The Sun.
London, England, 1866-11-14 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONLON, WEDNESDAY EVENING, NOVEMBER 14, 1866.

the 16th of that month he was created a K.O B.
He became ten days later a Lord of the Admiralty;
and on resigning that appointment was constituted
May 12, 1841, Naval Commander-in-Chief in the
East Indies, whither he sailed with his flag in the
Cornwallis, 72. As a reward for his services in
China, where he superintended all the operations
from the taking of Amoy in August, 1841, to
the pacification of Nanking in 1842, he was nomi-
nated a G.C.B. Dec. 2, 1842, and raised on his re-
turn to England in 1844 to the dignity of Baronet.
Since Feb. 27, 1845, Sir Wm. Parker (he had be-
come a Vice-Admiral Nov. 23, 1841) has been in
chief command on the Mediterranean station with
his flag in the Hibernia, 104. He was awarded the
Good Service pension of £3OO per annum April 26,
1844 ; and appointed Dec. 19, 1846, First and
Principal Aide-de-Camp to the Queen."
By the death of Sir Wm. Parker, Vice-Admiral
Sir T. S. Pasley, the present Naval Commander-
in-Chief at Portsmouth, becomes a full Admiral
from Vice, Rear-Admiral the Hon. Joseph Denman
becomes a Vice-Admiral, and Capt. Astley Cooper
Key, C. 8., the Director-General of Naval Ord-
nance, takes promotion to Rear-Admiral's rank,
and Capt. Sir R. J. Le Mesurier M'Clure, K.C.8.,
becomes senior Capt. on the list.
The following appointments were made on Mon-
day at the Admiralty :—Sub-Lieut. Count F. C.
Metaxa, to the Reindeer ; J. St. J. Wagstaffe, pay-
master, to the Urgent ; S. S. L. Needham, assist.-
‘
paymaster, additional, o the Bristol ; C. Warren,
clerk, to the Bristol; . Johnston, assist.-clerk,
additional, to the Bristol.

The following appointments weri►also made yes-
terday at the Admiralty :—Capt. J. Edye, to the
Satellite, vice Capt. Purvis Sub-Lieut. E. Festing,
to the Hector ; C. Serjeant, chief engineer to the
Fisgard, for charge of the engines of the Crocodile ;
E. Newman, chief engineer, to the Urgent ; N. Far-
rant, chief engineer, to the Sparrowhawk, with
seniority of April 21, 1866; A. Nettleton, paymaster,
to the Mutine, with seniority of March 5, 1866 ; W.
Morgan, paymaster, to the Victory ; and G. Smith,
naval cadet, to the Victoria.

Major-General Dix's Address to the 7th New
York National Guard.

On the 31st January last the 7th Regiment Na-
tional Guard, State of New York, gave a grand
reception to its members who had served in the
army and navy of the United States during the
great Rebellion. The proceedings were opened by
an address from General Dix, who was introduced
to the assembled guests by Colonel Clarke. Al-
though several months have elapsed since the occa-
sion, the address is now of more than usual interest,
as both the officer who delivered it and the men to
whom it was addressed are likely soon to be among
us. Major-General John A. Dix has been appointed
United States Minister to Paris, and it is probable
that he will be installed in office, and will welcome
to Paris his old companions in- arms, the 7th, on
their approaching visit to that city. The peculiarity
of the circumstances under which he was addressing
the Regiment was, that though there was a crowd
of officers who had won distinction in the battle-
fields of the United States during the late war, it
was not under the banners of the 7th that they had
been brought into contact with the enemy, but iu

;he ranks of the 7th they had received their military

training. It was not that the regiment as a unit
of the United States military organisation had won
renown in the field, but that it was the school from
whence had been taken the assembled officers, many
of whom had gained high distinction in the contest.
" Giving you all the praise," said the General,

