The Sun.
London, England, 1860-09-01 00:00:00

Commence at 7.

ADELPHI, NEW THEATRE-ROYAL.
. Sole Proprietor and Manager, Mr. Beni. Webster.
Last nights of the popular Adelphi Drama of Janet Pride.
THIS EVENING, JANET PRIDE. Messrs. B. Webster,
J. L. Toole, P. Bedford, Stuart, C. Selby; Miss Woolgar and
Miss Laldlaw.
To conclude with THE ENCHANTED ISLE ; or Raising
the Wind under the most approved Principles. Messrs. J.
L. Toole, P. Bedford, C. J. Smith, C. Selby, Powell, Romer,
Misses woovar, K. Kelly, and Emily Thorne.
Doors open at half-past B—Commence at 7.
Box-office open from 10 till 5.
No charge for booking.
Private boxes, £2 2s. ;
Orchestra Stalls, ss. ; Balcony, Family Boxes, £l.
4s. ; Front Circle Stalls, is. ;
Pit Stalls, 25.; Pit, is. 6d. ; Amphitheatre, Is ; Gallery, 6d.
Acting Manager—Mr. Win. Smith.

A STLEY'S ROYAL AMPHITHEATRE.-
Proprietor and Manager, Mr. Wm. BATry,
Continued Success of "Mazeppa."
This Erening, Lord Byron's splendid Hippo-drama of
MAZEPPA AND THE WILD HORSE, with entirely new
and beautiful scenery, costly costumes, and appointments,
introducing the largest stud of highly-trained Horses, Po-
nies, Buffaloes, and Camels in the World.
To be followed by Scenes in the Arena by the Star Riders
of the day, including the greatest Equestrienne in the world,
macie. de Berg, whose wonderful Leap through the body of
a Male)Co (a feat never before attempted by any other
fem has been nightly received with enthusiasm.
Doors open at half-past 6, performance commence at 7.
Box-office open daily from 11 till 4.
Stage Manager—Mr. W. Wzax.
Director of the Arena—M. Felix Revolti.

CONCERTS.-

C A NTERB UR HALL
EVERY EVENING,
A Grand Selection from
MARTHA,
And Selections from
DINORAH, TROVATORE, MACBETH,
And numerous other Entertainments.
Balcony, is, Hall. 6d.
Comic Vocalists—Messrs. George Hodson (the Irish Come-
dian ant/Mimic), and C. Marshall.
The ETHIOPIANS, consisting of 17 performers (organised
expressly for this Establishment), for the performance of
Vocal and Instrumental Music, Comic and Sentithental, with
Legro delineations, anecdotes, dem, in addition to the usual
entertainments.
The Fine Arts Gallery is open from 5 till 11 on Sunday
Evening.

THE WEATHER.—SUN OFFICE, SEPT. 141860.
THERMOMETER, IN THE SHADE.
67—highest since noon yesterday.
49—lowest this morning and during the night.
64—this day at noon.
BAROMETER-29.86.
Wpm—West-North-Westerly; light, with fine harvest
weather now, and a fair prospect of continuance.

HIGH WATER AT LONDON BRIDGE.
Tins DAY.—Morning, 2h. 34m.—Afternoon, 2h. 48m
To-momtow.-Morning, 3h. 2m.—Afternoon, 3h. 16m

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THE SUN.

LONDON, SATURDAY, SEPT. 1, 1860.

The Liberals of Maldon and of Essex have given
their fellow Liberals all over the country a valuable
hint. They have met to organise. All in the
orthodox good-tempered style of English politics,
they start with a banquet. Two hundred of the
principal members of the Liberal party of Maldon
and of the neighbouring parts of Essex assembled
to resuscitate the old " Maldon Liberal and Inde-
pendent Club," which seems to have fallen
into decay of late years, but in which
the fathers and grandfathers of those
present took an active part. The almost
complete overriding of the whole county by the
Tories has at last aroused the Liberals to propose
and inaugurate a common effort to deliver what
was once a Liberal district from the domination of
the party opposed in heart, though not always in
words, to all reform.

