The Sun.
London, England, 1860-02-24 00:00:00

THE WEATHER.-SLIN OFFICE, FEB. 24, 1860.

THERMOMETER, IN THE SHADB.
41—highest since noon yesterday.
31—lowest this morning and during the night.
40—this day at noon.

BAROMETER-30.19.
WIND, South-Westerly ; light, with very fine weather,
but frostily cold.

HIGH WATER AT LONDON BRIDGE.
Tins DAY.—Morning, 3h. 34m.—Afternoon, 3h. 47m,
To-moßßow.-Morning; :4h. lm.—Afternoon, 4h. 15m,

'
r,
_
L••••••1:1.1*-,421.1..2.4,111:11..N

THE SUN.
LONDON, FRIDAY, FEB. 24, 1860.

" The insolence of office," about which hamlet
speaks in a tone of mingled scorn and loathing, is
precisely what the House of Commons has of late
quite enough experienced. It led about two years
ago to the sudden crash and ignominious downfall
of an undoubtedly_ powerful and, at its outset, an
eminently popular Government. It is an arro-
gance, one would think, that among all kinds of
arrogance must certainly be the most intolerable.
Yet it is as nothing—absolutely as nothing—when
compared with the ex•official pride and disposition
to domineer over every individual who has the con
summate hardihood to differ from him in the
smallest particular, displayed last night through- •
out a speech, the one prevailing and all-pervading
characteristic of which was that of impertinent self-
assertion, by the hon,, and gifted, and eloquent,
but, above all, supremely bumptious, member for
Birmingham. It was in its every syllable—the
cracking of the thong that will drive that motley
' crowd yonder upon the right hand of Mr. Speaker
into the Ministerial lobby, after the opponents of
Mr. Du CANE'S motion and the supporters of the
Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr. BItIGUT speaks
altogether as the conscious master of the situation.
He presides, if we are to believe him, at this mo-
ment over the destinies of the nation, the fate of
Ministers depending wholly upon his Olympian
nod. As the last of the Barons was the King-
Maker—so this last of the Tribunes is the Cabinet

maker in our more commonplace generation.
The coalition is under Mr. BRIGHT'S patronage.
The Opposition is under his ban. The very
Treaty about which we are battling is but an
incidental emanation from his brain, as entirely
and directly an emanation from his brain (and
no one else's) as the Goddess of Wisdom was
from the brain of JUPITER! That benignant PAL-
LAS who, although the genial patroness of
the Arts and of Industry, appeared, from the first
moment of her birth, armed cap-a-pie in all the
panoply of War—just as this Pacific Treaty comes
forth surrounded by all the formidable splen-
dours, all the pride, pomp, and circumstance of a
glorious War Budget, with its £30,000,000 of mili-
tary and maritime expenditure. All that Mr.
BRIGHT could really say in regard to the anomaly
resolved itself into one idle and vapid ejaculation.
If it had not becu for that £30,000,000," he ex-
claimed, " what a scheme it might have been !"
Precisely—it is what we would all say—" IF !"
Eat it is not. There, on the contrary, are those
£30,000,000 in proof of the utter insufficiency of
this Treaty, which we are to accept meekly as a
" material guarantee" that England and France,
like the lovers at the close of the third
volume of a "Rosa-Matilda" novel, are to
" live happily together for ever afterwards
that 1860 is, in fact, t) be regarded and viewed as
the year One of the Millenium. " If," to adopt
Mr. BRIGHT'S pathetic and sentimental ejaculation
—Tithis Treaty had been just exactly ghat it is not,
then we might have found some inducements to
receive its announcement with an enthusiasm that
has certainly been wanting to it since in England

there was the first whisper heard of its existence !
The anomaly of this Peace Treaty coming
forth, as it has done, simultaneously with

a War Budget of the most flagrant charac-
ter—a Budget with a war impost (through the