" which is most eminently .your due for your
promptitude, your patriotic spirit, and your alacrity
on all occasions in accepting and courting military
service, yet the crowning distinction of your regi-
ment is in the large number of officers which you
have furnished for other organisations. I hold in
my hand a roll of 557 of your members, who
received commissions in the army, the navy, or
the volunteer service. Nine-tenths of the number
were serving with the regiment when the
war broke out. Three rose to the rank of

major-general, nineteen to the rank of brigadier-
general, twenty-nine to the Rink of colonel, and
forty-six to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Many
whose names are on this roll of honour are sleeping
in soldiers' graves. Others are moving about with
nvitilated limbs and with frames scarred by honour-
able wounds, the silent but expressive memorials of
faithful and heroic service. For years before the
war you devoted yourselves with an assiduity and a
zeal worthy of all commendation to martial exercises,
and I believe I may safely say that there was
scarcely a man in your ranks who was not capable
of leading other men—of commanding a platoon, a
company, a battalion, or a regiment. And the gra-
tifying result is, that under nearly every battle-flag
which the State of New York unfurled you had an
honoured representative. The historian Justin, in
his account of the preparations of Alexander the
Great for his Asiatic expedition, says that some of
the corps he organised were so well disciplined that
one would have considered them not so much sol-
diers as the chosen leaders of soldiers :
Non tam milites quam magistros militias electos put ares.
You have fairly earned the same praise, and are
justly entitled to the honourable appellation of
niilitite magistri—the leaders of soldiers ! Ido not
know so striking an illustration of the truth of a
maxim which is usually considered of modern origin,
but which is as old as the Augustan era, when it was
proclaimed by the most graceful of the poets of
imperial Rome, in that pure Latinity for which he
was so distinguished—
, In pace, ut sapiens, aptarit idonea bello ;'
which may be literally interpreted, In peace, if you
are wise, you will prepare for war.' To have fur-
nished the most remarkable proof of the profoUnd
wisdom of this ancient maxim is a distinction to
be remembered with gratitude by your fellow-citi-
zens, and to be cherished with a manly pride by
yourselves."

The people of England will be astonished at the
fact stated by General Dix. But when they under-
stand the constitution of the 7th they will see how
natural the circumstance was. It is probable that
there is no other Regiment, either in the United
States or in any other country, whose members, from
the colonel to the drummer-boy, hold a higher social
position than the 7th New York. The privates of
the 7th are the gentlemen who, in England, Aus-
tria, Russia, and Prussia would be selected for com-
missions, and when their services were required for
actual war, the Government availed itself of the
opportunity of officering other organisations from
the material in this, ready to its hand. It would
have been a waste to use up men of such quality
as private soldiers, while the war languished, and
failed for want of leaders. When the contest
opened the Northern Government could command
men, but it could not manufacture at once officers
fit to lead them, and to have sent the 7th into action
as a regiment would have been a foolish waste of
its resources. Although the 7th was used mainly
as a training school to supply the army with offi-
cers, whenever the emergency arose the regiment as
a body was brought up to the scene of danger.
Thus, as the General said—" At the outbreak of
the rebellion, when the Sixth Massachusetts Regi-
ment was attacked at Baltimore, and the deepest
concern was felt for the safety of the capital, you
were among the first to hurry to the scene of action.
A gentleman high in position at Washington gave
me, two or three years ago, an account of the con-_
dition of things there at the time of your arrival.
Open communication with the North had been en-
tirely suspended ; railroad travel and the transpor-
tation of the mails through the State of Maryland had
been broken up by force ; and no intelligence could
be obtained from the loyal portions of the Union
except through secret messengers and couriers, whose
journeys' were always performed with difficulty,
and sometimes not without absolke danger. At
this juncture, when all was uncertainty and doubt,
when each revolving hour came freighted with some
new burden of anxiety or peril, a column of armed
men, with bayonets glittering in the sunlight, was
seen entering the Pennsylvania Avenue, near the
Capitol ; and the feeling of relief and security was
unspeakable when the welcome intelligence spread
throughout the city, as if by some magnetic influence,
that the Seventh New York had come to oppose