The meeting was conducted with excellent spirit ;
the member for Maldon, Mr. T. S. WESTERN,
being of course the chief speaker. He enjoys, he
tells us, the melancholy honour of representing all
the Liberals of Essex, he being the only member out
of ten holding liberal principles. The practical
question is, how the nine are to be brought down
from their position and replaced by men of progress
and liberal ideas. The advice of Mr. WESTERN,
and those who are acting with him, is thoroughly
sound, as far as it goes. For sixty years the
Maldon Club did good service, and we suppose we
may regard Mr. WESTERN'S membership as some
fruit from the good seed it so long sowed
at Maldon ; he now, therefore calls on the
Liberals throughout Essex to unite on the
Maldon basis. "If all honest Liberals would sink
their petty differences, and rally around the centre
supplied by the Maldon Club, be believed they
would acquire ere long true strength, and they
ought not to rest satisfied until, by means of the
machinery supplied by the club, they made the re-
gistration so exact that they could calculate the
numerical strength of their friends and their foes,
and reduce to a certainty what had hitherto been a
matter of speculation. They might depend upon
it that when that time arrived, as he trusted it
would soon, the Liberals of Essex would not be
restricted to a single seat, but make the Tory
nine descend and sing very small indeed."

Now we do think this a text worth the earnest
consideration of all Liberals. First, all over the
country we want organization. The Tories have
an organisation almost without trouble. With in-
significant exceptions, the Church is a great Tory
organisation having representatives, and very
influential, if they cannot be very noisy ones, in
every village. The clergyman instinctively feels
that he is a privileged man; he alone, amid all the
religious teachers around him enjoys an income
provided by the State and belongs to a Church
'which alone has representatives in the second
estate or the realm. The host of Tory landlords
have, therefore, bo‘ides their own stewards, law-
yers, and tenants, an echiulted mysteriously in-
fluential personage in every place to bock their
efforts, and in addition to this they have generally
a good registration agent looking well to the
lists of electors. Tories can afford to do this,
for, to them, is the pecuniary gain of keeping
things as they are. Liberals, unfortunately,
have no similar inducements to exert themselves.
If they bestir themselves, it must be " for an idea,"
as the EMPEROR would say ; the public good, by the
abolition of unjust privilege, is the grand motive
of Liberalism. But while tLio class which enjoys
privilege has personal reasons for defending it, the
class which attacks it can hope for the rewards of
patriotism only. The Liberal party peculiarly needs,
therefore, all the encouragement and support which
organisation and agitation can give. It can live
only by continued discussion.
But if the Liberals would unite they must, like
the Tories, sink their minor differences. Now it is
easy for Mr. WESTERN to say this, but:he should
remember the real difficulties in the way. The
Tories are ever ready to combine, because they have
43 t one object—the retention of aristocratic privi-

