The Sun.
London, England, 1859-03-19 00:00:00

COCHIN CHINA.

By the last China mail accounts from Touron, in
Cochin China; to the 18th Jan. have arrived :—" The
situation of the Franco-Spanish expedition was
satisfactory. Rains, however, had re-commenced,
but with less intensity than before. The Annamite
army, which had disappeared for nearly a month,
had resumed its former positions, and had com-
menced the construction of a circular line of small
forts and redoubts at about two miles from the
allied camp. To prevent the continuance of these
works the French and Spanish had made severa
sorties, all of which ended in the defeat of the
Annamites, with rather large loss in killed and
wounded, and with the loss of 14 pieces of cannon
and considerable stores. On two occasions the
Annamites made a vigorous resistance, and among
'the killed in one of the combats was a mandarin,
nephew of the Emperor, commander of the artil-
lery, as well as some superior officers. Several
prisoners were taken, and are to be sent to Manilla.
After these combats the Annamite army retired
in the direction of' Phutuon. The Pregent, which
had been sent to the coast of Tonquin to look after
the missionaries, had returned, having on board
several Spanish Dominicans. The persecution of
the Christians was so severe that the villages occu-
pied by them were being burned down, and their
populations carried into captivity. A mass for
the repose of the soul of Mgr. Reford had been
celebrated in the French camp, and a resolution had
been come to that a monument should be erected
to his memory on the heights of Tiencha. Admiral
Rigault de Genouilly was preparing to attack Ilue,
the capital, at the end of February or beginning of
March. The French had purchased two steam
corvettes, the Lily and the Rose, which draw little
water, and in addition to the English steamer
Scotland, the command of which had been given to
a Frenchman, had freighted two merchant ships.
The fortifications of Touron were completed, and
were strong enough to resist any attack, though
they will not be fully armed until the arrival of
new_ guns expected from France."

A communication from Vienna, in the Aruremberg
Correspondent, states that an envoy is to be shortly
sent by the Austrian Government to London, and
that Field Marshal the Prince de Windischgratz
is to be selected to carry an autograph letter from
the Emperor Francis Joseph to Queen Victoria.

The St. Petersburg Gazette states the Cabinet
of St. Petersburg appears decided on energe-
tically defending in the conference the double
election of Colonel Couza. That journal even pro-
poses the admission at the conference of a repre-
sentative of the united, provinces.

The Greek Government, whose interests are not
very visibly connected with the political questions
now und* consideration in the western parts of
Europe, has demanded from the Chambers a credit
of two millions of drachmas (1,600,000 fr.) in order
to provide against eventualities, which, however,
it does not define. It has also, letters from Athens
state, given orders in France for three batteries of
artillery, and had applied a sum of 400,000 drachmas
(320,000 fr.) for the purchase of rifle muskets.

MB. GLADSTONE'S LETTERS ON THP,
NEAPOLITAN STATE TRIALS.

(From the :Daily News)

Nearly eight years have now elapsed since the
publication of that first letter addressed by the
Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone to the Earl of Aber-
deen, which contributed so much to engage the
public opinion of England on behalf of the noble
martyrs of Italian liberty theft suffering, as they
have continued to suffer, the extreme of cruelty
inflicted by the modern Dionysius of the Two
Sicilies, under the implied sanction and protecting
superintendence of his Imperial, Royal, and Apos-
tolic Majesty of Austria. Mr. Gladstone's pam-
phlet, which created an European sensation at the
time, and which, it will be remembered, was so far
adopted by the cabinet of Lord John Russell, in
1851, that Lord Palmerston, being then Foreign
Secretary, sent copies of it to our ministers at each
of the European courts, has long been out of print,
and cannot now be easily procured. We therefore
think it worth while at this moment, when a few
—and be it remembered, only a few—of the most
distinguished victims of the infamous tyranny of
Naples have succeeded, thanks to the imminent
menace of a French war, in obtaining their release,
and have been landed upon our own shores, to fur-
nish our readers with some extracts from Mr. Glad-
stone's first letter, in order to refresh their recol-
lection of the justly indignant vehemence with
which an honourable English gentlemen, a Conser-
vative statesman, whose political principles have
consistently attached him to the legal maintenance
of all existing governments at home and abroad,
came forward as a personal witness of the villany
of a king and his ministers, to denounce that
almost incredible system of wickedness, that com-
plete and unparalleled fabric of injustice, hypocrisy,
falsehood, and ferocity, which has nevertheless been
tolerated by the devotees of what is called " Order."
Without further comment, we proceed to give
some extracts, and a little analysis of the letter,
which was dated the 11th July, 1851, addressed to
the Earl, late Minister of Foreign Affairs, and pub-
lished by Mr. Murray, of Albermarle-street, under
the title of " The State Prosecutions of the.
Neapolitan Government," as a pamphlet of 32
pages.

