The Sun.
London, England, 1861-03-15 00:00:00

VOYAL ENGLISH OPERA,
jA) COVENT-GARDEN
Under the Management of Miss Louisa Pyne and Mr. W.

'Harrison, Sole Lessees

EVENING, LE DOMINO NOIR. Miss Louisa
Pyne, niss Thirlwall, Miss Leffler ; Messrs. Henry Haigh,
B tJorri, A. St. Albyn, and Horncastle.
Followed by Mendelssohn's Operetta, TIIE SON AND
itANGF,R. Misses Thirlwall and Leffler ; Messrs. St.
Albyn, Corri, Lyall, and Homeastle.
Conductor—Mr. Allred Mellon. Commence at &

tual as, perhaps far more effectual than, a more
manly and Christian treatment, in multiplying
its readers. That, however, was not the
intention of the clergymen and bishops,
who in various ways, and even in that
ecclesiastical Hades, Convocation, have protested
against it. But the fact to which we call attention
that hitherto we have had scarcely anything
but protest. This is what we, as Englishmen, object
to. Protest, in cases like these, is dictation—and,
if we mistake not, resentment to this kind of dic-
tation has had quite as much to do as curiosity,
with the vast and still increasing popularity of
the book. Protest is fair when the protester has no
other resource left—as when, for instance, a weak
Power like Portugal was shamelessly coerced by
France in the affair of the slave-trading French
ship—but between combatants each having the use
of the same weapons, and on the part, too, of a
great, wealthy, and learned majority, to protest
against the minority is something really ludicrous.
The common-sense of England says to the well-
endowed protesters—" Right Rev. Fathers, there
is the printing-press; here are pens, and ink, and
paper; plenty of pulpits, too, if you like—try your
hands at argument." Indeed, a shrewd suspicion
is apt to creep over the minds of lay-men that
there must be some difficulty in meeting the seven
by argument ; else they say, why not, instead of
protesting, announce that a reply was in hand, by
the Right Rev. Lord Bishop of this or that place,
and a second by another and so forth, and, then,
indeed, in this match of " the Seven against all the
Bishops of England"—the public would wait with
approval and patience the issue of the theological
match. Under the circumstances, in the opinion
of the vast majority of educated persons, we are
certain that protesting is—solemn cowardice.
Another thought occurs at once to most observant
persons who have watched public matters for the
last thirty years. And that is, that far
worse, or equally bad, errors in doctrine
and practice, have called forth no protest.
Not only does such gross simony as the sale
of souls at GARRAWAVS, or by private contract
—not only do all the jobs in building Episcopal
palaces with money which ought to relieve the
wants of poor clergymen—not only does Episcopal
nepotism, even to bestowing £1,300 a year on a
because he fell in love with his
prelate's son-in-law,
daughter—not only do numberless such disgraceful
doings call forth no protest—but the theological
and ceremonial delinquencies of which these essays
are but the reaction, never that we can remember,
were met by an Episcopal protest. Nothing can be
more certain than that the Oxford Tracts for the
Times, and the Romanising follies of Young Oxford,
which began nearly thirty years ago, was the
direct cause of the counter movement which
has reached its culmination in such books
as the Essays and the Reviews. The
great majority of English Protestants looked on
this Romanising movement with perfect disgust;
they doubted the honour and morality of the men
who could hold livings and possess emoluments in
the Protestant Church of England, and yet endea-
vour to defend the worst errors of the Church of
Rome, and try to ape her showy ceremonials. But
the Romanising movement was one which idolised
bishops. They became a kind of demi-gods, their
parentage being carefully traced through the
Vicar of CHRIST at Rome to the times of the
Apostle, a goodly padding of fiction making all
soft and easy where history failed them. But not
one protest, so far as we can remember, was heard
from the Episcopal Bench all the while. The old
ludicrous figment—lie is the better word—of
apostolic succession was preached, bishop-worship
was taught, the ordained of bishops were repre-
sented as capable of such magic wonders as
baptismal regeneration and all but transubstantia-
tion, the English ritual was made as like that of
Rome as possible, the congregations were annoyed
by dresses more appropriate to a theatre than to a
church—but all the time we heard of no protest !
The why and the wherefore English laymen think
they quite understand ; they also tbink they quite
understand why this reacting swing of the ecclesi-
astical pendalum is met with a protest while free
play was given to the other.
A very clear and fair account of the case between
the protesting bishops and clergy and the seven
" Essays and Reviews " is given in a tract before
us. Mr. WILD appears to us completely to make
good what he professes on the title-page. We
recommend the pamphlet to all readers of the
Essays and of the protests against them.*

