The Sun.
London, England, 1868-01-11 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

The Irish Government has at last taken a step which no
other Government would have so long forborne to adopt.
The proprietor of the Irishman appeared yesterday to
answer a summons calling upon him to shew caase why a
criminal information should not be filed against him for
seditious publications, and the application was granted by
the police magistrate. A prosecution, says the Times,
will therefore be forthwith instituted, and it will be for
a court of justice to decide whether articles encouraging
the Trish people to rebellion are or are not within the
liberty allowed by law to the press. That such was
the tendency, not only of the articles selected by the
Government as the subject of criminal proceedings, but
of many other paragraphs in the same journal, will be
doubtelL, by no one who has referred to the numbers
which ha;,e appeared during the last six months, or
even perused the specimens occasionally furnished by our
Irish correspondent. Whether such was the intention
of the conductors, in spite of editorial warnings, few and
far between, against the danger of open violence, is a
question into which it is needless for us to enter. The
editors of newspapers, like other persons, must be pre-
sumed to know the necessary effect of the statements
which they circulate, and cannot shelter themselves under
the plea that the offensive passages were not formally en-
dorsed by themselves. In this instance some of the most
,insulting reflections on the British Government are con-
veyed in letters from the United States or extracts from
American organs of Fenianism. An Irish paper exclu-
sively composed of such materials, and containing not a
single original article, would be quite as effective au engine
of sedition as if it depended on Irish writers and reporters.
The real principle at stake is the moral right of the Go-
vernment to protect itself, by means equally available to
any private individual, against publications designed to
bring it into hatred and contempt. With every disposi-
tion to maintain the legitimate privileges of the press,
we cannot understand either how this right can be dis-
puted, or how any one can doubt that it was high time to
exercise it.

The Telegraph prays its readers to remember that the
prosecution is no attempt to fetter the liberty of journalism
in Ireland to discuss any question that the most ardent
patriots could raise, from the Repeal of the Union or the
fixity of land-tenure to the exclusion of Protestants and
he establishment of a Republic. It simply propounds the
question whether the opposition can raise the flag of
actual revolt. Authority, having been gainsaid, appeals
to the tribunal of justice, asking the judicial arbiter to
say whether the law has or has not been violated. The
right to make that appeal cannot be denied to any Govern.
nent. In a case like the present, incentives to bloodshed
are only one degree less dangerous than bloodshed itself,
and they must be put down with as firma hand. No
person recognises this fact more clearly than one of the
most ardent living advocates of free speech, Mr. Mill.
" Even opinions," he says in his noble p'ea for individual
`iberty, " lose their immunity when the circumstances in
which they are expressed are such as to constitute their
expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act.
An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or
that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested
when simply circulated through the press, but may justly
incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob

assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when
handed about among the same mob in the form of a

placard." That is to say, when words are manifestly a

direct incentive to crime, they should be punished as
sternly as guilty actions. But the Irish agitators have
used the worst of all incentives to crime. They have
preached, not only spoliation, but armed conflict ; they
have preached violence to an excited people at an excited
time ; and the question now to be determined is, whether
the law of England permits the defiance of authority to
be thus proclaimed with impunity.

The Post speaks of the Queen's book as a pleasant sur-
prise to the whole nation, and gives us a hope and confi-
dence in our future Kings which probably nothing else
could have clone. Amidst many disturbing elements, and
some things which have been invested by the timid and
the reckless with almost a threatening aspect ; at a moment
when our institutions have been menaced by much gloomy
prophecy, the Queen has reassured and satisfied us. She
has come forth serenely to appease our anxieties and to
comfort us by her calmness, courage, and virtue. The ex-
tracts which will be found in our other columns from this
remarkable book are sufficient to prove a hundred times
over that these are not idle words only to be read
patiently in the atmosphere of a Court. It may be
safely predict, d that no English book ever had such a sale
as this will have ; and generation after generation of her
Majesty's subjects will read it for themselves as the most
beautiful memorial of an enduring love and a noble life
that ever hallowed a throne. It is a very great and a very
good bcok. No such valuable historical record exists in
our national archives. It is altogether exceptionally in-
teresting. It is a book that will live as long as our lan-
guage, and it will rouse a widely spread and deep sympathy
in the minds of millions all over the world wherever the
English tongue is spoken. It will infinitely endear our
Queen to the hearts of her subjects and their descendants
to their remotest posterity as the best example ever given
by a sovereign to a people--an example that will teach
us for ever how to love, how to live, and how to be
happy.