lege, an object worth sacrificing something ;for ;
hence it is but rarely that Tory splits endanger
Tory seats. But Liberals, contending as they
do for an idea, naturally have many aspects of
the general idea before them. From the ballot
and universal suffrage to the " poor little bill ;"
from the abolition of all Ecclesiastical establish-
ments to a " fair compromise on Church-rates"--are
well known lines of latitude and longitude on the
Liberal chart. Now it frequently happens that
those who tend to both extremes of the
lines are in some constituencies essential
to each other. Neither can return a member
without the help of the other. Such constituencies
are numerous in boroughs, perhaps not wanting in
counties. The fair course in all such cases seems
obvious enough. Sinking petty differences must be
mutual. The old Whigs, as well as the Radicals,
must sink something. They must have a
member each. They must stand honourably
shoulder to shoulder. The Whigs must not
meanly give their second vote to some plausible
Liberal Conservative, put forward by the Tories
just for that purpose, and Radicals must not, in
anger with the low political standard of the Whigs,
refuse to vote for their candidate. Where there is
a very large majority of Radicals or Whigs, as the
case may be, the minority may be fairly expected
to yield—but this is rare; the common case
is, that though one party be the larger both
are essential to success. Then let the majority
good temperedly give the minority a member.
Neglect of this simple rule, which has been most
successfully adopted in several constituencies, has
lost many a seat to the Liberals. The Whigs have
generally been the offenders. Their pride has re-
fused to vote for a people's man : they would unite
rather with Tories than with Radicals. It is time
that this suicidal folly came to an end.
Mr. WESTERN observed that it would be a great
advantage to have in the clubs, like the Maldon
one, centres of action for the popular party all over
the country. They are admirably adapted to bring
public opinion to•bear on Parliament after an elec-
tion. " Clubs of this kind might organise petitions,
and petitions, when sufficiently numerous, would
destroy the plea that the people were apathetic and
indifferent in many cases, when their silence had
only arisen from the want of proper machinery
to enable them to express their wishes." He
thought the course of things in the last
Parliament would have been very different if there
had been some means established of enabling the
constituents easily to express their wishes. " Upon
the occasions he alluded to, the people were compa-
ratively silent, and the enemies of popular rights,
and, he regretted to say, some members of the
Liberal party also, considered that their silence in-
dicated indifference. The consequence was, that
the popular rights went to the wall. It was the
fashion of their opponents to treat these events as
symptoms of what they called ' Conservative
reaction ;" but if the view he took was correct, it
would be much nearer the mark to say they were
the results of Liberal inaction. At any rate, he
should like to see " an appeal to the country where
such reaction was the watchword on one side and
Progress the rallying cry on the other."
These remarks are perfeetly just. From one
cause and another Liberals have been inert ; on
one minor grievance, the " Religious in-
quisition," several members of Parliament and
other gentlemen did form an organisation
—a " club " for a special object. No
great number combined, but they worked ; and
with what a satisfactory result—two principal
Ministers of State had, although avowing their
reluctance, to surrender at discretion. It was
organisation did it all. One word, however, in
conclusion. If the Liberals would succeed
with the country, they must take up reforms
that will warm the heart of the country.
The people at large will not exert themselves merely
for a party bearing a certain name—if they see it
distinguished by that name only from Conservatives.
The secret of Liberal inaction is the heartlessness
of Liberal Ministers. Had Lord JOHN RUSSELL,
for instance, before the last election, announced that
henceforth a Liberal Ministry must be a Ballot
Ministry, Mr. WESTERN would not have been the
solitary Liberal member for Essex. Lord
JOHN wanted to kick out the Ballot by extension
of the suffrage ;he ludicrously failed. Had he
proposed first to secure the independence of the
present constituency by the Ballot he would have
gained an immense number of real voters ; and,
that point secured he might have appealed to
the emancipated constituency to declare what
further reforms it wished for.'

STEPHEN BLACKPOOL'S frequent exclamation
" it's aw a muddle !" might very appropriately be
inscribed over the entrance to the valuable but
hotch-potch museum collected together in what
are called the Brompton Boilers, down at the corner
of South Kensington. It would constitute in every
respect quite as appropriate a superscription for
the Kensington Museum as that exquisite line of
JOHN KEATS'S (the very first verse, by the way,
that KEATS ever published, being the initial line
of his maiden work .Endymion, as it has certainly
proved to be the most famous verse he ever com-
posed)—

" A thing of beauty is a joy for ever I"

—emblazoned over the porch of the Fine Arts Ex-
hibition at Manchester. So—in a kindred spirit—
would we most respectfully suggest that there should
be emblazoned over the porch of these wonderful
Brompton Boilers that memorable epitome of
STEPHEN BLACKPOOL'S experience of life—the eja-
culation familiar to the readers of Hard Times—
already quoted above, but eminently worthy of being
here quoted again, if only by reason of its exceed-
ing appositeness—

