The Sun.
London, England, 1859-09-26 00:00:00

Commence at 7 o'clock;

CA.NTERBUR V HALL CONCERTS.—
EVERY EVENING.—The lixsic of Verdi's Opera of
MACBETH (now first made public in England at these Con-
verts), the extraor,inary Violin Performances of the cele-
brated Infant DELEPIERRE FAMILY, and the usual
Vocal Concert.
Comic Vocalists —Messrs. George Hodson (the Irish Come-
dian and Mimic), W. T. Critchfleld, and E. W. Mackney.
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
Meats of the metropolis.
Will shortly be produced, a Grand Selection from Meyer-
beer's new opera of DINNORA.

TUE WEATHER.—SIJN 077107 E, SEPTEMBER 24.
THERMOMETER, IN THE SHADS.
67—highest since noon yesterday.
63--lowest this morning and during the night.
64—this day at loon.
BAROMETER-30.06—a sudden rise.
WEND, S.W.; rather fresh, with passable, but dull wea
ther.

HIGH WATER AT LONDON BRIDGE.
THIS DAY.—Morning, lh. 15m.—Afternoon, lh. 37m.
To-Moßnow-Morning, lh. 57m.—Afternoon, 2h. 17m.

Our " foreign relations," as they are termed,
now begin to look up, but how long they may so
continue is more than we, or even the High Pleni-

potentiaries themselves; can tell. The last six weeks
have been consumed much in the style of trying to
"beggar my neighbour"—for all their doings were
a sort of make-shift to put off the evil day. Now
time presses, and if we may believe the following :

" They laid down a more modest programme,
which, if my information, as I cannot doubt, be
correct, is as follows :—A definitive treaty of peace
will be signed by the three Powers, and an end will
thus be put to the state of armistice, which was pro-
rogued, as you will remember, at the first meeting
of the Conference early in August, until peace
should be concluded and ratified. Another treaty
will be drawn up, by which Austria will cede
Lombardy to France, who in her turn will make it
over to Sardinia. Before this can be done, however,
it is clear that on certain points the three
Governments must be agreed, since France
can take Lombardy from Austria only 'on condi-
tions upon which Sardinia will be willing to
take it from her. The most knotty poin in the

business of the double transfer is the question of

the debt, and on this head it is believed that Aus-
tria is likely to abate somewhat of her pretensions,
which Piedmont finds exorbitant, and which Baron
DE BOURQUENEY is disposed to consider exagge-
rated. Should it be found impossible to agree on
this point, some say that the formal cessation will
nevertheless take place, and that it and other diffi-
cultiee will be reserved for subsequent settlement.
'With reference to such unsettled points, to the
Italian Confederation, restoration of the Dukes,
t 6., documents will be drawn up, which, can be
however, Only by the Austrian and
French Plenipotentiaries. Austria is tenacious
is to the restoration, and France as to the con-
federation, -while Sardinia utterly rejects the for-
mer, and will not agree to the latter under pre-
sent circumstances and in the present state of
Italy; and thus it is that the documents referred
to, and which will be little or nothing more than
repetition of the Villafranca stipulations, will
- not receive the signature of VICTOR EUMANUEL'i
delegate. It may be thought that this abstention
on the part of the Sardinian Government •
is vir-
tually almost of the nature of a protest against the
convention entered into by the two EMPERORS,
and to which the KING, not previously consulted,
was afterwards summoned to subscribe. The situa-
tion is peculiar, and perhaps unprecedented. Mean •
while, unless some fresh instructions should be
brought by a courier, who is daily expected at
Zurich, it is believed that the Conference will con-
clude its labours, within a very few days, in the
manner above indicated."

Now all this looks like being very real—but to
lour belief it will only prove to be so much smoke,
and will only leave a vestige of hazy blank simili-
tude to gaze on. The fact is, that the two Em-

perors, in their extreme hurt to patch up matters
so suddenly in their mutual fright, were too glad
to get rid of each other in any way for the time
being ; and so they trumped up terms of any sort
to please the pride of either, hoping to set all things
right hereafter. The conqueror was afraid of
German Confederation, and so he set up a Confe-
deration of Italy, with a President at the head
of it, who had no real standing with either of
them—no, nor even with himself, or the world at
large, on secular matters. But the bait took
with Austria under the sure belief that the POPE
would support her in bringing back the
self-exiled Dukes. Thus we see how even in
great matters Emperors and Kings commit the
same grave mistakes as individuals while acting
under the influence of terror, be it imaginary or
real.

Meantime, as autumn is casting a lingering
look of departure, grim winter is about to throw
his mantle of darkness and storm over his shoulders
and just peeps into see if the Pleipotentiaries are
waiting for him to settle their differences, before he
seeks the sharp counsels of General FROST.

The King of SARDINIA is as much puzzled with

the abundance of " liberty: thrown at his feet by
the congregated freemen of Italy, that he feels
bewildered at its dreamy munificence, and
wonders accordingly. He would accept it
loyally, as it is spontaneously proffered; but—a
voice behind him—whispers—beware ! the time is
not yet!—wait—wait!—and he answers in doubtful
hesitation. In short, the whole is a sort of fairy
dilemma out of which they would all willingly
get, if they could. But how ?