to the gathering cohorts of treason the aegis of its
discipline and its name."
On Baltimore being threatened by Lee in his in-
vasion of Maryland, the 7th hurried up to the de-
fence of the city. When the terrible riots broke out
in New York the 7th were pushed into the metropolis
in the nick of time to overawe and quell a disturb-
ance which might have grown into a formidable in-
surrection. Thus the regiment was always held in
readiness for any great emergency, at the same time
that from its ranks were drafted the men destined to
fill the decimated ranks of the officers, and to furnish
commanders for constant levies of fresh troops raised
in the Northern States. After paying a high tri-
bute of praise to the services performed by this regi-
ment, which the General was so well qualified to
do, the corps having served under his personal com-
mand, he proceeded to remark on the lessons taught
by the war. " First of these is the great truth that
the course of military successes is always from
north to south, from frosts and snow to flowers
and sunshine. Our very instincts teach us
that it must be so, and all history confirms it.
It is not because the Southern nature is less spirited
or less capable of high and heroic achievements, but
because the Northern muscle, elaborated under a
colder sky and through more invigorating influences
of climate, acquires more compactness, tenacity, and
strength, carrying with it (for the mental and
physical conditions always assimilate) a greater
moral power of endurance. Southern races
are, for the most part, precipitate, impas-
sioned, fiery, vehement, sometimes breaking
down all opposition by force of their resistless
impetuosity. Northern races, on the other hand,
are calm, deliberate, persistent, determined, and as
immovable as a rock against which wind and storm
are idly expending their fury. The remark may
seem fanciful, and yet I believe it to be historically
true, that great military successes, considered in
reference to parallels of latitude, are subject to a
law analogous to those which govern currents of
running water. They do not rise above the level
of their source, or if carried to a greater height by
ome special force they subside to their former level
as soon as that force is withdrawn. Accordingly
we find that the great tides of conquest in all ages
have flowed from north to south, or east to west, or
nearly the same parallels of latitude. It required
the extraordinary genius of Julius C2sar, the most
finished commander, perhaps, that ever lived, to
carry the victorious arms of Rome, when the great
republic was in the fullness of its prosperity and
power a few degrees of latitude north of the metro-
politan centre. And yet we all remember that it
was more than a hundred years after his first inva-
sion of the little island of Great Britain before it
was reduced to the condition of a Roman province.
Even then only the lower part was subdued, and the
Emperor Adrian was compelled to build a wall
across it to protect the Roman soldiery from the in-
cursions of the Caledonians, the predecessors of the
Scotchmen of our day. Now I venture to say, that
if that island had been fifteen or twenty degrees
further South it would not have resisted the Roman
power successfully through a single campaign. The
operations of Hannibal in Italy may seem to conflict
with my theory, but not if they are properly con-
sidered. It is true he marched up through Spain,
crossed the Alps, descended into Italy, and obtained
several signal victories over the Romans. But- his
operations did not contain one of the elements of
permanent conquest. They were nothing but a pro-
tracted raid; and after a few years he was compelled
to return to Carthage to defend that city against
the very people whom he was invading. There was
a remarkable instance eight or nine centuries later of
the truth of the proposition I have stated. Some six
hundred years after the Christian era—when man-
kind, as if in defiance of the celestial messages of
the Great Teacher, had sunk into a mora] torpor as
dangerous to all the interests of civilisation as the
living paganism which had preceded it—God raised
up an avenger in Mahomet to destroy all that de-
served to perish, and to rouse to action all that was
worthy of being preserved. The creed of the
Prophet was full of error, but it contained one
vital truth, and under its influence his followers
were roused to a wild enthusiasm which nothing
could resist. It was in the name of the
one and the ever-living God that their scimitars
flashed to the light ! The great tide of Islamism
poured down through Western Asia into Africa,
across Egypt and the Deseit of Barca, whelming
the ancient Pentapolis, over the narrow strait which
separates Africa from Europe, sweeping across the
sunny plains of Andalusia and over the vine-clad
hills of Grenada, until the great wave burst at the
base of the mountains of Asturias. It did not rise
in the West above the level of its sources in the
East. And thus this great human deluge, impelled
by the spirit of conquest and religious frenzy, bear-
ing on its crest the trophies of Eastern science and
art, was poured out over Western Europe, and
planted there some of the richest germs of civilisa

