The Sun.
London, England, 1859-12-06 00:00:00

Stage Manager, Mr. K. Phillips

CANTERBURY HALL CONCERTS.-
EVERY EVENING.—The Music of Verdi's Opera of
MACBETH (now first made public in England at these Con-
certs).
And a Grand Se:ection from Meyerbeer's new opera of
-DINORAH.

Comic Vocalists —Messrs. George Hodson (the Irish Come-
dian and Mimic), W. T. Critchfield, 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
sights of the metropolis.
ROSA BON HEUR' S celebrated PICTURE of the HORSE
FAIR is note added to the already mafmiticent Collection of
Paintings in the Canterbury Hall Fine Arts Gallery.. The
gallery is opea from 9 a.m. till 12 p.m. Admission, Six-
pence.

WEATHER.—SUN OFFICE, DECEMBER b.
THERMOMETER, IN THE SHADS.
56—highest since noon yesterday,.
46—lowest this morning and during the night.
49—this day at noon.

WIND, S.W.; light, with rather dull weather.

lIIGII WATER AT LONDON BRIDGE.
THIS D. r.—'Morning, 10h. 41m.—Afternoon, 11h. 9m.
To-Morrow.-Morning, 11h. 3Gm.—Afternoon, Oh. Om.

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THE SUN.

LONDON, TUESDAY, DEC. 6, 1859.

Peace or war—Congress or no Cdfigress—matter
very little now that our patriotic spirit is fairly
aroused. The Congress suntnioned—we say sum-
moned by NAPOLEON, of the various nations of
Europe is but a blind to hoodwink his yet unde-
veloped plans. As to Europe in general he has
nothing to fear, but as to England in particular
—that one blot in his escutcheon—that one
will prove his ruin, if he but dare to risk the
passage of the Rubicon. We cannot but admire
his daring, though we contemn his affected
inscrutability. Why, does he think that
we of England are such fools as the Quarterdolts
of Liverpool that we cannot divine his
naval preparations ? What are they for ? To
guard the French coast from Invasion, or to cap-
ture all Morocco, and have a full swing from the
Isthmus of Suez to the broad Atlantic, and so
menace not only Gibraltar, but keep the tideless
Mediterranean all to himself ?

The Chinese Expedition is but a snare to carry
out his game. What cares a man who speculates
on a loss of some quarter of a million soldiers for
the sacrifice of ten or even twenty thousand in a
distant land ? Nothing—aye, nothing. The men
that leave their native land for China are booked
—never to return, or, if they return, it
will be only .as one for a thousand, just
to put in an appearance, as the lawyers say.
We sincerely wish the brave fellows may all come
back to enjoy their laurels, but we greatly fear they
will be rather late in the day. No ! The Emperor
NAPOLEON is like the man who has sold himself to
a kindred Prince, and must pay the penalty, or
forfeit his destiny. That destiny being the
glorious destruction of England—the capture of
all her Colonies—the world at his feet—Water-
loo avenged, and the mastership of the wide waste
of waters to boot. And what will it all combinifi,
boot him? Why, the very attempt will but serve
to lure him to his doom. We quote the following
from the second edition of the Times, with this re-
serve, that Austria hates if possible, even more
than France :

"In spite of the ehaiige of tone in the French press
it is still firmly believed that the Emperor Napoleon
means mischief to England. The Vienna Presse
thus writes on the sqject : England is undergoing
a in litany organisation, because the nation wills it
so. It is resolved that the steam-fleet shall
be as preponderant as the sailing-fleet is, and that
rifle-cords shall everywhere be raised. The hostile
feeling which has been raised in the English nation
is extremely disagreeable to the Emperor NAPOLEON;
and the more so, because it cannot be done away
with by diplomatic wiles. Only a war could
interrupt the English armaments, and. not being
prepared for a war with England, NAPOLEON tem-
porises. All the notables in the French navy are

of opinion that at present a war could nqt be waged
with England with a fair prospect of success. The
bolder spirits says that France only requiros six
months more for her preparations, but more circum-
spect politicians tall of a whole year."