Certainly, judging from the state of things al
this present juncture in all parts of Europe, Asia
Africa, and America, we are very far indeed from
that modern Arcadia, dreamt of so complacently
in the Manchester school of philosophy—the purely
hypothetical Age of Arbitration. It was only
yesterday, as it were, that a three months' cam-
paign in Northern Italy closed, after the destruc-
tion of some 50,000 souls between the Alpha and
Omega of that brief campaign, namely, the days of
Montebello and Solferino. Scarcely has the grass
begun to grow again over the graves of the Rus-
sians, French, English, and Sardinians, destroyed
by thousands upon thousands during the far more
prolonged and far more sanguinary war raging
only four or five years since in the Crimea—when
the legions of the Northern Autocrat are carrying
desolation before them elsewhere at the mouth of
the cannon from Georgia to the Caspian among
the mountains of the Caucasus. Gounib, the last
stronghold of the Circassians, is besieged and taken
at the point of the bayonet. The warrior-priest
SCHAMYL, half knight, half prophet, succumbs at
last to evil fortune—having been betrayed. His
heroic sword fails at length to cleave a way
for him out of the toils laid by a wily, coura-
geous, but most unscrupulous foe. And, as ABD-
EL-KADER in the end fell a prisoner into the hands
of the Prince de JoIN %lux, so now more recently,
by a kindred fate, SCHAMYL falls under the power
of the CZAR, being captured in the name of the
Emperor by Prince BARIATINSKY. An infamous
conspiracy meanwhile is suddenly discovered in
Turkey—a diabolical plot to assassinate the Sultan-
Caliph ABD-UL-MEDJID, at the instigation, it is
said, of DIAPER DEM, the Pacha of Albania.
Simultaneously, there kas come to us of late from
Morocco tidings of the death of the Emperor,
ABD-ER-HAMAN, and of the probable outbreak of
disturbances along the Moorish frontier between
the French conquerors of Algeria and the more
fanatical of the Morocco Mussulmans. Intelli-
gence, too, there has been, for many weeks, coming
to us, mail after mail, from the neighbourhood of
Ceuta—intelligence of warlike movements on the
part of Spain upon the opposite coast of Africa,
the Gibraltar Gazette being filled for a consider-
able time past with details of this threatening con-
test, and accounts, agaiu and again repeated, of the
sound of ordnance there distinctly audible from
the shores of the southern continent. It
was but ♦ery recently, as we all remem•
ber, that the Prussian army was being
collected together along the northern bou
daries of France, preparatory, as many deemed
probable, to a descent upon the Army of Observa-
tion under PELISSIER during the absence of the
main body of the troops of NAPOLEON then under
the command of the EMPEROR in person beyond
the barrier line of the Alps, fighting nominally the
battles of Italy, but more particularly, as it has un-
happily proved, the battles of Piedmont, upon the
plains of Lombardy. Nay, it is even by this time
a matter of tolerable certainty that it was in a great
measure the directly antagonistic attitude assumed
by Germany that led upon the morrow of a victory
that brought the Allies at last triumphantly within
the view of the formidable Quadrilateral to that
premature, still regretted, and, to this moment,
utterly incomprehensible compromise at Villa-
franea.

Directiig our attention, however, to the opposite
extremity—whether eastwards or westwards, it
signifies comparatively little—the story told in
either instance is in a measure identically the same,

inasmuch as it tends to show the absurdity of count-

ing yet awhile upon the arrival of that beneficent
millenium when spears are to be beaten into reap-
ing-hooks and swords into ploughshares. Almost
at the same period of time—meaning this critical
epoch in the world's history—there comes to us
news from the remotest quarters of Asia and of
America of wars or of rumours of wars. Yonder,
at the entrance of the great river that Sir JOHN
BOWRING must still permit us to designate the
Peiho, the necessity for a terrible retribution being
inflicted by the allied forces of France and England
upon the recreant Chinese has been suddenly thrust
upon us by that faithless and atrocious ambuscade
which has startled us into attention and thrilled
through the hearts of 60,000,000, and those
60,000,000 the population of the two most powerful
and most civilised nations of the earth—thrilled
through the hearts of those sixty millions
with one instinctive, spontaneous, and elec-
tric thrill of indignation. While we are
yet burning with ardour to vindicate our
outraged honour at the easternmost extremity of
Asia, we become aware upon a sudden that at the
westernmost extremity of North America there are
abruptly becoming visible the indications of ill-
feeling between England and the United States in
the matter of that contemptible little island of San
Juan, the chief of the little group known as the
group of the Arroo Islands, situated between
British Columbia and the island of Quadra or Van-
couver. Unless diplomacy can amicably settle this
wretched little dispute betimes there are already in
it the seeds of what may be far worse than a mere
estrangement, namely, a deplorable and unnatural
conflict
between the Young American Republic,
and the old mother-country. Altogether it is
pretty obvious at a, glance, no matter how cursory
that glance may be, no matter in which direction

wo may look, it is tolerably clear, we say, in the
north, in the south, in the east, and in the west
that the Era of War has not wholly passed away—
that we have not as yet entered even upon the
threshold of that dreamy and Millenial Age of
Arbitration, dreamt of by the cotton•spinning and

broadcloth-weaving day-dreamers of Manchester :
the which sage philosophers, by the way, have a
tolerably fair prospect before them of eating humble
pie this next session in the House of Commons—by
Toting fresh supplies for the new war in China, and
by aiding, in spite of themselves, in the more com -
prehensive remodelling of both our military and
maritime armaments.

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THE SUN.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1859.