The Sun.
London, England, 1861-10-28 00:00:00

We might even now demand to apply the principle
insisted on by the States themselves at Naples, that
a Government cannot blockade its own ports ; an
argument they could not object to. If they, to
meet this, declared the South belligerents, they
would justify us in doing what they made such
a clamour about at the time. But then, also,
other questions might arise. On that of
slavery there is nothing to choose between
the North and the South. It stands thus—the
Southerns wish to keep their slaves, and the North
will not let them run away. The South says,—
respect our property in flesh and blood; the North
replies,—we so respect it that we suffer defeat
rather than declare for emancipation. We are as
free, therefore, to side with one party as with the
other ; and. what if our rulers choose to say,—
Your dream of 34 united States, instead of half
that number, may be very fine for you, but we
must side with that half of them whose cotton
feeds four millions of our subjects ; and if you do
not see fit to open their ports we are strong enough
to do it, and we will do it ?" Our statesmen might
plead the necessity of Lancashire against the am-
bition of Washington; could the positions be re-
versed, we are sure Americans would do it, and
laugh at us.

The Liberals have at last begun to take their share
in the Autumn talk of the country. The Maldon
Liberal Club responds with its dinner and toasts,
to the lead of the Castle Hedingham Tory Club,
and gives a very respectable account of itself. This
is a kind of quiet, agricultural, county, Whig-
Liberal affair ; and drives its liberalism along,
pretty briskly, in the orthodox Whig ruts. But
the North is also beginning to simmer and bubble.
Leeds is to have a Reform demonstration by dele-
gates from all the towns of reforming tendencies,
and Manchester and Birmingham have already be-
stirred themselves to make the demonstration effec-
tive. The winter does not promise to keep the long-
headed operatives of the North very busy; and well
do our governors, let which party will, be in power,
know, that politics " find some mischief still for idle
hands to do." We should not be at all surprised
should the Northern political winter be such as to
make the Conservative young lords, who have rid-
den Mr. DISRAELI of late with their Conservative
reaction bit, but too thankful that the Whigs are
in office. How lucky it will be for the
Tories should the Whigs have to face the possible
chartism of 1861-2. They profited immensely, be-
fore, from setting the Whigs on the physical force
advocate■ of the five points ; had they been in office
they must have done the same, perhaps would have
done worse. But most conveniently for them the
unfortunate Whigs had to bear the entire odium of
resisting that "ugly rush ;" while the Tories cleverly
used it to harass the Corn-law Repealers. We
observe that some of the Tories speak with singular
apprehension of the cotton famine in the North.
They have not been wont to sympathise so much
with the sufferings of the cotton districts. Whence
this new-born sympathy ! Is it that there being no
League to set the new Chartists against, the Tories
fear that nothing can put them off the scent of their
electoral rights? Also, that the operatives, now so
much better educated, will use their power in a
way not so easy to resist as that of drilling and
arming with pikes ? Do the Tories tremble at the
thought of seventy millions a year of taxes, when
unemployed operatives, by the hundred thousand,
are not arming, but firmly and persistently demand-
ing to know "the reason why ?" It will bode no
good to Toryism if working men should generally
begin to ask why they were talked out of their
rights in the session of 1860, and voted out of them
in 1861.

However, we come back again to our Maldon
friends. The chairman gave as the key-note on
domestic matters, that we were all so happy, he
wondered what the Tories could be thinking of, to
wish to evict from possession a Ministry, beneath
whose reign all prospered so exceedingly. The worthy
Chairman affected to forget that the prosperity of

a country is the greatest grievance of an opposition

It is so trying to political patienee to have the
right thing from the wrong party. When Libe-
rals are in power all things ought to go to ruin.
We ought to be embroiled abroad, and the Lords,
the Crown, and the Church ought to be threatening
to tumble about our ears. To be sure the Tories
find a way to explain it all to their own credit.
The Wednesday Tory triumphs have saved the
country. Praise be to Toryism ! Men must still
pay Church-rates, however much they hate the
Church ; Dissenting teachers may not yet offer
their profane prayers, or sing their ribald hymns
by the graves of unbaptised corpses to which sur-
pliced priests refuse Christian burial ; trustees of
school trusts must still be Church of England men,
though the founders belonged to the Church which
deems the Church of England the most heretical
of sects ; and, politically, Mr. LocKE KING is
scouted from the stage with the suffrage for
counties, which Mr. DISRAELI himself proposed,
and Mr. BAINES, with that which, when offered
by Lord JOHN RUSSELL, Mr. DISRAELI did not
vote against.