The beginning of the end is fast coming upon
Austria—nay, it has already actually and signally
commenced. The financial condition of that empire,
—it is a matter of notoriety this throughout Europe
—is nothing less deplorable than a state of bank-
ruptcy. The treasury of the house of Hapsburg
has been drained for years and years back, seriously
drained beyond the possibility of redemption simply
and solely to pay for the maintainnance of that
gigantic army of 600,000 men which holds in thrall
36,000,000 of various races and tongues and coun-
tries by merely pitting those different races adroitly
against each other ! German against Italian, Croat
against Hungarian, and so on throughout all that
complicated machinery built up from stolen king-
doms and principalities. Yet when did the army, in
the creation and maintainance of which Austria has
contrived thus to ruin herself financially—when,
let us ask, and where has that vaunted highly-disci-
plined army contrived to win any corresponding
triumph or equivalent reputation ? It was beaten,
ignominiously driven back and routed in 1848 by
the popular leaders of the Hungarians. How it was
beaten, scattered, slaughtered, upon its own chosen
battle-ground during this present year of grace
1859 by the combined forces of France and Pied-
mont is already matter of history, and will consti-
tute in fact not the least remarkable or least pic-
ituresque page in the modern annals of Christen -
dom. How the Austrian armies were defeated by
the ancestors of those fighting and conquering
Frenchmen of to-day, the soldiers of the first
Empire, as previously by those of the first and
par excellence the Great French Revolution, every
one knows who has thumbed, however carelessly,
his TRIERS or his ALISON, MIGNET, and HAZLITT,
CARLYLE, and TRIBANDEAU. The fame of the single
soldier of Austria, the late Field Marshal RADETSKY,
stands out one and solitary. And even RADETSKY,
grand old soldier as he undoubtedly was, had to
contend with the unaided power of the little king-
dom of Piedmont, under the heroic King CHARLES
ALBERT—the veteran Generalissimo of the Aus-
trians having at his back all the finances and all
the resources to be placed at his disposal for that
purpose by the Viennese Government, then driven
to bay, and in a state, so to speak, of
desperation. Looking further back into
the past than that age of marvels, when Young
General NAPOLEON BONAPARTE with his tatterde-
malion troops was descending upon the plains of
Lombardy to set at nought all the old-world
strategy of the veteran WURlLSER—looking back
to the time when the Turks were advancing with
all but invincible force into the very heart of Chris-
tendom—do we not recognize then the fact that
shines conspicuously yonder from that remoter
epoch, that Vienna was saved from destruc-
tion, not by the Viennese, but by the Poles, under
SoniEsKl ? It is the same throughout. And it is
this bankrupt empire, resting for support upon this
inefficient army, upon these numerically formidable
and highly disciplined troops, that we may now
see in process of crumbling to pieces, in a state of
visible dissolution, disruption, and dismernterment.
Lombardy is lost to her already. Venetia is ready
to follow suit at the first signal. Croatia is ripe
for revolt. Hungary is watching eagerly for the
first glimpse of her next opportunity.

The lamentably sudden. death of Mr. Justice
CROWDER comes to us as another painful reminder
of the excessive amount of over-work, and that
work of the most responsible description, devolved
habitually and inexorably upon the venerable occu-
pants of the Bench. It is not the first catastrophe
of the kind that has occurred within very recent
recollection. The public has not forgotten the

