The Sun.
London, England, 1859-12-08 00:00:00

has also been mentioned ; a valuable man, doubt-

.ess, and trained in a school of the most instructive

kind. With decided instructions he would do as
much as any man of equal standing to give effect to
them. It is hardly needful to advert to Lord JOHN
RUSSELL or Sir JAMES HUDSON, our ambassador
at Turin—for reasons pretty well known, they would
not do. The former has made one great failure in
this line ; the latter is thought to be too obviously,
though by no means too much so, a friend of Sar-
dinia.

The upshot seems to be that we shall send to the
Congress a clerk, namely, a respectable lord of the
name of COWLEY, who has long been employed in

receiving a handsome salary and living in a hand-
some house at Paris, to be the channel of our offi•
cial communications with the French Government

He may be a very worthy lord, for all the country
knows about him, but it does know that his letter,
in the affair of the Conspiracy Bill, was such a
miserable affair that, had he been a member of a
Cabinet, it would have been sufficient to overthrow
it. He has notoriously neither the parts nor the
spirit which are needed as our representative at such
a Congress as this will be. He may do as
well as anyone else to read to it the telegrams
and letters sent to him from England, bat it is cer-
tain that he is not even equal to Lord CLARENDON,
who yet failed so sadly at the last Paris Congress.
The important point to keep in mind respecting
our position in the Congress is, that we, as a
nation, neither have fought in Italian affairs, nor
mean to fight. We have purchased no right to in-
terfere, nor do we mean to purchase it. We have
merely the position of a bystander amongst the
nations ; and a bystander of very pronounced opi-
nions. True, these opinions are simply the opinion
of the law of nations. We do but declare the prin-
ciple in reference to nations, which is the bond of
every civilised society, that right not might should
prevail, that the weak are to be as independent as
the strong, that every man's house is his home,
and so forth. But, these very principles we
ourselves ignored at Vienna in 1815, and consented
to the gross interferences with national rights which
have caused a great part of the wrongs we now
want to see rectified. We are, however, fully entitled
to the benefit of confessing our error, and of the
superabundant proof since furnished that all the
Italian arrangements, except, perhaps, that of Pied-
mont, were blunders. Even, in fixing the extent
of the kingdom of Sardinia, there was sad injustice
done at the time to Genoa. Genoa, however, has
probably condoned this. Sicily, the Duchies, and
Venetia never have and never will ; and, we are
certainly entitled to ask justice and right on behalf
of all those whom we contributed to wrong. We go
to the Congress as penitents for 1815, preaching
righteousness far 1860.
When to the difficulties of obtaining the right
man to send, and of our uninfluential position in
regard to physical force, we add those of the known
object of Austria, of the similar course marked out
for France by the EMPEROR'S letter, of the legiti-
mist tendencies of Russia and Prussia, combined
with their unfriendly feeling towards Austria, it is
evident enough that our part is not a very easy one.
It is useless to predict ; we can only hope that
Sardinia and the Duchies will be able to resist any-
thing like intervention, that they will fully assert
their right to combine as they have resolved to do ;
and that the issue will be one strong State in the
north of Italy. Best of all if Austria could be
persuaded to sell Venetia, the French to evacuate
Rome, and Italy be left to settle accounts with her
Popes and Kings and Dukes as she sees fit. This
were, however, to expect grapes of thorns and figs
of thistles. A Congress of Monarchs is not the
assembly to confer liberty on nations.