Mr. WESTERN WOOD was there to show in his
proper person how London Liberalism would treat
even a popular Lori Mayor, who had given up a
petty borough to prove that a Conservative Mayor
was the fitting successor to the great Whig lord.
He appeared at once as a victor and a martyr, and
a triumph of attention to Registration. He was a
victor, for he had beaten a Lord Mayor. He
was a martyr, for he had sacrificed per-
sonal ease and comfort to the patriotic duty of
saving the honour of London Liberalism, and his
return had been owing to the Registration Associa-
tion of the City of London. So efficient had that
body been, that for four years the Tories had aban-
doned altogether the Registration Court. Now,
however, they were objecting by wholesale;
making, in fact, a spasmodic effort. Register !
Register ! Register ! was, therefore, the advice
which the conqueror of the Lord Mayor came to
give to Essex Liberals.

Mr. C. BUXTON had, what we suppose must be
regarded as the toast of the evening—the old one
which we certainly never heard of at a Tory dinner
—" The Progress of Civil and Religious Liberty all
over the World." Mr. BUXTON seemed to start
with discouragements, that he might sweep them
out of the way. The Australians have not worked
their constitutions so well as he could wish.
Universal Suffrage did not please him by its doings
there. " I confess," he said, " tbut in my eyes
there is some discouragement in watching the
working of the representative institutions that
were bestowed a few years ago upon our Australian
colonies. I do not hesitate candidly to own that
I think experience does appear to show that a
very broad line must be drawn between univer-
sal suffrage and the possession of the suffrage
by those classes whose position, however humble
it may be, still gives some indication of the exer-
cise of the virtues of industry and order." We can-
not say that we need confess so much. Australians
are trying their hands at legislation in their ex-
ceptional circumstances ; and these difficulties all
arise from two sources; from the injurious prior
legislation of Downing-street while these colonies
were in the hands of necessarily ignorant secretaries

who enforced their crotchets on a society distant
from them by half the circumference of the globe;
and next, and from the disturbing effects of the gold
discoveries on a new community. Without half the
novelties of their situation, and with the blessing of
Lords and Church, as well as Crown and Commons,
we have seen within the recollection of most of us,
political changes as rapid and as unreasonable as
those which have occurred of late in our Australian
colonies. Indeed to a great extent the source of
political unsettlement is the same. The squatters
are the landlords in America, and the quarrel be-
tween them and the towns, is, as here, the one
which has caused the greater part of the commo-
tion. America he got over more easily. Reason-
able Tories have confessed that the struggle there
is due to the questions of slavery and protection, and
might as easily have occurred under a monarchy.
He might have added that the success of several
European monarchies is not such as to enable the
Right Divine of Kings to cast a stone at the Right
Divine of the people.
Looking over Europe Mr. BUXTON took the
brighter side. There was light amid the
darkness in France, and hope in Prussia,
though but little in their stupid King.
" Although," said Mr. BUXTON, " the cause of
liberty may be under clouds here and there, I be-
lieve it is making steady way over the face of
Europe. No doubt in France there has been a
terrible and shameful downfall of liberty, and that
is the more painful there because France ought to
be leading the world with us in the path of free
statesmanship and constitutional liberty. But even
in France we seem to see a tendency, I cannot say
to liberty, but to the increasing application of the
national will and judgment to their own national
affairs, and though it is mortifying to own :t, if
Louis Napoleon holds the French nation in leading
strings, it is with their own:consent. If the French
nation chose to be free they certainly could be free,
but it is the dread the upper and middle classes
have of the outbreak of Red-Republicanism, which
makes them throw themselves foolishly into what
they suppose to be the security and quiet afforded
by a military despotism."
So of Prussia, the slack zeal of the people for
their constitutional liberties is disappointing.
"But they have shown," said the speaker, "on
several important occasions that they value their
power and are determined to use it. That foolish
and exasperating expression of the King at his
coronation the other day, talking about 'Divine
right,' and saying that he trusted to his army to
defend him from attacks, coming from whatever
quarter they might, evidently aiming at his own
subjects—l was told by a Prussian gentleman the
other day that the practical effect of that speech
would only be to stimulate them in taking still
stronger precautions against any monarchical en-
croachments,"