" It's aw a muddle ;"
Looking at the outside of the buildings ! was there
ever such a medley raised in so short a time—painted
all manner of colours—constructed out of every
variety of building material, wood and iron,
bricks and mortar, stone and stucco—
here something like the squat ghost of a sham
Swiss Cottage—there a cockney imitation of a
Cheshire farm-house, half whitewash, picked out
with black beams and rafters—yonder the eidolon,
as it were, of an exaggerated boiler turned into an
impromptu tenement, such as we may sometimes
have remarked the half of a disused barge in a
boatbuilder's yard, erected perpendicularly and
" transmogrified"—(that is really about the • only
fitting expression for it—though the word will
be vainly looked for either in WALKER or in
JouNso m) —transmogrified in to the ludicrous
semblance of a sort of a Jack Tar summer-house !
Literally and positively, that is a tolerably fair
description of the heterogeneous aspect of this won-
derful museum of ours at South Kensington.

Then look at its contents ! The treasures there
compacted together are, in many respects, only just
a trifle better than the jumble:l toys in a child's
Noah's Ark of the old approved fashion—a Noah's
Ark, the roof of which slides off at one side for all
the animals, and birds, and creeping things, from
the elephant and dromedary down to the beetle or
the tomtit, to be tossed in promiscuously and shaken

together.
Nor can the confusion (every now and then

" worse confounded" than ever) down in that
marvellous museum of museums, or collection of
collections, be very much wondered at upon
reflection. Certainly it is impossible not to
feel surprised that so much order as there
actually is there could possibly have been
already obtained in the Kensington Museum,
after reading the report of the Select Committee
appointed to inquire into its general character and
arrangement—a document which we presented to
our readers yesterday in extenso, verbatim et
literatim ! It is amusing to note in the very pre-
amble of this elaborate rigmarole that the Com-
mittee disclaims the smallest intention of " entering
at any length upon the many large and important
subjects involved in the institutions for promoting
science and art—viz., the School of Mines, the Geo-
logical Museum and Geological Survey, the Museum
of Irish Industry, the Royal Dublin Society, the
Industrial Museum of Scotland, the twelve Navi-
gation and Science Schools, and the eighty art
schools, throughout the United Kingdom, all of
which are under the Science and Art Department !"
Why, of course, the notion of the Committee doing
anything of the kind would be, upon the face of it,
simply ridiculous. Particularly, when the have
themselves to add; immediately, that the institu-
tions just enumerated " did and might exist quite
independently of the South Kensington Museum
itself"—the South Kensington Museum having,
in fact, been added as recently as in 1857 to those
Institutions ! And certainly the Museum alone
presents a pretty stiff piece of business for the
Committee to get through as best they may—as
we have actually contrived to get through
it somehow ! For, recollect the departments
into which it has been subdivided in the report of
the Committee are nine—the Museum being, in
effect, composed of the following nine different kinds
of collections :—" 1. Objects of ornamental art as
applied to manufactures, with an art library ; 2.
British pictures, sculpture, and engravings; 3.
Architectural examples; 4. Appliances for scholas-
tic education ; 5. Materials for building and con-
struction; 6. Substances used for food; 7. Animal
products ; 8. Models of patented inventions ; and
9. Reproductions by means of photography and
casting." Now, from these nine distinct sections
we have not to-day to announce for the first time
that we would gladly have the second elimi-
nated ! Or, at any rate, a portion of that
second section ? namely—the British Pic-
tures ? Leave, if you will, the sculpture
and the engravings in the Museum at South Ken-
sington. But, at the very least—in the name of
common sense, let the national paintings—the
most national part of the national paintings, viz.,
the British Pictures—be, where they ought in
reason to be, i.e., in the National Gallery. Upon
this we shall take occasion to speak again at
another and an early opportunity. For the pre-
sent we content ourselves with commending, as
they deserve to be commended, the assiduity and
industry displayed by this Select Committee upon
the South Kensington Museum, as evidenced by
their report.

