The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-09-13

Editorial Opinions ofthe Leading Journals
upon Current opios-CompiIed Every
Day for the Evening Telegraph.
ENGLAND AND THE WAR.


1t is now Just about twenty years since the
husband of Queen Victoria brought down
upon himself the indignation of the ruling
classes of Great Britain by incautiously avo w.
ing that he thought constitutional govern
ment to be on its trial in that country. Con-
stitutional government would submit to no
such princely criticism, aud many years of
devotion to the public interests hardly suficed
10 restore to the princely critic the esteem
ard confidence of loyal England. The Prince
Consort sleeps now in his gorgeous mauso-
leum, upon which his inconsolable widow
has lavished as many tears and as much
maenifcence as immortalized the sorrow of
Artemisia for her Carian lord. Constitutional
government in England has gone on from
bad to worse meanwhile, until it stands before
the world to-day, no longer on its trial, but
practically condemned and, as one may say,
held for execution. Whatever else may
be reserved to be proved or disproved by the
terrible ordeal through which Europe now is
raising, this, at least, has been established
by it in the sight of all men, that the existing
constitutional government of England has
practically exhausted its capacity of useful
ness to the English people. 1t stands revealed
to-day, without blow struck against it in
anger by any foreign prince or power, as
mere shell of shams and imbecilities as the
imperial system which has been shattered in
France by the iron hand of invading Germany
In its foreign relations the constitutional
monarchy of England has contrived to make
the country which it misadministers
and misrepresents at once odious and
contemplate. In its domestic relations
it has contrived to unsettle all the
foundations of the social order without
preparing any available basis of political re-
construction in place of the system which
has gradually crumbled to pieces beneath it.
There is no evidence that the people of Eng
land have degenerated from the solid virtues
and the resolute national temper of their an
cestors. Their activity in all the varied occu-
pations of civilized life was never greater,
never more successful than it nowis. In all the
more recent adventures of their national life
in the sharp trial of the Crimean war, in
the terrible crisis of the Indian mutiny in
the short but severe strain of the Abyssinian
expedition-the soldiers and sailors of Great
Britain approved themselves no unworthy
heirs of the heroes of Trafalgar
and of Waterloo. Nowhere in the
world have the nobler qualities of
charity and humanity been more busily
and more intelligently developed than in
England during the last twenty years. No
where in the civilized world are so many
voices sure to be raised in protest against any
act of national injustice, or in support of any
act of national magnanimity, as in the Britain
of our times. And yet nowhere in the oivi-
SO wretchedly incapable of national Justice
SO miserably destitute of national magnani-
NIFTY as the British Government of our times
In the whole world, for example, there are
no two nations SO closely connected with the
British people, or SO well entitled to con-
sideration and justice at the hands of the
British Government, as the United States
and France. With the United States
Great Britain is connected by ties of blood,
of Of on un6 f,lA frol
tions, of religious and political sympathy, of
commerce and of material interest, as she is
connected with no other people. Yet no
sooner were the United States subjected to
the sorest trial of their history-a trial in
volving their very existence as a nation and
those principles of freedom by which their
existence a nation is made worth the hav-
ipg-than the British Government adopted to-
wards them policy so irritating and SO selfish
as suffced in the brief space of four or five
years thoroughly to ALLEVIATE, not only from
the Government but from the people of
Great Britain, the good will and the respect
of all classes and of both sections of the
American people. Not even in Ireland,
which, after centuries of incessant opportu-
mites to unite the Irish nation in friendship
with the English, the English Government
has succeeded in making her bitterest
Eoropean foe-not even in Ireland is Great
Britain to-day more distrusted, despised, aud
disliked than in America.
With France Great Britain has connections
only less various, less important, and less
intimate than those which attach her to the
United States. In all her history she has had
no ally SO sincere and so constant as the
France of the second empire. To the French
alliance she is indebted for no slight share
of the great and growing prosperity which
has enabled her during the last twenty years
to bear up against the demoralizing and
paralyzing effects of her slow political decom-
position. Yet no sooner had France been
dragged by the imperial Government into
the fiery furnace Of hev present sore trial
than the British Government at once aban-
doned all interest in her fate. And
now that the French people have shaken
off the incubus of the personal administration
to which they owe the collapse of their
armies and the peril of their state the British
Government, as all our adVices unite in fore
ing us to believe, interposes its influence,
not TO facilitate but to thwart the establish
ment If freedom in France, not to hasten
but tt adjourn the return of peace to Europe
What the people of England are beginning
to think of this latest revelation of their true
political condition, our dispatches of yesterday
morning in a measure indicate. We are not
disposed to exsggerate the significance of
such demonstrations as were recently made
in London against the Government of Queen
Victoria and the foreign policy of Great
Britain. We do not mistake men like Professor
Beasley and Mr.. Odger for the heralds of a
new order of things in England, or infer from
the tumultuous applause with which their
denunciations of the Sovereign and of her
ministers were received in the most
public quarters of the British metropolis, that
England is upon the verge of new reVolu-