tion, to be purified and perfected in after ages by
the clearer light of Christianity. Wherever armies
have gone to the north for the purpose of conquest
they have been defeated. The Greeks and Romans
were constantly repulsed by the rude nations north
of them. The legions of Varus were cut to pieces iu
the wilds of Germania by Arminius and his fol-
lowers. Nay, the great modern conqueror of
Europe, when he undertook--if I may so express
myself—a campaign against the Arctic circle, with
one of the most numerous and best-disciplined armies
the world ever saw embodied, was discomiited—not

so much, it is true, by the arms as by the strategy
of his enemies, and by the rigours of the climate.
His immense host, like that of Xerxes, was broken
to pieces, and he was compelled to retreat, leaving
thousands of his followers sleeping in bloodless
death upon the frozen plains of Muscovy. On the
other hand, when great conquering armies have
been sent to the south they have nearly always been

victorious. The Romans overrun everything south
of them, down to the shores of the great African
desert—one of those seas of sand which are far more
impracticable than any waste of waters. The Ro-

mans, in their turn, were overrun by the barbarous
nations north of them. The Goths, the Normans,

the multinomial races which were swarming century
after century out of the great northern line, over-
whelmed all Europe down to the very shores of the
Mediterranean ; and even Southern Italy saw these
rude warriors, with frames compacted almost to the
hardness of iron by hyperborean frosts, unbuckling
their armour, and lying down in the summer radi-

ante on the heights of Sorrento, by the blue waters
of Baim, and even in the classic grotto of Panglipo.
In like manner armed multitudes from Central and

Western Europe poured down into Syria, under the
unconquerable banner of the Cross, and wrested the
Holy Sepulchre from the hands of. Its infidel pos-
sessors. The flaming scimitar of the fiery Saladin,
as described in Walter Scott's " Crusaders," falling
in fast but ineffectual blows on the massive battle-
axe of the cool Plantagent, is but a type of
what the world has seen, and will con-

tinue to the end of time to ace, in the
conflicts of southern with northern races.

I wish some of our Canadian friends were here to

take comfort froin these suggestions. When the
rebel raiders, whom they were harbouring, crossed
our frontier to plunder our villages, shoot down our
unarmed people and give this city to the flames,
through a schemeof incendiarism which for atrocity
has no parallel in the annals of barbarism ; and
when a certain Department commander, whose
name I will not mention, with a frontier of nearly
a thousand miles to guard, with only sixty military
posts along its whole extent, and without two hun-
dred men in any one of them, gave orders to the

commanders of these slender garrisons, in case the
depredations were repeated, to pursue and capture

the marauders, even if it were necessary to cross the
astronomical line which constitutes the boundary
between the two countries—the stout hearts of our
northern neighbours need not to have been disturbed

by any imaginary apprehension of invasion. No,
gentlemen ; whenever the tide of emigration, the

only instrument of conquest the United States em-

ploy when unprovoked,-shall rise again in the East,
it will move on across our own territory to Ne-
braska, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Montana, Cali-
fornia, Oregon, and the calmer shores of the Pacific.

