster still. The French, of course, are the
cleverest people in the wide world of genius and
invention ; they have eclipsed all and every other
people, and now they are preparing to set us down
on our own proper element—the sea. Their papers
boast that, by means of the superior knowledge
evinced by French architects, ship-builders, and
others, they will now teach us a lesson for which we
xnuA be grateful. They h ave failed hitherto to bring us
tea sense of our position on the broad waters where
great ships are to be superseded by frigates clad in
armour—real mail clad ships cased in steel, against
which resistance were hopeless. Well, we have
seen many strange inventions in our time—some of
them so clever that the very inventor burnt his
fingers in showing them off. There are many
things which look well and promise more—but
there are also such things that in their ex-
periment prove too clever by half. And
such we take the steel plated frigates may
prove upon trial. The French ought to recol-
lect that, in the late wars, when only wind and sail
helped rival fleets to manceuvre and to fight, their
ships were almost always the best sailers—in fact,
their ships were built with that one idea—of out-
sailing all others ; and yet when the hour of trial
came, and close quarters were the order of the day,
British pluck made amends for wind and weather
and fast sailing too.

We will just remind our clever inventors, be
it in wood or steel, that English sailors don't
like playing at long bowls, and if the plated ships
try to keep away there is such a thing as bring-
ing them to book—by boarding—and all the steel
alongside will prove of little avail on the quarter-
deck, when the hurrah ! of the Boarders re-echoes
to the rush for victory. Steel will then be at a
discount in the market.

It is hardly to be believed ! But the fact is undeni-
able, that nearly fifteen months have elapsed since
the outrage to the British flag in the Peiho, since
the destruction of 400 of our gallant tars by a das-
tardly Chinese ambuscade, since the solemnly ar-
ranged treaty of Tien-tsin was torn asunder, so to
speak, by the murderous fusillade opened upon the
attendants of our Ambassador, from behind the
screen of those treacherous masked Taku fortifica-
tions. Yet up to this present moment those infamous
acts have remained unpunished, have bees allowed
to pass unchallenged, have elicited hitherto from
the majesty and might of insulted England not one
solitary attempt at retribution ! It was near
the end of June of 1859 that the gunboats
in attendance upon Mr. BRUCE, as her Britannic
MAJESTY'S representative, were opened fire upon
by the lawless dastards lying in wait behind those
veiled batteries infamously prepared for their ob-
struction upon the muddy banks of the river Peiho,
or Tien-sin-holt I And here is the middle of Sep-
tember, 1860,
and we have not heard that a
single blow has yet been struck by sea or by
land in those Chines©
waters, to avenge
our 400 dead and gone, and almost, it would seem,
forgotten, our cruelly and barbarously murdered
countrymen !
Not a blow ! And yet we
sahroeratcatunally
(thanks to our steam power) within lm
in-
terval from the scene of these atrocities that within
two months from the date of their perpetration the
stretched out arm of England might have sun-flea-Lily
avenged the four hundred British seamen who
had fallen by the heinous crime of the Chinese
Government ! " Shanghai," says the
cap-
tain of H.M.S gallant .
the Furious, " Shanghai is only
forty-two days by the overland route from Charing
Cross ; and at the entrance of the reiho river I met
a traveller in 1858, who was only fifty days from
Paris 11' Mark that —note those words—remember
that 30 days had sufficed to bring that traveller from ,