" Who shot the dog ?" was the question shouted

in the ears of every volunteer as he walked the
streets of London by every archin, till the Hyde Park
Review silenced the ragamuffins for ever. " Who

prigged the note ?" is the question Sir G. C. LEWIS
will hear again and again till he makes a clean
breast of it, or till something in the Home-office,
equivalent to a Hyde Park review, consigns to obli-
vion petty larcenies in behalf of foreign despots.
The question was last night asked and pressed in
the House of Commons, which we believe we were
the first to ask out of it, " Who stole the note ?"
We are glad, yet sorry to say, the question was
unanswered there. Glad, because it is pleasant to
see English Ministers ashamed of such a dirty job;
sorry, because the principal and the tool, the cor-
ruptor and the corrupted, in this un-English job
ought to be branded with a disgrace equivalent to
six months on the treadmill.
This business must not rest where it is. Our
Home Secretary tells us that to the best of his be-
lief no detective was employed to procure the note,
end that no improper agent, such as Mr. BRIGHT
described, was induced by corruption to give in-
formation. Now we take upon us to say, as men
of business, that this statement must be false, though
Sir G. C. LEWIS may think it true. Without
roguery somewhere, neither the representatives of
Austria nor Sir RICHARD MAYNE could have pro-
cured the note. Either, as we have already affirmed,
a person must have been paid to abstract one, or a
rogue in the employment of Messrs. DAY was sharp
enough to think he might get a reward for the stolen
article, and have taken it to the Receiver. The only
possible difference of degrees of guilt on the
part of the thief, is that between a man
who was prompted by another to steal
and a man who stole because he was a thief by
nature. And the corresponding difference between
the parties to accepting and using the stolen note
is, that between men who would receive and use
stolen articles knowing them to be stolen and the
men who would promise to pay for them if stolen.
Into the casuistry of these shades of guilt it is
not our intention to enter. We only say that such
meanness, such encouragement of men to tamper
with their master's business, such employment, in
fact, of pilfering spies for Foreign Governments, is
not a thing which Englishmen will tolerate.
In a printer's office, as much as in an
attorney's, a considerable degree of honour

THE' SUN, LO:

and confidence is requisite. Respectable workmen
all know it, may be relied on to act accordingly,
and if they did not, would be hissed out of the office
At • their fellow-workmen when sent about their
business by the master. And, is it for our police,
who should be the ministers of social morals, to be
the depravers of our working men ? We insist on
it that the note ought to be impounded; that the
present possessor ought to be compelled to state
how he got it ; and so on backward till we know
where this shameful business began.

No one can doubt one of two things—either
money was paid for this note to some self-inspired
thief, or one of Sir RICHARD MAYNE'S de-
tectives stole it in the execution of his
commission—of h:ls duty, we cannot say. In the
former case the money was paid either by the
Austrian Ambassador, whom it is little likely the
thief would know, or by some Englishman. Who
was that Englishman? we ask, and the question will
be asked till he is named. On the latter supposition,
which Sir G. C. LEWIS believes not to be correct,
our police are in the service of Austria, and
we pay a police rate that they may steal into re-
spectable tradesmen's workshops, and commit theft
by order of their superiors. If, as Mr. DUN-
COMBE observed, " our Government paid the
money, then this country was paying for
the spy system of Austria ; if Austria found it, then
our police were in the pay of Austria." We com-
mend the whole debate, however, to the notice of
our readers, calling their special attention to the
fencing of Sir G. C. LEWIS. Not having volunteered
an answer on the subject of the theft—" How did
they get the note ?" asked again Mr. DUNCOMBE.
To which the only reply was, " Oh, the note !"
Mr. BRIGHT rose and put the case fully before him,
and Mr. HENLEY supported Mr. BRIGHT, still he
replied, without a word about how
he came by the note. Pressed again with a
pointed and not to be evaded interrogation,
by the determined member for Birmingham, the
reply at last was—" The notes were laid before me
by Sir RICHARD MAYNE"—cries of "Oh !" and
" Hear !" followed. We wonder some one did not
rise and say, " The woman gave me and I did eat."
And another, but—" who was the serpent in the
business ?" The question, we repeat, must be an-
swered—" Who stole the note ?"

