The Sun.
London, England, 1858-08-30 00:00:00

proprietor lending himself to unfair conduct, or be-
coming a party to a conspiracy to deprive an inno-
cent man of his liberty and property.

America will have to celebrate a sth of August as
well as a 4th of July—a day of Reunion with Eng-
land as well as a day of the Declaration of Indepen-
dence. A few days ago we gave considerable ex-
tracts from American papers, containing accounts of
the universal joy and enthusiasm with which the
tidings had been received that the transatlantic cable
was safely laid, and that England could now con-
verse with her eldest daughter. Subsequent ac-
counts confirm what we then published. Delibe-
rately arranged fetes are to follow up the great
tumultuous rejoicings. When the news was first
received, as the telegraph flashed it from town to
town, all the loud, boisterous, ardent means of cele-
bration common to our race were put in requisition.
Salvoes of cannon resounded in town after town, in
others all the bells were rung, impromptu public
meetings and brilliant speeches, and every hearty
mode of A nglo-Saxon expression of joy and gladness
were at once put in requisition. A college announce-
ment and dinner, at which a thousand persons were
assembled, and which happened to be on the very
day, inaugurated the event by a spontaneous reli-
gious speech and appropriate prayer ; and the fol-
lowing Sunday it was the topic of preaching
and of special thanksgivings in the churchesi of all
denominations. Not satisfied with this, however, the
municipalities are making arrangements to comme-
morate the great event in some more formal and
solemn, but not less hearty manner.
We must certainly yield to our cousins the palm
is regard to passionate rejoicings, and deep-felt plea-
sure too, at the late telegraphic success. They are,
no doubt, a more impressible and impulsive people
than we are. There is all the difference between
youth and age in the two countries ; between a na-
tion that measures its life by centuries, and one which
measures it by decades of years ; between a nation
which has gravely to consider what it can do with
its crowded and annually increasing population, and
one which has a boundless far west, and, with juve-
nile hopes, only wants to add to its years that it may
fill up the vast space it pants to occupy. We rejoiced,
indeed, and heartily enough, but it was natural.
America should surpass us in its exultation. Eng-
land's merchants and politicians, and all her people,
were glad to be united to America, but it was surely
much more for America to be united to us, and
through us to Europe. Long as Europeans have
been settled in America, and Englishmen in
her Northern half, yet all this time it
is America that has most ' felt the dis-
tance between the old world and the new. Europe
has not yet become relatively to America what Asia
was to Greece and Rome, and what Greece and
Rome are to modern Europe—the effete parent of a
superior civilisation. That day may come. The
emigration of all the more energetic, the more deter-
mined among us, to better their fortunes, may, long
after we are all dead and buried, render the States
the most powerful, wealthy, and. influential part of
the human race, leaving to Europe merely its supe-
riority in an ancient literature and learning, and its
cultivated taste. But at present America still leans
more on Europe than Europe on her. She has been
the outlying nation, the expatriated one of civilisa-
tion. True, she might be very well content with
the ample supply her own territory furnishes to all
she wants, but she cannot be. She carried with her,
as a part of her inheritance, the literature and laws
of the old world ; they are the basis of her civilisation,
and she still needs the intellectual food which the
parent country alone can furnish. Of commerce it
is needless to speak; but for her very fashions the
IStates are entirely dependent on Europe. Natural
was it, therefore, for Americans to rejoice the most.
They felt themselves at once placed in instant and
permanent connexion with the great family of civi-
lised nations. On the fifth of August, 1858, they
were joined for ever in happy matrimony with
the old aristocracy of the human race.
But, better still, there was, we believe, in all this
rejoicing a feeling which we here in England can
most cordially reciprocate. Was not the feeling more
akin to that of a re-awakened fraternal, and almost
filial, feeling, than to that of marriage rejoicings for
a union between the ration in her teens and the
nation in her maturity of age ? Is not the heart of
America, after all, more towards England, the land
iof her birth, and the land, despite herself, of her
pride and her real esteem, than towards any other
nation ? France she has used politically, and
she is pleased with Russian flatteries ; but she cares
more for the approbation of England than for that of
all the world besides. She is proud to be the
daughter of Britain, and would not exchange the
parentage, if she could, to call any other nation on
earth her mother country. And we, too—what
nation beside in the world would we prefer to call
our daughter ? When she has got rid of one dark,
" damned spot," which we ourselves have not washed
out for a very long time—we shall be in all respects
proud of our offspring, and feel—as, indeed, we now
feel—no jealousy of her most rapid progress. We
believe the Americans themselves hardly knew how
much they loved the old country. The tele-
graph was just the incident to show them, and
us too, that there was a stronger family
feeling than we had ever thought of. The
landing of the cable was, in fact, an almost unex-
pected meeting of two families—families, whose an-
cestors, some fourscore years ago, had, through the
stupidity of an ob3tinate King and his.iguorant Minis-
ters, and the young blood of the juveniles, contrived
to quarrel bitterly. Now, all that generation dead
and gone, the descendants, of the offenders at least,
all renounce the quarrel ; they do more, they adopt
the very principles of Colonial Government which
had they been in vogue at the time of the quarrel,
would have rendered it impossible. Every English-
man now avows that, with his present views, had he
been a colonist then, he would have rebelled. Thus,
a state of feeling has grown up which has thoroughly
changed the feelings of the two peoples, while con.

currently with all this a commerce has sprung up
between the two, probably the largest that ever

existed between any two nations.

It seems, therefore, but natural that Americans,
notwithstanding all the petty squabbles of late years,

should have growingly felt that they are more than

ever one with the old country. One in raee and

origin, one in language and literature, one in laws
and religion, one, essentially i❑ civil institutions and
in their irrepressible love of liberty and hatred

of despotism—the two peoples have found, after a
long separation, that they are suddenly one in

proximity—that a half-inch cable and a thin
wire has made them conterminous ! and the result is,

that the younger nation exults with exuberant de-
light, and the older one is profoundly glad, and both
feel instinctively that the telegraph is an informal
bond of federal union—that it has rendered war an
impossibility—that it is now England and America
against all the world—that freedom is safe, and that
despotism must at least keep within its own limits,
and soon begin to contract them—that even mistakes
between the two countries are henceforth to be of but
short duration—that commerce is to act on prompt
information and safe knowledge—that New York
and Liverpool are to transact business almost as
easily and securely as London and Liverpool ; and
that, for all but local purposes, the two countries
have become one. Already our aristocracy had
begun to acknowledge the claims of the Anglo-
Saxon Republic on their equal and respectful treat-
ment ; they had sent an able ford as an Alphas-
sador, and had avowedly given up all dispute about
the old quarrel as to the right of search. This
latter course had hardly been adopted before the
Transatlantic Telegraph made and ratified a treaty
of perpetual alliance such as statesmen could never
make—or, rather, sealed a brotherhood between the
peoples which will make their treaties superfluous.

A strange rumour is afloat which may prevent
the marriage in the high quarter, which occupies all Paris
at this moment. No less an impediment than a prior claim
is said to exist,—Court Journal.