The Sun.
London, England, 1866-05-22 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

TIMES.—We have expressed an opinion that the
first breach of the peace of Europe is not likely to
come from the side of Prussia. The menacing atti-
tude of Austria, the promptitude with which she
has prepared for war, the enormous army she is
capable of bringing into the field, might well cause
Prussia to pause before driving matters to extremity.
Prussia has, moreover, shown unmistakable symp-
toms that all is not well in her internal affairs. The
people, whom the Government has done everything
in its power to disgust, appear at last to be really
and effectively disgusted. A brave nation, never
slow to draw the sword at any reasonable provoca-
tion, is ready to do everything in its power to pre-
vent the outbreak of war. The people, who have
somehow contrived amid the wreck of their other
liberties to preserve the right of public meeting, are
exercising that privilege in a manner which must be
exceedingly embarrassing to Count Bismark and
his master. The King evidently despairs of obtain-
ing from his Legislature the support upon which he
at one time counted. He has been coquetting with
universal suffrage—the last and most desperate re-
source in the present day of those who want to do
a great wrong and veil it under the pretence of po-
pular assent. All sorts of Liberal schemes are in
agitation, assemblings of Diets, of Parliaments, of
Congresses, everything, in fact, except the down-
right measure of commencing the war which Prus-
sia but a little while ago was so ready and anxious
to provoke. It seemed strange that a Government
which has so openly and ostentatiously relied on
the army alone for its support should suddenly be
seized with a desire to refer matters to that very
civilian element upon which it has so long been
trampling. But it now appears that _there is
something more at stake than had hitherto been
supposed. In estimating the chances of peace or
war, we seem to have attached too little weight
to the fact that the army of Prussia is.rather
what we in England should call a militia
than a regular force. It serves only for a
short period, and when it has to be called out a great
number of its soldiers must leave the pursuits of
civil life. This does not perhaps interfere much with
the efficiency of the army in a cause with which their
opinion coincides, but it is a very important matter
indeed when the army is called upon to fight for an
object which is unpopular. The Prussian army has
so unhesitatingly supported the Government in its
conflict with the Assembly that we are surprised to
find it showing the least indisposition to follow
wherever Count Bismark chooses to lead it. So it
seems to be, however. The promises made in order
to render popular the military reforms introduced
by the Government against the will of the Parlia-
ment and the people have not been fulfilled. Every-
body knew that the standing army was to be enor-
mously increased, but the infliction was borne with
on the ground that the necessity for calling out the
militia, properly so called, would in the same degree
be diminished. The Government, by an act of pre-
rogative and in defiance of the Legislature, has
raised the Prussian army in time of peace to 210,000,
instead of 130,000. The only excuse for such a mea-
sure could be found in its entire success ; but the
army is so little adequate for the emergency the Go-
vernment has provoked that the whole of the militia
is called out on the very first alarm of war. The
Assembly will be able to point to this fact in the
coming session as decisive of the controversy between
the Government and itself. We are informed by the
same authority from which we extract these state-
ments—the Cologne. Gazette—that disturbances have
occurred in all parts of the country, and that in
some cases the military are required in order to
check the tumult. This is an evil prospect at the
commencement of a struggle which promises to tax
the resources of the country to their very utmost,
even if it be carried on with the full assent of the
people and with all the support which popular en-
thusiasm can place at the disposal of the Govern-
ment. We are somewhat surprised that the
Prussian Government themselves should have over-
looked this formidable difficulty in their way. They
at least should have known the reed on which they
leant when they supposed that an army so ready to
support them in their quarrel with the Assembly
was to be relied on for the purposes of foreign war.