Surveying all other civilised European countries
with those which are quietly moving forward and
those which are unsettled by struggles for freedom
and nationality, we are able to say that, upon the
whole, we have this comforting truth forced upon
us, that the day of despotism is waning in Europe,
and that constitutional self-government is steadily
making its way—a result which even a decent Tory
will hardly deplore. Indeed, when one looks at Essex
Liberalism and Essex Conservatism, as developed
by some of the leading speakers at each of the two
recent gatherings, except the difference between
the " ins" and the " outs," any other of importance
is not easy to find. To us, indeed, the difference
between the RUSSELL, PALMERSTON, and GREY
Whigs seems to be that the Whigs can be reluc-
tantly pushed on to measures and votes, which the
Tories, being in opposition, are happy to oppose.
Both parties oppose not only large extension of the
franchise, but the emancipation of the counties and
the purification of the boroughs.

Among the literary benefactors of the pliblic few
men at the present day deserve to rank higher than
Mr. CHARLES KNIGHT. For long years he has de-
voted himself to the diffusion of knowledge among
the people, and the improvement in the general in-
telligence of the lower middle classes which is now
perceptible, is mainly due to the indefatigable exer-
tions of the school of which CHARLES KNIGHT may
be called the founder. In the days when the
" Plain Englishman" first appeared at Windsor good
popular serials were unknown. The last generation
did not excel in combining amusement with instruc-
tion, and the natural result of the expense, elabora-
tion, and tedium of the educational works of their day
was the almost total ignorance of the masses of
the :population. Even where the rudiments of
learning were imparted the scholar's course was
generally arrested at the merest outskirts, and
science, history, and philosophy were things en-
tirely unthought of, or left to the study of the
scholar and the reflections of the recluse. Mr.
CHARLES KNIGHT was one of the first to per-
ceive that the area of general knowledge might
be greatly enlarged; that an acquaintance with
the outlines of history, the principles of science,
the great facts and theories which affect all mankind
alike, might be told in simple language, and brought
to the door of the man of business and the artisan,
published at a price which would suit the poorest,
and arranged on a system which demanded the least
time and attention from the reader. At the
present day, when schools, colleges, institutes, and
libraries are devoted to public education, when the
number of cheap popular works is almost excessive,
it is not easy to appreciate rightly the difficulties
which attended the establishment cf the "Penny
Cyclopsedia," or the merit due to its founders. Now
when he has happily lived to witness so marvel-
lous a change, to see even labouring men
listening with pleasure to scientific lectures and
poring over museums ; to see also the completion
of his noble work—the English Cyclopedia—

" Finis coronis opus"
he may look back with proud satisfaction to the
perseverance and consistency which marked his
earlier career. Another subject of gratification to
the veteran champion of popular education is the
approaching conclusion of his admirable " History
of England," a work which has won the public
approval of no less a critic than Lord BROUGHAM,
and which sets before the English people, in simple
yet powerful language, that record of their
forefathers struggles, trials, and achievements
which is their proudest possession. Of this work
a contemporary has happily observed—" His am-
bition has been to advance liberal thought and right
knowledge in England by a History of England, so
written as to engage popular attention, giving the
succession of events in the detail necessary to their
full perception, and with his own high interpreta-
tion of their relative importance. He is the
last man who would see in English History the
kings and queens instead of the people. With
the attraction of a graceful, varied, and often pic-
turesque style ; with a profusion of good woodcuts
that speak to the eye itself, and always carry infor-
mation of some kind; with generous sympathies
ni
preparationi ned
giving a soul to every chapter, and with the single-
minded earnestnessfor his thattask
—h ai.‘s
i.
r.. grudged
CHARLES no labourlii TKNIGHT
Hof
acontinued,
iv
without
hrfoeunkr
or
resairgsn orof mwooarreinetsos, issuesub
monthly,.
stantial parts of an original
History of England,
which now occupies seven hand
some 'volumes. There