tenpenny Income Tax) of £10,000,000, and a war
expenditure of £30,000,000—Mr. BRIGHT himself
frankly and forcibly acknowledges. He could
hardly, indeed, do otherwise. For he, of all men in
England, has, perhaps, the most loudly denounced,
hitherto, this most iniquitous and demoralising
of all taxes, the Income Tax, and this openhanded
squandering of millions upon millions annually
upon our war establishments. Yet, in spite of it
all, he swallows both. He swallows with a wry
face, it is true, but still swallows this bolus of the
thirty millions set apart for Army aniion7avy and
Artillery, this bolus of 10 millions upon the Income
Tax—swallows this bitter bolus of the War Budget
gilded over with that infinitesimally thin (even
transparent) gold leaf of the Peace Trey-ct,y—[for
which we are paying down at this momaruiVl hard
cash, £1,000,000 in the shape of duties remitted]—
encouraged to do so by a conviction that it will
operate most beneficially hereafter ! That it will
begin in about 18 month's from the present time to
operate most beneficially upon our Constitution.
It can hardly be wondered at, however, that Mr.
1 BRIGHT should have some faith in the efficacy
of this marvellous nostrum. For he tells
lus quite plainly, through his speech of
last evening that in compounding it his
friend Mr. COBDEN, and the French EMPEROR,
and her MAJESTY'S Ministers have only been carry-
ing out ideas that were originally his own. In tes-
timony of the truth of which assertion the hon.
member for Birmingham last night quoted one of
his own Parliamentary orations. The plea was as
naive as the famous one put forth long ago
by the renowned DENNIS—" That's my thun-
der ! " But with the Thunder in this instance
comes the searing and withering Lightning that
is to fall from the storm-cloud of this ominous
Budget upon the hearths of many millions
of Englishmen. With the Reciprocity that is
all-sided—with the extension of Free-trade
to France, which is rather a series of conces-
sions to the French Protectionists—there
comes the necessity kir the perpetuation of the In-
come Tax to the tune at the very least of
L 10,000,000 annually— and with no prospect before
us of any diminution of our immense warlike ex-
penditure.
Before Mr. BRIGHT spoke, Sir FRANCIS BARING
had in impressive accents, and with a frightful
force of logic demonstrated, with the distinctness of
a syllogism, that if according to the duplex scheme
now submitted to Parliament a deficit of
ten millions had to be met by a tenpenny
Income Tax, a shilling Income Tax would be
requisite next year to make up a deficiency of
£12,000,000. Never was Mr. BRIGHT hit harder,
however, since he has had a seat in the House of
Commons, just one remove below the gangway,
than he was throughout the whole of the very
masterly ironical reply to his argument of incon-
sistencies—a reply given in perfect good humour,
but with irresistible force both of sarcasm and of
reasoning, by the right hon. and learned gentleman
the member for Enniskillen. Mr. WHITESIDE, often
as he has before now spoken brilliantly, has never
spoken better within the range of our recollection.

We have protested in vain against the perma-
nent and enormous tax which will now be levied
on the inhabitants of the metropolis for construct-
ing their cloacce maximca. The thing is done.
Between the Imperial and Metropolitan Parlia-
ments we are doomed to pay some six or seven
millions of money, which we have always believed
we might not only have saved, but have turned into
a source of gain. To us it seems marvellous,
how intelligent gentlemen, whom we can hardly
suppose to be ignorant of Baron LIEBIG'S
writings, could have committed the suicidal mis-
take of rushing recklessly into the enormous colt
of the new system of the Metropolitan Drainage,
when it is as certain that it must become useless
as that Brown Bess will be wholly superseded by
the rifle, and the ponderous artillery of the past by
the lighter but far more effective guns of Sir Wm.
ARMSTRONG ana WHITWORTH. LIEBIG has made it
an axiom that the substances which are contained in
the sewage of towns,we might say, of every village and
house, sb ould be returned to the soil whence they origi-
nally came ; and if very carefully returned, the
fertility of the soil of any country might be main-
tained unimpaired, and even increase, with our com-
merce and population, for an indefinite period.
On this subject we may regard the Baron as its
ADAM SMITH or Colonel THOMPSON ; and we
shall have equally to be grateful to our fellow citizen,
Mr. MECIII, for becoming its COBDEN. By practice
and by writing, and by speaking on his practice,
he will succeed at last in gaining the ear of the
public. We, at least, shall always be happy to
aid his efforts to the extent of our power.
We have now before us a small but telling pam-
phlet, by Mr. MEctii, " On the Sewage of Towns
as it affects British Agriculture." It is a paper
which was read before the Central Farmers' Club
on the Gth of this month, but it is followed by a
valuable appendix of details, longer than the more
popular former half. Mr. MECHI is an enthusiast
for his object, but it is the enthusiasm of a
man of business and of a practical man.
He is the expounder, by experiment, of
Baron LIEBIG'S laboratory theories. But surely
his enthusiasm is warranted. He sees that we
are, demonstrably, all the kingdom over, carelessly
wasting what, in another form, is the staff of life.
We might quite as sensibly throw millions of quar-
ters of grain into the sea, as send down to it what
would produce that grain. If it ;was worth while
to repeal the Corn-laws, that there might be an Even
and ample flow of food into our ports, is it less
worth while to take measures which will ensure the
annual growth on our own soil of an equal
amount of food ? Or if it be worth while to
spend millions on importing bones and guano from
abroad, is it less worth while to make the arrange-
ments requisite to prevent the waste of a larger
quantity of home guano P
's lecture was to show
The object of Mr. MEcm.
that, taking our sewage as it is—just as it flows
now, into the Thames—it is capable of being applied
with a handsome profit to the land around Lon-
don. The difficulty with most other schemes is,
that they involve peculiar apparatus in our houses,
and chemical and dessicating apparatus at
the othe other end, to make the sewage a market-
able article. Mr. Malt' deals with our sewers
as they are. We have no doubt they might be
greatly improved for the purpose of preventing
decomposition, effluvia, and permeation of the so ii.
He asks, however, nothing but sewage as it is—the
unpleasant and slightly turbid liquid which one
may see at low water, running from huge subter-
ranean channels into our great navigable sewer.
The dilution, of which all other manipulators of
sewage complain, is to him a boon. He would
never, if he could help it, waste oven the storm
water. 'A system of steam•pumps, such as are now
used in Cornwall in the mines, or by our
water companies here, would raise the whole
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