But it is not wonderful that under such circum-
stances Prussia should declare her willingness to
enter into the Congress, though we confess that this
appears to us a very unpromising proceeding. No
general war ever breaks out in Europe without be-
ing preceded by a proposal emanating from some
quarter or other to refer all matters in dispute to a
Congress. Everybody always professes his readi-
ness to embark in it, but nobody will undertake to
abide by its decisions. It is an admirable means
for gaining titne, and for investing extrava-
gant and overbearing proposals with a spurious and
delusive semblance of moderation ; but it is the most
unlikely way in the world to solve any serious and
envenomed difficulty. If, indeed, the Congress were
prepared, as is said to have been suggested by the
Emperor of Russia, to enforce by arms its decisions
against dissenting members, a machine would be
provided ready to the hands of an ambitious Power
which might work results so disastrous to the liber-
ties of Europe as the Amphictyonic Council under
the presidency of Philip of Macedon did to the liber-
ties of ancient Greece. But though the decisions of
a Congress might possibly be suggested by justice,
its execution of them would infallibly be dictated
by policy, and we should probably not have long
to wait before we witnessed as gross an abuse of
the power of carrying out the general decree as
that which Austria and Prussia had exhibited when
they undertook to act as the agents of the Ger-
manic Confederation in the case of Denmark. A
Congress is often an excellent means of giving effect
to rights which have been previously established by
an appeal to arms. It can reduce into form and
give permanence to the well-ascertained results of
victory and defeat. But when countries carry their
preparations for war to such lengths as Prussia,
Austria, and Italy have now done, they must-look
for the adjustment of their rights and the settlement
of their quarrel to an agency more efficient than that
of an European Congress. They can, if they please,
draw back from the extreme pretensions they have
put forward, and assume again the tone of modera-
tion they have discarded ; but we shall require much
stronger evidence than anything which has yet come
to our hands before we believe that Austria, for in-
stance, will submit her right to Venetia to an Euro-
pean Congress, or that Italy, after having given
Garibaldi a command and called on the Revolu-
tionary party to aid her, can undo all these things
and wait patiently for the tardy decision of a con-
clave of diplomatists. We sincerely hope we are
mistaken, but it would seem as if all parties had been
careful to close against themselves this loophole of
escape. An intimation from the Emperor of the
French that he is iu earnest opposed to war, and
will take a definite and intelligible course imme-
diately against the first aggressor on its breaking
out, would have more effect than the deliberations
of any Europeon Congress. We have no doubt that
he possessed the power, had he chosen to use it, to
prevent the storm. It may be a question whether
it has not now acquired dimensions which even his
skill is unable to subdue.
THE 66 EXAMINER" ON COAL AND DEBT.—We are
asked by Mr. Gladstone to profess a new article of
faith and a new moral obligation. The national debt
was due and owing any day the last two years as
much as now ; indeed it was much more so, for
since then, out of surplus, we have paid off a good
many millions. If there was any obligation on the
national conscience to pay off only on taxes for the
necessaries of life, we should, of course, have heard
of it before now. Moral duties are not matters of
caprice or accident, and it would be a libel upon
the Ministers and the Legislature of the country to
affect to believe that all this time they have been
accomplices in a roguish evasion of a plain duty.
But the Chancellor of the Exchequer does not say
anything of the kind. The obligation to borrow the
savings of the working classes to pay off £24,000,000
due to the freeholders arises from the supposed dis-
covery of a new article of geological faith, namely,
that our coal mines are burning out, and that
we are, therefore, come within sight of the end of
our commercial pre-eminence. A new revelation
has come upon us, and the book of Lamentations,
by the Prophet Jevons, is added to our canon of
political scripture. We have read that book with
care ; not only from a sense of the importance of
the subject to which it relates, but from the surpris-
ing and, as we think, perilous inferences judicially
drawn from it ; and we do not hesitate to say that
we think its spirit unhealthy, its logic unsound, and
its deductions at variance with all the teachings of
industrial history, and with all that is ennobling
and elevating in the social history of man. We do
not question the honesty of the Professor or the
I pains he has taken to collect and to group facts in
illustration of his theory, but we deny that the facts
sustain the theory, and we think the theory is
founded in essential misconception of the facts. He
would have us believe that the industrial features
of a country like this are dependent mainly
on mineral matter,—we believe that the annals
of our commerce and civilisation prove it to be
much more dependent on the national mind.
The greatness of England, he tells us, is
bound up in the cheapness of iron and coal, and
dependent on their proximity, when they are found,
to each other. That large fortunes have been made
by this proximity, we of course do not deny, and

thatilarge numbers of persons have been for genera-
tions employed in iron smelting every one knows ;
but true it is that the manufacturing or the com-
mercial grandeur of England began with these, or
rests on these alone? Let us narrow the question
a little and try to get out of this loose, vague, in-
determinate language of the alarmists. In reply to
Mr. Horsman and other opponents of the Treaty of
Commerce with France, who would have put a tax
on the export of coal as one device for limiting its too
rapid consumption, Mr. Vivian said that the mines of
South Wales &one would keep our national fires
going, at their present rate, for at least 500 years.