Mr. Gladstone commenced by explaiiiing the
motives which had induced him thus to trouble his
noble friend with a statement " which you will
find," he says, " painful, nay, revolting to the last
degree." He had been impressed, during a resi-
dence of three or four months at Naples, with a
" deep sense of the duty of making some attempt
to mitigate the horrors amidst which the govern-
ment of Naples is carried on." It was not for the
purpose of political criticism or censorship that he
had gone there, but from circumstances purely of
a domestic character. "I disclaim," he says, "po-
litical propagandism, and I did not go to look for
grievances." As a member of the Conservative
party, he remarks, he is naturally disposed to sup-
port the reigning monarchies of Europe ; but his
own actual observation, and the most authentic in-
formation which could be procured, have convinced
him of the following propositions :—" Firstly, that
the present practices of the government of Naples,
in reference to real or supposed political offenders,
are an outrage upon religion, upon civilisation,
upon humanity, and upon decency. Secondly, that
these practices are certainly, and even rapidly,
doing the work of republicanism in that country—
a political creed which has little natural or habitual
root in the character of the people The go-
vernment of Naples, in its social, like its physical
position, is under the shadow of a volcano, and is
doing everything in its power, from day to day, to
give reality to its own dangers, and fresh intensity,
together with fresh cause, to its own fears
pass over the consideration of the whole ground-
work of governing authority in the Kingdom of
the Two Sicilies at this moment. I shall not in-
quire whether, according to reason and social right,
the actual government of that country be one with
or without a title—one of law or one of force. I
shall assume that the constitution of January,
1848, spontaneously given, sworn to as irrevocable
with every circumstance of solemnity, and never to
this day either controverted or ostensibly revoked,
though contravened in almost every act of the govern-
ment, never existed, and is a pure fiction." Mr. Glad-
stone then suggests, with regard to our own in-
terest in this question, that " a question may
arise in reference to the treaty of 1844 between the
Two Sicilies and England, upon some parts of
which, as a colleague of your lordship, I had the
honour to be employed." Again approaching that
picture of evil which which he is about to delineate,
he observes : "I am persuaded that, in reading this
letter, you will feel distosed to ask, how can con-
duct so inhumann and monstrous be pursued with-
out a motive ? and what can be the motive here ?
To answer that question fully, I must enter into
the history of the Neapolitan constitution. Ido
not refer to the struggle waged by the King of
Naples against his Sicilian subjects. My subject is
the conduct of the Government of that sovereign
towards his Neapolitan or continental subjects,
through whose fidelity and courage the subjuga-
tion of Sicily was effected."
"There is a general impression," he then observes,
" that the organisation of the Governments of
Southern Italy is defective—that the administra-
tion of justice is tainted with corruption—that
instances of abuse or cruelty among subordinate
public functionaries are not uncommon, and that
political offences are punished with severity, and
with no great regard to the forms of justice." This
is the mild and favourable view of the matter,
which Mr. Gladstone repudiates as altogetherin-
adequate to the blackness of the real case.
" Had this supposition of the state of things been
accurate," says he, " I should have spared myself
this labour. The difference between the faintest
outline that a moment's handling of the pencil
sketches, and the deepest colouring of the most
elaborately finished portrait, but feebly illustrates
the relation of these vague suppositions to the
actual truth of the Neapolitan case.
"It is not merely imperfection, not corruption in
low quarters, not occasional severities, that I am
about to describe ; it is incessant, systematic, deli-
berate violation of the law by the power appointed
to watch over and maintain it—it is open violation
of human and written law, as there, carried on for
the purpose of violating every other law, unwritten,
eternal, human, or divine—it is the wholesale per-
secution, of virtue when united with intelligence,
operating upon such a scale that entire classes may
with truth be said to be its object, so that the Govern-
ment is in bitter and cruel, as well as utterly illegal
hostility to whatever in the nation really lives, and
moves, and forms the mainspring of practical pro-
gress and improvement—it is the awful profana-
tion of public religion, by its notorious alliance in
the governing power with the violation of every
moral law under the stimulants of fear and yen•
geance—it is the perfect prostitution of the judicial
office which has made it, under veils only too thread-
bare and transparent, the degraded recipient of the
vilest and clumsiest forgeries, got up wilfully and
deliberately by the immediate officers of the crown
for the purpose of destroying the peace and free-
dom—aye, and even if not by capital sentences, the
life—of men amongst the most virtuous, upright,
intelligent, distinguished, and refined of the whole
community—it is a savage and cowardly system of
moral as well as, in a lower degree, of physical
torture, through which the sentences extracted
from debased courts of justice are carried into
effect.
"The effect of all this is a total inversion of all
the moral and social duties. Law, instead of being
respected, is odious. Force, not affection, is the
fcundation of government. There is no association,
but a violent antagonism, between the idea of free-
dom and that of order. The governing power, which
teaches of itself that it is the image of God upon
earth, is clothed, in the view of the overwhelming
majority of the thinking public, with the vices for
its attributes. I have seen and heard the strong
and too true expression used,—' This is the nega-
tion of God, erected into a system of government.'"
Mr. Gladstone goes on to speak well of the dispo-
sition of the unfortunate Italian and Christian popu-
lation who arc doomed to groan under this horrible
yoke. " I confess my amazement at the gentleness
of character which has been shown by the Neapoli-
tan people in times of re7olution. It really seems as
if the hell-born spirit of revenge had no place what-
ever in their breasts. I know that at any rate some
illustrious victims are supported by a spirit of Chris-
tian resignation, and by their cheerful acceptance
of the will of God. But the present persecution is
awfully aggravated, as compared with former ones.
It differs, too, in this—that it seems to be especially
directed against those men of moderate opinions
whom a government well stocked with worldly
prudence, whom Machiavelli, had he been
Minister, would have made it his study to conciliate
and attach. These men, therefore, are being cleared
away, and the present efforts to drive poor human
nature to extremes cannot wholly fail in stirring
up the ferocious passions which never, to my belief,
since the time of the heathen tyrants, have had so
much to rouse, or so much to palliate, when aroused,
their fury."
After this impressive preamble, Mr. Gladstone
states that the number of political prisoners con-
fined in the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, at the
period of his visit, was variously estimated, but
that he does not reckon it below 20,000, and in
Naples alone some hundreds were under indictment
at the moment of his writing. In the trial of the
15th of May, which was then expected shortly to
come on, the numberl capitally charged was 400 or
500, " including,' as he tells Lord Aberdeen, " one
or more persons
of high station, whose opinions
would be considered in England more conservative
than your own." He adds, that the number of