The Sun.
London, England, 1861-08-21 00:00:00

THE SUN.
Ii():41)0N, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 21, 1861

England may now sleep in peace. Invasion has
had its day. France is erecting granite monuments
to its memory. Past glories will be henceforth
sufficient ; enough that in one thousand sixty-six,
WILLIAM the BASTARD subjugated England, and
founded the dynasty of which Queen VICTORIA is
the living representative. Once to have established
French rule over the whole of England, an achieve-
ment never performed by England on the other side
the Channel, may well satisfy the aspirations of
French love for military glory. Iron-plated ships
can mean no menace to the throne set up by
WILLIAM the CONQUEROR ; and the British QUEEN,
if we look at things by the light of history, is the
living evidence of the great Frenchman's victory.
Such, we suppose, must be the Manchester in-
terpretation of the ceremony performed last Sun-
day at Dives in Normandy. That was the place
where, eight centuries ago, WILLIAM THE CON-
QUEROR mustered his forces, fifty thousand strong,
before they set sail for England ; and there, on
Sunday last, a granite monument, commemorative
of the fact, was uncovered in the sight of an appro-
priate assembly. For a month long lay his army
on that shore; and the orator of the occasion told
the company that the modest column there erected,
on ground given by the public authorities,
would inform inhabitants, travellers, and
sailors of the fact. The greatness of
the undertaking he described in the
words of a speech of M. GulzoT's, delivered ten
years ago ;—" Remember," said the great historian
of modern times, our learned and illustrious master,
M. GUIZOT, in his address at Falafse in 1851—
" Remember a fact which has been accomplished in
our own days, before our own eyes, the expedition
to Algeria in 1830. The task to be performed
was to embark and convey to the opposite shores
of the Mediterranean an army of 30,000 men, to
exact a just reparation from a barbarian.
What immense preparations ! What care,
what energy, what powerful means employed
by
our powerful civilization ! And all this was
deemed necessary. And when the day of trial came
nothing of all this was found superfluous. Well,
in the 11th century, almost on the outskirts of
•
barbarism, witaout any of those means which
civilization and science provide,
Duke WILLIAM
assembled, embarked and transported beyond the
Channel, and landed on an enemy's soil 50,000 men,
and shortly after landing gained battles and con-
quered a kingdom.' This, gentlemen, is the greatest
fact in our Norman annals. It is glorious for the
hamlet of Dives to have been the point of assemblage
of that powerful army."
In the opinion of the French orator, it was glori-
ous for the port of Dives to have assembled in its
'antlers the great conquering army. " But," said
be, " What is glory if forgotten ? The great fact I
have just mentioned, and which eight centuries ago
startled the world, is almost ignored to-day, and,
in fact, there is no monument to record it—not
one ! •We exhaust our resources to embellish

great cities, to erect palaces, to construct
`wide streets ; but no heed is taken of locali-
ties of an inferior order, even if they possess a
glorious past. Dives is a proof of this."
The granite monument was to redeem France from
the charge of such unsentimental indifference to its
greatest glories. And then all this is but introduc-
tory to a still greater commemoration of the glory
of France and the humiliation of England. There
is to be yet another gathering. There are to
assemble next year ten thousand persons, in-
'lading,E deputations from all the towns,
hamlets, and communes from Upper and Lower
Normandy. to that (12y the orator looked
forward
almost with rapture, exclaiming,
the monument which I this day offer to the coun-
try is Only the
precumor of a more lasting
and complete monument--" The Golden Book of
the Conquest"
will be placed by our care in the
church of Dives ; the
trench A.tchmlogical Society
will have engraved on tablets
of marble in the
walls of the church the names of the fami-
lies that accompanied
bake WILLIAM in
his perilous and audacious expedition.
" Then,
gentlemen," said our CicEno, "that is indeed
to be an illustrious day
when we behold
that immense concourse assembled at our call to
pay a debt contracted to the past ; when we ,shall
see artisans with their ba aners, communes -with
their flags, warriors, men of science, magistrates,