The Sun.
London, England, 1859-11-07 00:00:00

Stage Manager, Mr. It,. Phillips

CANTERBURY HALL CONCERTS.-
EVERY EVENING.—The Music of Verdi's Opera of
MACBETII (now first made public in England at these Con-
certs).

And a Grand Seeetion from Meyerbeer's new opera of
DINORAH.

Comic Vocalists --ltessrs. Georze }To lson (the Irish Come-
dian and Mimic), W. T. Critclifield, and E. W. Hackney.

Several interesting Pictures are added to the Fine Arts
Gallery. The suite of Halls have been re-decorated and
beautified, and constitute one of the most unique and brilliant
eights of the metropolis.
RoSA BONI' E UR'S celebrated PICTURE of the HORSE
FAIR is now added to the already magnificent Collection of
Paintings in the Canterbury Hall Fine Arts Gallery. The
gallery is ope t from 9 am. till 12 p.m. Admission, Six-
pence.

TILE WEATHER.—SyN OFFICE, NOVEMBER 6.
THEILMOMETER., IN TIIE SHADE.
59—highest since noon yesterday.
56 —lowest this morning and during the night.
58—this day at noon.
BAROMETER—down to 29.40 ; now 29.49.
WIND, South-Westerly; fresh, with fine sunshiny weather.
Rain in the night and in the evening.

Nov. 7.

THERMOMETER, IN TIIE SHADE.
59—highest linee noon yesterday.
55—lotvest this morning and during the night.
56—this day at noon.
BAROMETER--29.73; a rapid rise.
WIND, Westerly; fresh, with fino weather.

HIGH WATER AT LONDON BRIDGE.
THIS DAY.—Morning, 11h. 48m.—Afternoon, Oh. Otn
To-Monnow-Morning, 12h. 9m.—Afternoon, 12h. 23m

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THE SUN.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1859.

Do British Catholics believe, or do they not, in
the independence of nations ? This is the plain
question we put to them, after reading the resolu-
tions of their Dublin clergy, which appeared in
The Sun of Saturday. If they do not, then let
them give up at once all title to the name of Britons.
Let them openly avow that they wish for the re-
turn of the days of King JOHN, or of THOMAS
A'BECKET, and that they think it fit and proper
that this kingdom, or any kingdom, should
take for its ruler some one whom it detests
and whom it longs to shake off, at the
bidding of a combination of other na-
tions. Let them avow that they have not the
same love for national independence as the French,
or even the Belgians, who have both got rid of the
monarchs and dynasties given them by the Holy
Alliance. But if they do believe that England did
nobly and well by asserting those liberties in 1688,
in virtue of which Ctitholics have a home in Eng-
land, and by the expansion of which they stand on
a level with all other British subjects, then let
them blush . for their prelates and their clergy
who ask them, in effect, to make a tyrant of their
Pope, and slaves of his subjects.
To Popery, as a religious system, it is not ours to
object. We hold each man's faith sacred. Roman
Catholics are Roman Catholics for exactly the same
• reason as. Mahommedans are Mahommedans, and
Protestants Protestants ; they were born and
brought up Roman Catholics. It is not with them
in the slightest degree a matter of investigation,
or conviction ; they have been industriously pre-
cluded from that by priests and confessors who bad
the absolute command of their mothers' faith,
and they are no more culpable for be-
lieving in what appears to others supersti-
tion, than English Churchmen are for believing
in the Church Catechism, or Scotchmen for
pinning their faith to the Assembly's Catechism.
Nine-tenths of us, at least, account for it how we
will, believe as our mothers did, and for this rea-
son in addition to all the more religious and meta-
physical ones, we think it no merit that our tolera-
tion to religious differences is absolute and corn-
plete. But let it remain a religious difference.
let the difference between us and the Catholic be
that he thinks CHRIST has a Vicar on earth, and
that. we acknowledge religiously, no master
at all on earth, but one in Heaven only.
With that difference we can shake hands with
him as cordially as with a Protestant. It is no
concern of ours whom or what he believes in ; to
his own Master he standeth or falleth.