The Daily News points out that what has been set down
was not set down for the public, and if now printed for
the public it has been partly in order to prevent a private
circulation from creating mysteries and suggesting false-
iood. It i 3 essentially a private and domestic record, in
which the little incidents of a Highland tour are the
most exciting scenes. Hundreds of journals probably

-xist in which similar journeys are narrated in language

equally unstudied. The fresh impressions which a new
people, glorious scenery, a ruder and less constrained
life than usual, have made upon the mind of an intel-
ligent and cultivated lady, are all the claims to
literary favour which, had it come from another
pen, the volume could have presented. These
would have sufficed to make it a cherished memorial
of happy days in the author's own family, whosoever
she might have been. But they would not have
justified its publication. The reason for this, and the cir-
falmstances which will make this work perused with inte-
rest in every English home, lie apart from its literary or
aesthetic merit. They depend on the social position of the
lady who has thus frankly taken the public into her con-
fidence. The fact that the highest in birth and the
supreme in rank, the sovereign of the widest and most
powerful empire in theworld, the head of a Court in which
all ceremonial has for sole object to do her honour, has
thus invited her subjects to see how the woman lives under
the trappings of the Queen, how the heart of Royalty beats
with all the emotions that agitate the human breast, how
the forms and responsibilities of State are burdens which
are flung off with the same gladness with which the har,:est
workers welcome the holiday of labour—this is the peculiar
interest of the book, and in this lies the lesson which, more
or less directly, it will teach to all its readers.

It appears to the Star that the only thing wanting to
these volumes, both that which is now published and the
" Early Years of the Prince Consort," is that they should
be published in a cheap form for popular circulation. The
Queen lives in the heart of the people of this country ;
that affection has been true to her from the moment she
ascended the throne, and is as strong at this day at it was
when, a fair young wife, she made her first visit to Scot-
land. The rich and noble are not more loyal than the
common people. The latter may have no great castles or
splendid mansions which her Majesty might visit on her
journeys ; they may not have the right to stand near the
throne, their ancestors may be unknown, and they them-
selves may never be heard of in the busy world ; Lut
the strength of the kingdom lies in them, and
not in the higher born or more fortunate few. If
any convulsion were to arise in the State, the
noble may lead, but it is the million who make and un-
make kingdoms. The general population of these realms
are at the present day more truly loyal to the throne of
Queen Victoria than over the ignorant Highlanders of last
century were to the House of Stuart. Each page of the
volume of which we now speak bears on its front proofs of
the ardent attachment of the people to their sovereign.
We should like to see those charming pictures of the
Queen's private life distributed by the thousand and the
hundred thousand, like Mrs. Stowe's " Uncle Tom's
Cabin," or Sir Walter Scott's novels. That can only be
done if the price be reduced to meet the ability of the
multitude to buy, and in this case no thought requires to
be given to the wishes or profits of publishers. 'Air. Helps
will do one more service to his sovereign and the nation if
he can induce her Majesty to consent to the speedy issue
of a cheap edition.

The long agony is now at an end. The name of
Poland, observes the M ruing Herald, vanishes from the
maps and from the language of diplomacy. A short ukase
has set the seal to the measures which for four years tt.!e
Russian Government has been taking to denationalise
Poland, and make it an integral part of Russia. Its
separate administration has fallen bit by bit ; month by
by month its government has been assimilated to that of
the other Russian provinces. The Polish language has
been suppressed as an administrative language, and
Russian substituted ; the Catholic clergy have been made,
as far as Government regulations can go, as dependent
upon the Government as the Greek ; the very use of the
Polish language in religious services is threatened, and
the choice left to the Poles of saying their prayers and
being preached to in one of two languages which they do
not understand ; and now, finally, the Treaty of Vienna is
set aside—the kingdom of Poland exists no more, and the
territory of which it was composed is to be known officially
as the Province of the Vistula. The Poles will long sur-
vive as a race, but they have no longer even in name a
fey will illustrate the valour and the failing
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