Now that the New Zealand war has actually
terminated, we can look back to it dispassionately.
So long as the natives were openly in arms against
our authority, so long as they appeared to set at de-
fiance our earnest efforts to subdue them, it was dif-
ficult, not unnaturally, to divest ourselves of all par-
ticipation in the passionate emotions excited by the
mere fluctuation of events among those European
and Aboriginal belligerents, a few months back
confronting each other at our antipodes. Now,
however, that there, far away to the South, in
New Zealand, no less absolutely than half-a-dozen
years ago yonder to the East in the Crimea, " the
dead past" has " buried its dead"—now that, as liter
rally in regard to the naked New Zealanders as in
regard to the grey-coated Russians themselves, we
can live and act in the " living present" of a fully,
and we will even hope permanently, re-established
tranquillity —it is not only possible, but
advisable, to revert to a calm consideration
of the real origin of this last deplorable conflict
between a race of tawny savages, armed with
boomerangs, and the little band of skilled and
disciplined troops sent out against them by the
authority of the British Government.
Historical materials are already supplied to those
who care to enter into this retrospective examina-
tion. So entirely is the war of 1860 in New Zea-
land an event done with and completed ! Pamph-
lets have been issued from the press opportunely in
reference to the recent conflicts between barbarian
New Zealanders and civilised Englishmen.
Pamphlets, for example, like that formed by the
" Inquiry," reprinted in an octavo brochure
from the columns of the Colonial Intelligencer.
Goodly volumes, moreover, have already made their
appearance in elucidation of much that it was as
yet difficult thoroughly to appreciate, in respect to
these remote but still deeply interesting and, so far
as it relates to the assertion of our authority in our
vast colonial possessions in these antarctic regions,
these vitally important occurrences. Volumes, let us
say, such as that
_able and comprehensive survey
of the past history, and the future prospects of New
Zealand—or as the writer designates it, " The Bri-
tain of the South," penned by CHARLES HURST-
HOUSE, as he significantly but unostentatiously calls
himself " A New Zealand Colonist and a Visitor
to the United States, the Canadies, the Cape Colony,
and Australia." A travelled bookman who him•
self knows (not by any means invariably the
case with authors) really knows what he is
writing about—learning much himself (before he
attempts to teach others) upon the subject
in reference to which he. has deliberately made
up his mind to put forth his disquisitions—ob-
taining his knowledge upon that chosen theme
from personal inspection and from actual expe-
rience ! Anyone who upon entering on the parti-
cular inquiry we have here alluded to, as being in
every way at this moment so peculiarly desirable,
may " cram" with especial advantage either from
the numerous chapters of CHARLES HURSTHOUSE,
or from the few but sufficient pages of the anony-
mous pamphleteer above particularised.
From the comprehensive survey of the rise and
development of New Zealand as a British colony,
sketched by the pen of Mr. HURSTHOUSE, there may
be readily extracted all the information—about the
history and resources of that Britain of the South—
that the inquirer could otherwise alone hope to
accumulate for himself after a laborious research in
a very chaos of scattered authorities. The Histo-
rical Sketch alone which forms the second chapter
of the production, setting out with a reference suc-
cessively to the Spanish Discovery and the Dutch
Discovery, and glancing afterwards at the memor-
able visits paid thither by Coox, and again
by DE SURVILLE, recounts the whole narra-
tive of the New Zealand annals under British
rulers, consecutively under Governor HOBSON,
Governor FITZROY, Governor GREY, Gover-
nor WYNYARD, and Governor BROWNE. The
configuration and area, the commanding posi-
tion, the geological peculiarities, the varied scenery
and other physical characteristics of the great
Antarctic Archipselego of New Zealand are then
particularised. Neither the climate nor its
salubrity, neither its temperature nor its fluctua-
tions are overlooked or examined (when turned to
by this watchful colonist) superficially. The ex-
traordinary peculiarity of the total absence from
New Zealand of any indigenous quadrupeds
whatever, and of almost every reptile, saving
a few lizards and a little wild rat, called the
Kiore, will be found, as a matter of course,
duly commented upon in the writer's incidental
treatises on the denizens of the animal kingdom,
the birds, fishes, and insects familiar of old to the
native New Zealanders. The vegetable kingdom,
and the mineral kingdom, as unfolded yonder at
our antipodes to the New Zealand Colonists

* " The New Zealand War of 1860: An inquiry into its
origin and justice." Bvo. pp. 52. W. Tweedie, 337,
Strand.
t "New Zealand—The Britain of the South." By
Charles Hurathouse. 1 vol,, Bvo, pp, 515. Stanford,
Charing Crow