The Sun.
London, England, 1868-09-10 00:00:00

SPIRIT OP "THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

The Times claims the right to be very much dig•
appointed tbst the Archbishop of Dublin has not done
more for his cause. The least we could expect from him
was that be should chew either faith or a graceful
Tesignation. We cannot say that he writes either as though
ye expected the Establishment to stand, or as if preferring
to make the best of an inevitable disaster. His future
is as dark and cheerless as his present is unsatisfactory,
and his past a compilation from the worst pages of Irish
history. When everything that can be said for or against
the Irish Church has been said many times, with diminish-
_. _ _

ing. freshness and increasing acerbity, and when Mr.
Murphy is handed to a policeman and ordered to find
bail, we had hoped that the former Dean of Westmin•
ster would at least give new life to the wearisome question.

Dr. Trench treats with the utmost indifference the argu-
ment of numbers, of national sentiment, or of popular

will, Ex cathedra he lays down that the wealth, the
worldly wisdom, and the physical superiority of the Pro•

testants should in this matter make tip for the numerical

disproportion. If they are fewer, he adds, they
cannot help it, for it is not their own fault. Their
forefathers, or rather the people who should have

been the forefathets of a more numerous body.

were massacred by the Papists. Protestantism did
wonders, and flourished, and went far to convert the
wDole island, but, unfortunately, once in forty years or
so, the converts, or the people who ought to have been
converts, rose in a body, and murdered the very excel-

lent teachers to whom they were under such obli.

gations. In the face of this wholesale periodical
extirpation of the Protestants, it is a comfort to
hear, on Dr. Trench's authority, that there remains
an immense number of small farmers descended from the
soldiers invitedby the British Government to take confis-
cated Irish property, who, if they are not treated as
friends to the English cause. will be the other thing, and
will make Ireland a hot country. For anything the arch-
bishop says, he regards this as a natural and proper
course, worthy of good wishes, if not of a pastoral bene-
diction. •

The Daily News notices in Archbishop Trench's recent
charge a very ill-judged and dangerous resort to the his-
torical argument in favour of the Establishment. The
archbishop attempted to account fur the paucity in
numbers of the Irish Protestants as compared with
the Roman Catholic population by the astonishing
statement that the progress of the Protestant
faith in Ireland " had been checked by a hideous
catastrophe _nothing short of a tearing up by
the roots and trampling in blood and mire of all that had
been previously accomplished." This imaginative pic-
ture referred, it seems, to the Rebellion of 1641, in which,
according to some accounts, forty thousand Protestants
were massacred. The loss of these, the archbishop argued,

was crippling to the advance of Protestantism, for, at the
general rate of multiplication, they would by this time
have increased in numbers fourfold or fivefold. We
fail to see how the addition of two hundred thousand
or less to the numbers of the Established Church could
redeem it from the imputation of failure; but, setting
that consideration aside altogether, is it wise for a Pro-
testant ecclesiastic to arouse Irish Roman Catholics to
turn back to the dark history of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, and to invite a comparison of what

Protestantism may be held to have lost in sanguinary
outbreaks of rebellion, with what Catholicism may be
held to have lost by the policy of repression, which
down to the time of the Union was sternly maintained by
England? From the days of Spenser and Raleigh to the
days of Cornwallis and Castlereagh the strong hand of the
law or the fiercer grasp of military domination was ever at
the throat of Catholicism in Ireland. No reasonable man
will compare this studied and relentless oppression as an
engine for crushing out a destested faith with the fitful
bursts of Irish insurrection in 1641 and 1689 and 1798.
The Standard thinks the termination of the deadlock in
Victoria remarkably illustrates the wisdom of that course
which is so often foolishly and ignorantly deprecated as
Imperial interference. Here we have had a direct Impe•
rial interference with the action upon which the nume-