But, all is changed if he bring his religion forth
" as an instrument of civil oppression. While we
thoroughly believe that no man's religion should
interfere with his own civil position, we equally
-huld that no man's religion should interfere with
(mother's civil position. It is to this converse of
their o Nn demand that Catholic prelate and priests
exhibit an insensibility which rouses the indigna-
tion of every sincere lover of civil and religious li-
berty. If Roman Catholic soldiers and sailors, felons
and paupers; do not enjoy the same religious advan-
tages at the cost of Protestant taxpayers which are
accorded to Protestants, we hear no end of outcry
against religious oppression—against their treat-

ment being worse because they are Catholics. But
when Catholic States forbid Protestants to worship
at all in their dominions, or compel them to do so
under annoying restrictions and supervision, or al-
low no burl ing place or monument for their dead,
or enact laws for kidnapping Jews' children—all
suck things are " good Catholicism !" It is
only religious liberty that Catholics in Eng-
land should propagate their views and cele-
brate their worship as they please ; but
it is very wicked and revolutionary, " dam-
nable" we believe is the favourite word, for
Protestants to enjoy the same rights in Spain, or
Italy, or Austria ! The Vicar of CHRIST being the
most perfect exemplar of this intolerance !
If, however, there be one case in which this
unendurable one-sidedness comes out with more
offensiveness to free Britons than another, it is in
the conduct of British Catholics in regard to the sub-
jects of the Pope. So blinded are the former with
the conceit of making the elect of the cardinals and
the religious head of their faith a temporal
prince, that they deny to the unfortunate descen-
dants of the ancient Romans the common rights
of mankind. They onlylof all the nations of Europe
may not govern themselves as they please ! While
all other free Britons assert the right of the Romans
to depose even a good Sovereign if they wish it, and
to instal a better, British Catholics deny their right
to get rid of the worst government in Christendom,
and to arrange their temporal affairs to their own sa-
tisfaction. They brand as calumnies the accounts we
have of Papal maladministration from every
source which can be relied on. Not a decent
Government in Europe has yet denied that
the POPE'S government is the worst in this quar-
ter of the globe ; yet British Catholics
profess not to believe it ! We have, how-
ever, one broad fact which settles all con-
troversy as to what is the real state of the
case. The Pope cannot keep on his throne without
the aid of foreign bayonets. Let the Catholic clergy
twist and turn that fact as they please, there it is.
French, or Austrians, or Neapolitans, or Swiss, or
some foreign help, is indispensable to the support
of the temporal reign of the Pope. He must hire
foreign dogs to worry his flock, as at Perugia, or
his flock will not merely run away, it will trample
his temporal power under foot. It is willing to
have him for its shepherd, but not for its butcher.
Let the French go to-morrow, and his Holiness
must be off, too !
Now, we ask all British Catholics what
right have they to require these Romans
to submit to the will they detest ? Is their religion
one which necessitates the political enslavement of a
nation ? Were there no popes before they had
temporal power, and was their Church less efficient,
less a Church for the first eight centurion than
it is now ? Is the abuse implied in making a priest
into a Sovereign, the better because it is an old
one ? Because it is so old. that it has become
utterly rotten and corrupt ?
There is a great deal of nonsense talke I, about
affronting 200,000,000 of Catholics by interfering
with the rights of their Head. We know not how
numerous Catholics arc, nor do we care. Truth
and right do not depend on numbers; and
a very large part, nearly all the educated part of
these Catholics in France, Germany, and Italy, are
infidels, while a very large part of them indeed—
perhaps the larger part—sympathise with the
freedom.loving Romans, and not with their bishop-
despot. But even were not this the fact, as it most
certainly is, what rightwould. the 200 millions to be
affronted by our demanding for the " Patrimony of
St. Peter," as they style it, that its inhabitants
should be free men ? Did the superstition of a
foreign Prince, in giving that territory to an elective
Bishop, deprive its inhabitants of the rights of men
for all time? Did that superstitious dotation really
elevate the position or improve the character of the
Bishops of Rome ? Did it even render them more
independent ? Ilas the Bishop of Rome been more
independent just because he has had a small terri-
tory to be anxious for, for the safety of which he
has had to be by turns dependent, now on a king,
now on an emperor, and at this moment on the ten-
der mercies of the man whose uncle whirled about
his predecessor as he pleased ? But we refuse even
to entertain the question—whether it be for the
advantage of Catholics that the Pope should have
a little kingdom of his own. As free Englishmen,
we assert the right of the Romans, and of all
nations, to have Governors of their own choice.
Whether the Popes have governed well or
ill, whether the people or sovereigns of other na-
tions would like the Popes to have a kingdom or
not, have nothing to do with the matter. The
Romans have the same right to resist the nomina-
tion of a monarch for them by 200 millions of Catho-
lics;as they would have to resist the nomination of 200
millions of Protestants. Surely the Catholic Laity of
England and Ireland will have the good. sense to
put an extinguisher on these proceedings of their '
clerics ; if not they will make half the country re-
pent of emancipating those who use their own
civil liberties to clamour for the enslavement of
their fellow Catholics in a foreign land. Let Catho-
lics
in Rome choose their own Sovereign, as well
as Catholics in England Ireland.