Mr. Hull, who may be regarded as the High Priest of
our fire worshippers, scoffs at this version of the mat-
ters, and propounds, instead, his dictum that below
4,000 feet we can never go for coal; that the present
rate of consumption must continue to increase in a
geometric ratio, and that therefore in 1961 we shall
want 2,670 millions of tons instead of 86,000,000,
which is all we require now ; and inasmuch as the total
amount of coal within 4,000 feet of the surface is
86,000 millions of tons, before the end of the com-
ing century we shall be fairly burnt out. Now, in
the first place, there is not a particle of evidence
produced, or produceable, as to the maximum depth
at which all mines can be worked. Some geolo-
gists think we could go deeper, and some think not
so deep ; and our own opinion is like Byron's guess
at the author of Junius, that it can be fixed to no
one particular at all. Averages are proverbially unre-
liable in estimating speculative and inventive facts,
where half the data are never known to us, and
never_can be ; and mining incidents and accidents
are certainly no exceptions to the rule. Professor
Jevons shrinks from endorsing the 4,000 feet
theory, and stops short at 2,500 ; but why there
precisely, rather than anywhere else, he does -not
tell us. All we can gather from him on the
subject is that when we get to that depth
a complete supply of foreign coals will
come in from Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
The possibility and probability of such foreign sup-
ply is one of the most sensible things in the Profes-
sor's book. We send coal to Australia, to India,
even to Hong Kong ; yet we are startled at the sup-
position that it may one day suit us to import it,
like timber or rice, from the comparatively adjacent
States of America. Who will undertake to say what
the price of coal on the banks of the Potomac will
be five years after American coal-fields begin to be
thoroughly opened? Or what underwriter of stand-
ing-at Lloyd's would guarantee the figure at which
freight will be charged from Philadelphia to Liver-
pool or London ? The available supplies in
America, as is well known, are enormously
greater than those in any other country in the
world except, perhaps, China, whose resources in
this respect are still unexplored : and yet we hear
inquirers and learned men discuss the question as if
this alone of all articles of export could never be-
come for us one of import. And now with re-
gard to the monstrous chimera of the geome-
tric ratio of consumption. A contributor to the
Times has, in a few wise and weighty sentences, dis-
pelled summarily this strange hallucination. He
says
The consumption for household purposes is assumed to
be a ton for each unit of the population—say 29,000,000 of
tons a year; and the theory we are considering involves
that the consumption of coal for household purposes shall
be, in 1961, 576,000,000 of tons, and that as the country
will be neither hotter nor colder, and coals will afford the
same warmth to each person, the corresponding population
of the British isles will be also 576,000,000!
It seems ludicrous to argue gravely against absurdity
like this, and yet this is the corner stone of the
whole argument, for considerably more than one-
third of our entire consumption is confessedly for
domestic use. Of course, when pushed to the literal
rendering of their own vaticinations, these seers of evil
flinch from their own dogma, and tell us gravely that
they didnot mean quite that, but something else, al-
though what the something else may be they do not
tell ; and for the best of all possible reasons, namely,
that they do not and cannot know. A like illustra-
tion may be drawn from the consumption for loco-
motive engines. Railways have come into existence
within the last few years throughout the United
Kingdom, and the quantity of fuel consumed in their
working has increased at the general rate assigned,
but it would manifestly be absurd to say that the
mileage of railways could go on increasing for the
next 100 years at the same rate, or anything like it ;
and without this, what becomes of the geometric
rate of progression ? The great case, however, is no
doubt the augmented absorption of coal in the iron
trade. Eighteen millions of tons are now annually
used in making four and a half millions of tons of
pig-iron. If the increase continues, at anything
like the recent rate of expansion, the alarmists
• foretell that, in 1961, the quantity of coal con-
sumed for this purpose will be 472,000,000 tons,
which would produce twenty-four times the
present make of pig-iron.. Now, if there
be any one the gullet of whose credulity is
wide enough to swallow this piece of apoca-
lyptic arithmetic, he must gulp with it a propor-
tionate expansion of other manufactures beyond the
limits of any prosaic estimate ; because pig-iron,
inevitable though it may be in these gigantic dimen-
sions, must after all be made use of somehow, in
order to pay the makers and keep the furnaces
alight. Not wishing to be considered lunatics, we
simply take leave to note that we don't believe one
word of the story. But if it be true, or half true,
then in the name of common sense and fair dealing
let us adjourn the paying off of the National Debt
until we shall have got into this promised land of
unbounded production and unlimited profit, where
the nursery fable will at length be realised of the
pigs lying about in all directions, seeming to say—
who'll have us ? A trifle of 800 million pounds
sterling will be nothing to our lucky grandchildren,
whose garden of gold will be entered by such iron
gates. What will signify to them the weight of coals
from Pennsylvania or Hongkong, or the satellities
of Jupiter if that should become necessary ? Seri-
ously speaking, we mu st, with all respect for the
Chancellor of the Exchequer and the hon. member
for Westminster, recur to the economic principles in
which we were brought up. One of these was that
to tax the industry of the country to pay off debt was
pro tanto to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.