rical majority of the colonists had vehemently set their
hearts, and yet that interference has been most happy in
all its results. It has had the effect of bringing peace to
the colony when peace seemed to have fled for ever,
and of maintaining the balance of the colonial consti-
tution when all local contrivances for restoring
that balance had utterly and grievously, failed.
The Standard is, however, disgusted with the M'Culloch
Ministry. The Opposition made use of their numerical
strength in the Lower House to carry a vote of want of ,
confidence against the Sladen Ministry, and thus to '
revenge themselves for their discomfiture in the matter of
the Darling grant. The M `Culloch Ministry have
returned to power, weakened, however, by the seces-
sion of all its more respectable members, and
damaged irretrievably in the eyes of the mob by the
loss of the one cry on which they had been trading.
To fill up the vacancies in his ranks, Mr. M`Culloch
has been obliged to look for his colleagues in a
political stratum lower than was ever reached by any
Ministry which has yet been formed in Victoria. Of the
new Ministers, it may be said that they are below the
grade, morally, intellectually, and socially, of those who
would be considered eligible for ministerial office in any
civilised country. Of the two law officers both are barris-
ters of recent and colonial creation, neither of whom has
ever held a brief in the Supreme Court of the colony; while
the gentleman to whom has been allotted the portfolio of
Public Works and Roads and Railways, has only lately
failed in the humble trade of journeyman tailor.
The Herald falls foul of the International Working
Men's Association. This association pretends to repre-
sent the interests and hopes of labour. What business,
then, had its general council to address to the British
Executive a memorial " demanding a commutation of the
sentence of the three victims of Manchester !" Had that
anything to do with industrial rights ? It is amusing—
nothing more —to note the prodigious complacency
with which the committee assure all persons, past.
present, or to come, that they have " forced " the French
Empire " to drop its patronising airs to the working
classes." When did that particular change come over
the spirit of the Imperial dream ? When did the
Third Napoleon submit to this joint-stock dictation ?
We have never heard of it. If not, who else did ? But
mightier yet have been the works, and mightier yet are
the words of the association. In Belgium itself, we are
informed, " the coal lords of the basin of Charleroi" have
been defeated in the courts of law ; but this is not held to
be enough. The King himself must be careful, or the
Leaguers will discrown him. For, they say," the Belgian
Government ought, at last, to understand that petty States
have no longer any raison cl'ltre except they be the asylums
of liberty." This is almost cool enough to atone for the
atmospheric excesses of the season. Still it is not the climax.
Prussia has offended the association no less than
France. " Always ready to fall foul of one another," says
the report, " the military Governments are cheek-by-
jowl when entering upon a crusade against their common
enemy, the working class." In Austria the Congres
promise nothing less than revolution. But it is not
"political." In America its battle is being fought out
against "rebellious capital." And this is the new gospel
of industry—that " capital " is " rebellious " whenever it
resists a demand on the part, not of " labour," but of the
"labourer." Leaving out of view the monstrous bombast
which predicts, as the task of this society, the future
" regeneration of mankind," we would put it seriously to
intelligent working men whether their true interests
are not damaged by this sort of stilted balderdash.
The German exploring expedition has advanced to the
80th degree of north latitude. Captain Koldewey, says
the Telegraph, has done wonders, but he is not yet so far
north at one point as Parry was many years ago, or the
American Hayes was at another. Parry tried the despe-
rate experiment of journeying over the ice itself to the Pole.
It was on the 22nd June that, having left his ship behind
him in safe quarters, he commenced his strange enterprise.
Half sledges, half boats, his vehicles served alike for solid
ice or open water. Whenever a pool of water was reached
the boats had to be launched • as soon as the pool
was crossed they had again to be dragged heavily
along, often up steep and dangerous cliffs of ace. Hard
Pas the men toiled they made but eight miles in five days.
On the 22nd July they were fortunate, and made seventeen
miles—their best day's work. Soon afterwards the wind
shifted to the north, and, faster by far than they could
travel towards the Pole the ice was drifting beneath them
to the south, bearing them helplessly with it. Then only
they give up the attempt ; but they had reached the high
latitude of 82 deg. 40 min.-2 deg. further north than
Xoldewey has achieved. The German captain's chance,
however, lies in his having a steamer. Where Parry was
helpless and encumbered with his boats, Koldewey may
probably be able to make a dash through some of the open
channels that are almost always to be found in a movinr
ice-field, and press on to the Pole itself.
Englishmen are fond of boasting about the freedom of
the press, and this freedom is supposed to extend
wherever the Union Jack waves. It seems, however,
says the Star, that we need not go to Paris to find a plac:
in which the pleasure of the ruler is made superior to the
interests of truth or the convenience of the public. A
printing firm in Gibraltar announced some time since
the publication of a newspaper under the name of
the Calpense. The town had already one journal, the
Gibrolcar Chronicle—the. Atoniteur, so to speak, of the
Governor—and possibly the Governor thought, as it is
;said some eminent persons at Paris think, that opposition
newspapers are a nuisance. At all events, the proprietory
of the new journal.were instructed that if they attempted
to publish the paper as they proposed an ordinance would
NI issued making such publication illegal without a
license, which would only be granted under stringent
conditions. The printing firm were rash enough to
embark on their speculation in spite of this friendly
hint, and accordingly the ordinance was made—that
is to say, the law was altered to suit the notions of Sir
Richard Airey and the convenience of the Gibraltar
Chronicle. The proprietary of the Cape= then applied for
a license. They were told they could get it only on con•
dition of publishing nothing else in their paper but tele•
grams and shipping news; and, of course, these hard
terms they were compelled to accept. Such is the story of
the speculation of the Gibraltar printing firm. If it can