While we all lament the loss and distress caused
by the inclemency of the season, it is lamentable
to reflect that accidents, disaster, and destruction
of life and property, which might be avoided by
proper attention, are of constant recurrence. The
urgent need for a harbour of refuge in the Bay of
Wick, on the Caithness coast, has been frequently
brought before the notice of those in authority, but
the public are not perhaps generally aware of the
imperative necessity of the case. The account
given by eye-witnesses in the local press, and
.referred to in a letter in another column,
gives some startling particulars. Thousands of
men are engaged in the fishing trade in this loca-
lity, employing many hundreds of boats. Storms
are of frequent occurrence on that rugged northern
coast; and when they do occur the lives and property
of these men are exposed to the utmost risk from
the culpable negligence of Government in leaving
the neighbourhood without a harbour. As Mr.
MACKIE, the patriotic editor of the Northern Ensign,
observes,while insisting on the necessity of construct-
ing a place of refuge in the bay, the fishermen of
this locality do not ask for bounty as in France, for
official assistance as in Norway, for Government
protection as in Russia. They only claim a small
expenditure of the public money, so lavishly be-
stowed elsewhere, for the erection of a harbour,
which is to them a matter of vital importance, and
to which, though beyond their means to accomplish
unaided, they are ready and willing to contribute
During the gale which blew on Thursday last, the
boats crowded into Pultneytown harbour, the only
one on the coast worthy of the name, and the
scene of confusion existing there is said to
have balled description. " Boats ran into each
other, and in a short time the limited area of the
harbour was crowded to its entrance, while hun-
dreds of boats were tossed about in the offing, their
crews at their wit's end to know where to run to ;
and well knowing what they had to meet at Pulte-
neytown Harbour, some tried the river before
sufficient water was in it, and struck on the bar;
several, and particularly one fine boat, suffering
serious injury. The scene at the river's mouth was
at one time really saddening." The same writer
says, in another place, "We have not had time to
hear, as yet, from the coast creeks ; but we have
reason to fear that a similar scene has been
witnessed along the whole coast." When we
reflect that these scenes are constantly recurring,
that the lives of hardworking men are im-
perilled and their property exposed to needless
risk, the apathy or indifference of the authorities
seems no less surprising than lamentable. We
learn that during the severe storm of last week,
the precursor of the gale we have just been re-
ferring to, 30 large fishing boats were driven to
pieces on a short seaboard, and about double that
number seriously injured, involving as many
fishermen in a loss of several thousands of pounds;
and had the storm broken out a very few hours
earlier it would have been encountered by 10,000 men,
sailing in 1,700 boats, on this coast, with no place
to run to for shelter. Surely these facts speak for
themselves, and the immense extent of the Caith
ness trade gives it an indefeasible right to a share
in the public expenditure. We are told by Mr.
MAcKle, that, " generally a fourth of the whole
quantity of herrings annually caught on the Scot-
tish shores is brought ashore on the Caithness
coast; and the Caithness fishery, besides providing
a valuable article of diet for hundreds of thousands
of the people of Britain and the colonies, and em-
ploying a large amount of tonnage of vessels in
carrying stores and exporting the cured fish,
gives employment directly to about 30,000 men
and women from all the north-eastern counties,
and the Highl ends and islands." The claim on
Gayer a men t farther. üb, tan tiatcd by the fact that
one-tit th of the whole number of Roy it Naval Coast
Volunteers enrolled over all the Scwtisl e,eaboard
were obtained in Caithness. It is, inde i, d, short-
sighted economy which refuses the necessary grants
for harbours of refuge for localities like these. It
is another form of that rash and narrow minded
parsimony which suffered our national defences
and naval armaments to sink to so law an ebb, and
for which we have since had to pay so heavily.