Or, if it should deviate from our own parallels, of
latitude, it will not be in the direction of Hudson's

Bay and the coast of Labrador, where the bosom of

our mother earth is hidden from the sight of her
children daring more than half their natural lives,
but down into the sunny districts of the palmetto,
where the reproductive powers of nature are at
work throughout the. whole circle of the year, and
where the magnolia and the orange tree load the

atmosphere with perpetual fragrance. I know that
the mental and muscular energy of the North will
gradually give way, in obedience to the universal
law, to the amenities and seductions of the
climate ; but not until they shall have done
their work by waking up those sporofic dis-
tricts to the new life and the intense activities
of this earnest and enterprising age. Another
lesson which this law has taught is, that human
slavery, in some way or other, and at some stage or
other of its existence, is always calamitous to those
who maintain it. The justice of God is sure to
manifest itself, in some form of retribution, against
the injustice of man, even though it be through the
slow operation of what we call natural causes.
Wherever the subjugated class does all the work
and the governing class does none, wherever the
latter seeks to evade the universal sentence of earn-
ing our bread in the sweat of our faces, the former.
must acquire a physical superiority, which, in the
end, is sure to work out its own deliverance. We
have not waited for this tardy process of centuries.
Slavery with us has perished through the insensate
attempt of the masters to extend and perpetuate it
by destroying their own government. It has gone
down amid the clash of arms and the shock of battle ;
and the amendment to the Constitution just adopted
has confirmed and executed what the behests of war
had decreed. This great social revolution has been

accompanied by an equally great marvel. Slavery
has been abolished in Delaware and Kentucky by
the votes of Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina ;
and those who were most earnest in defending and
seeking to extend it, have conquered their pre-
judices,' and are marching on, with the great army
of emancipators throughout the world, to the
majestic minstrelsy of universal freedom P'

The General might have used the tide of conquest
in India as a still stronger illustration to show that
the course of military successes is always from
north to south in' the northern hemisphere, from
frosts and snow to flowers and sunshine. From
time immemoriallndia has been the prey of northern
conquerors, and the fact that for the first time in the
long ages of its history the current has rolled back
from the plains of Bengal to the mountains of
Affghanistan gives an exception which fully proves
the rule, for it was a northern race that organised
and led this triumphant march of conquest in the
opposite direction. It is a striking fact chat at each
advance northward by the British from Calcutta
a more vigorous and determined foe was met. Never
in the history of British India was the English
power so terribly shaken as when it came into con-
tact with the men of the Punjaub. Two terrible
campaigns and six pitched battles were fought with
the Seikhs, with varying success, before the conquest
of the Punjaub was achieved. The discomfitures
of Ferozeshah and Chillianwalla h were substituted

'or the easy victory of Plassy, and it required al

the stubborn determination of the Anglo-Saxon race,
and an expenditure of blood which shocked the
nation, to make good their footing against the
Kalsa army, in the most northern province of the
Mogul's ancient empire.
We conclude our remarks with the closing words
of this distinguished officer's address:—" With this
readjustment of our social and political relations,
and after this triumphant exertion of our power of
self-preservation, new responsibilities devolve on us.
We must enjoy with greater moderation the bless-
ings and privileges which Providence has vouch-
safed to us. We must exert our power, if possible,
with increased forbearance, even for the assertion
of our undeniable rights. We must practise toward
all with whom we have relations, whether within or
without the pale of our political system, the most
strict and impartial justice. Since. the days of the
Revolution, when ourfathers were led through seven
years of toil, and suffering, and peril, almost as
manifestly by the hand of God as the children of
Israel were led through the wilderness, we never
have been so significantly admonished of our de-
pendence on him, or have had so much causc to be
grateful for our deliverance from surrounding evils.
This sense of dependence, and this feeling of grati-
tude, must never be permitted to fade out of our
minds or hearts. The altars of our religion and
our freedom must stand side by side, that their
fires may ascend in one common flame to heaven.
Then shall we have reason to trust that the blessing
of God, which has been with us and -our fathers
under so many trials, will continue with us to the
end in our new career of prosperity and power."