The Sun. — 1856-08-27 (London, England)

LONDON, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 27, 1856.  If asked to name the distinguishing quality of the genuine despot, we should say it was malignant brutality. Not the brutality of the drunken husband or the rude savage, but the brutality of a mind which relishes the torture and degradation it inflicts. There have been men who were despots by accident, like a NERVA or a TRAJAN ; but they could have been happy enough with united power, and could rather have submitted to lose somewhat of it than to revel in the tortures of their fellow-creatures. There have been others like CROMWELL, who, though merciful at heart, could make all yield to their energetic wills, from an enlightened consciousness that they were serving the commonwealth in a national crisis, but who would rather have cut off their own right hand than sign the order to torture another. Severely just they could be— oruel they could not be. But the true despot is consciously a guilty being ; he is a political Satan ; his very nature is enmity to political good —he can but bate civil and religious liberty, while he can neither blind his eyes to the excellence of what he hates, and the nobleness of its advocates, nor to the selfish baseness of his own despotic nature. He therefore hates patriots as ABEL hated CAIN; he malignantly envies the approbation they enjoy, because it not only thwarts, if possible, his tyranny, but mirrors to himself as well as to the world the odiousness of his own disposition. Hence, from the times of the tyrants immortalised by Greek history, or even by the Sacred recDrds, to this hour, these curses of humanity have been distinguished, at some period of their lives, by the malignant propensity to torture or degrade, or both, the noble patriots who could not forget their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens. Our readers will excuse us if a glance at the world just now has betrayed us into a kind of philosophising strain. The illustrations of our remarks from things as they are are so glaring that any one may be pardoned for letting them fall. Two European Rulers, in particular, are now thrust upon our attention by their resistance to the counsels of England especially, as undisguised tyrants, and the insane cruelty of their conduct is raising a universal groan of disgust with them, and sympathy with their victims. Naples keeping Austria in countenance, and Austria repaying by upholding the southern Monarch against his subjects. It must be confessed that the dark inspirations of Jesuitism have long co-operated with the hereditary cruelty of the Bourbon and Hapsburg races. Superstition and bigotry, its offspring, have always delighted in torturing those whose superior light they could not extinguish, or whom they could not compel to hypocrisy ; and when the cruelly of religious fanaticism and that of enraged tyranny combine, of course they convert the human being almost into a fiend. It is also a deplorable aggravation of the evil that the despot, as the enemy of the human race, is essentially suspicious, that he cannot imagine himself safe without a host of spies and informers, and a bribed military guard, and that hence thousand; innocent of anything but the common hatred of oppression, are denounced and tortured as actual conspirators. Brit the other day we had to record an atrocity --the savage murder of CICERUACCIIIO and his eons and companions—which broke down even the stilted moderation of the Times itself, and brought forth a peal of stately thunder. What but a rancorous pleasure in cruelty could have induced a Prince of the Imperial family to shoot men driven ashore by stress of weather, men owing no allegiance to Austria, and who had violated no law ; voluntary exiles merely from Rome when the President of the French Republic strangled the liberties of the Roman Republic ; their leader a  man of distinguished probity, endeared to all  classes of Roman citizens, his two sons, one but nineteen, the other but thirteen years of age-what, we repeat, must have been th© malignity nd the cruelty which could butcher such an inoffensive band with every circumstance of atrocity, `--peeling the skin off the head tend fingers of