There are two wars now upon the eve of vigorous
comencement at opposite extremities of the old or
eastern hemisphere. To the generality they have
the aspect of direct conflicts between barbarism
and civilisation. Yet, among all the various belli-
gerents involved in them, there are nearly trace-
able degrees of civilisation. An Anglo-French war
with China, a Franco-Spanish war with Morocco,
might rather be termed, either of them, a collision
between ancient civilisation, or Pagan civilisation,
and Christian civilisation, or modern civilisation.
It were as preposterous for us to talk of the Chinese
as barbarians as it is for the Chinese to employ
that ridiculous term of derision or deprecia-
tion in regard to ourselves. And in some
degree also it comes nearly as . absurd
for the citizens of the French empire or of the
Spanish monarchy to sneer at the Moors as a race
but one removed from savages. The difference be-
tween them and their African antagonists is no
more than a difference between the degrees of
civilisation. It is not only thus under a purely
historical aspect, under the remembrance, namely,
of those monuments scattered far and wide over
the land of the Cid, attesting the glory and pomp
and the influence of the ancient race of the A ben-
carages. It is visible hare, we maintain, in the
actual condition of the Moors in their own country.
Granted that they have long been and still are to a
certain extent notorious and infamous in the eyes
of the nations of Europe as par excellence among
all the robber hordes of the old world, the pirates
of the Mediterranean. Granted that, as a recent
annalist has written upon this subject, "the his-
tory of the throne of Morocco, of the dynastic re-
volutions of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, is Ns-ratio
with blood"—yet as a people the Moors of this
present day are far, very far indeed, removed from
a state of barbarism. As the same writer has re-
marked, by a significant reminder, at the Great Ex-
hibition in Hyde•park but eight years back, the
Moorish Department, as many may remember,
contained many articles of utility and of luxury,
which were viewed with wondering admiration—
the taste and skill of the Moorish artisans

being world-famous in dyeing, in the fabri-
cation of swords, of saddlery, of earthen-
ware generally, and of gold and silver ornaments.
We read of them upon reliable authority, " They
are temperate in their diet and simple in their
dress, except the richer classes in the principal
towns, where the ladies literally cover themselves
with silk, gold, and jewels, while the men indulge
to excess their love of fine horses and splendid
arms." It being further related of them as a nation
that while there are, of course, amongst them many
wandering tribes—" they generally lead a settled
life as merchants, mechanics, or agriculturists."
The civilisatiop of the Chinese is a fact more noto-
rious in Western Europe, though more remotely
situated, namely, at the opposite extremity of the
eastern hemisphere! Among other illustrations
of the high degree of Chinese civilisation, it
is well known that they have for centuries enjoyed
as a people the advantages accruing to a community
conducted, from the highest to the lowest, upon a
grand and nobly-organised system of =Competitive
Examinations! It is well, we conceive, to have
facts like these in vivid remembrance, when we are
about to embark upon a new contest of any mag-
nitude with a race in all respects alien from our
own, but one that it would be simply folly to re-
gard, for that reason, as little else than semi-bar-
barous. The recurrence of wars like those once
more imminent, there with China, here with Moroc-
co, is in a great measure attributable, we can hardly
help suspecting, to a frivolous depreciation of the pa-
gan wars we are periodically called upon to combat
again and again. For ourselves, at any rate, it
were advisable, now that we are upon the eve of
embarking in another Chinese war ; it were, to say
the least of it, advisable to bear in mind that wise
saying of the Duke of WELLINGTON—that England
should never embark upon a little war. Less than
ever should we embark upon a little war with a
people numbering a vast aggregate of from
300,000,000 to 400,000,000. Now that we are
called upon once more to combat the Chinese, let
us do so at least energetically—for once and for all
—estimating aright the greatness of the enter-
prise upon which we have adventured.