tragic demise upon the very judgment scat itself of
one of the most gifted men invested of late years
with the ermine, the appalling death (in the very
act of addressing the last jury empannelled before
him) of the poet-lawyer and orator-dramatist, the late
Sir THOMAS NOON TALFOURD. And now in the in-
cident before us; if Sir RICHARD BUDDEN CROWDER
has not actually expired in Court while arrayed in
his scarlet robes and ermine, he has breathed his
last in the very midst of his arduous toil as one of
the judges of the land—struck down in what, for a
judge, may be regarded as the very prime of his
life, struck down thus abruptly (we may rest
assured of this) by his devotion to the duties of his
high and solemn office—duties discharged by him
in spite of all his physical ailments. Our argument
is not, of course, for one single moment to the effect
that the duties of a judge are in themselves beyond
the capacities and energies of the average majority
of those raised to thejudgment-seat. What we would
deduce from calamitous incidents like the two sudden
deaths already specified those of Sir THOMAS TAL-
FOURD and Sir RICHARD CROWDER is simply this
that too much is altogether required from
the eminent men raised to the Bench when
they are constrained as they are incontestibly
and that, moreover, pretty frequently to toil on as
the Shaksperian phrase is, "in harness," under any
and every circumstance, under the weight, some-
times, of many years, and often under the pressure
of severe indisposition.
It should be borne in recollection, for one thing
(as already indirectly intimated), that the toil de-
volving upon a judge is in itself very severe indeed,
and all the more so from being connected with the
most serious responsibility imaginable, thelespon-
sibility of life and death, of just or unjust judg-
mcnts. And this most severe, and most responsible
toil is undertaken, in the majority of instances,
when age is approaching, if, indeed, it may not
already have actually commenced. Let it be re-
membered, likewise, that with the vast increase in
the population, with the enormous enhancement of
the value of property, with the extraordinary mul-
tiplication of interests, public and private, Agricul-
tural and commercial, the number of our judges,
the number of those venerable men elected to adju-
dicate between rival claimants, or to decide upon
the guilt or innocence of the 'accused, has
by no means been increased proportionately. The
people generally are not one jot less litigious now-
a-days than they were in past generations. In-
deed, saying this, is only saying in other words,
that human nature is still, to the last, human na-
ture. And while this is so with is, as it was with
our progenitors, however recent or however remote
—the fruitful sources of litigation have, as we haVe
said, increased and multiplied very wonderfully in
proportion with the increase and multiplying of the
population itself, with the advance of Commerce,
and with the general development of Civi-
lization. Yet still rigorously we have con-
tinued, and we still continue, the number
of our judges as nearly as possible at the same
aggregate reached centuries ago. All the herculean
labours thrust in consequence upon those judges in-
dividually must necessarily be very disproportion-
ately distributed among them accordingly as they
are (in their very frames and temperaments) feebly or
vigorously constituted. The drudgery of the highest
Court of judicature in the land might be, in a mea-
sure, as it emphatically was in that instance, a mere

trifle, comparatively speaking, to the extraor-
dinary energy and vitality animating an
iron frame and an elastic intellect like that
of Lord -BROtGHAM—who had the advantage
moreover, of working heroically through the
accumulated, even Augean toils of the Court of
Chancery in his mid career, when his bodily con-
stitution was in its full vigour and his genius at its
brightest. But couple a forensic and judicial genius
the most luminous with a feeble frame, and thrust
upon them the same proportion of toil unceasingly,
pitilessly, inexorably—and the result is in the end
inevitably a sudden death like that of the late
Justice TALFOURD, like this as recently as
yesterday morning of the late Justice
CROWDER. It was not long since we had
an illustration brought vividly and point-blank
before us of the imperative necessity, at cer-
tain times and under certain circumstances, of in-
creasing the number of our judicial administrators.
We allude, of course, to the position of Sir CRESS-
WELL CRESSWELL—overwhelmed under a frightful
accumulation of cases in his isolated situation there
upon the bench of the newly constituted Court of
Probate. What was obviously required then in
that new Court might not unnecessarily be adven-
tured upon in regard to divers others of our older
courts of justice. At any rate it does appear to be
most unseemly that a high professional group formed
by some among the most venerable men in this
land should be that very group) out of all the
26,000,000 English-born) drudged to death by over-
work; by reason of an absolute want of considera-
tion for the weight of years, for the pressure of re-
sponsibilities, and for the undermining influences,
all the while ;,in the midst of this incessant
drudgery of secret and severe indisposition.