The Sun. — 1855-01-05 (London, England)

PROVIDENCE. In their view it is no part of -the system of PROVIDEIcE that violence should. "be resisted by force, and that society should disc riri. the convicted vii lain. Did these reasoners ever master that textbook of liberal English education, BUTLER'S Analogy ? With him we must believe that instinctive resistance to wrong is one of the providential punishments of crime ; and further, that if we arc too indolent or selfish to make the requisite sacrifices for maintaining the order of society, greater eventual suffering is the inevitable result. Now, beyond all doubt, if any man had murdered as many individuals as Russia has murdered nations even the Quakers would be ashamed to petition for his life; but had he only, before and behind, right and left, appropriated his neighbours' property in this style, JOHN BRIGHT himself would think it time to put on the handcuffs, to tear off his disguises, and to restore him to his individuality in solitary confinement. He would not venture to excuse his last felony or burglary because his own cotton-mill or his own mansion was untouched ; 1 or because it had been perpetrated on some individual who was not religious in Mr. BRIGHT'S way, or not administering his property so well as Mr. BRIGHT was doing. Possibly the villain might prove a CANNON, and half-kill the policeman who arrested him, yet Mr. BRIGHT would be willing, we presume, to incur tkat hazard, and maintain that the burglar must be put down, or that cotton-mills and mansions would be useless. We profess ourselves utterly incompetent to discern the want of appropriateness, when the same principle is applied to the community of nations. PROVIDENCE takes no more care of burglars than of conquerors, and knows no difference between them but that of degree ; and if we may piously or supinely leave the latter to PROVIDENCE, SO we may the former.  Here is a nation, sixty-four years ago, numbering but fifteen millions of people, swelled now, and chiefly by absorbing more civilised countries, to some sixty millions ! A nation which has so unblushingly mingled confessed fraud and 'open violence for the sake of acquisition that it is equally impossible to be on our guard against either ; a nation of slave-conquerors, which has spread the bane of her serfdom over every territory she has absorbed ; an insatiable military polypus, which has made each successive growth the preparation for further extensions. She robs Persia, and locates her troops en route for India. She seizes the Crimea, and builds, not a port and dockyards to civilise the Asiatic coasts and her own people by commerce, but a fortress and navy which could at any time crush Constantinople. She receives, at the Treaty of Vienna, the 'Government of Poland as an independent State. She provokes it by unheard-of barbarities to rise; and then, is the face of Holy-Alliance treaties, swallows and attempts to digest it, and Warsaw and other fortresses are forthwith put in array against Germany. By fraud and violence combined she seizes Finland and the Aland Isles ; immediately she makes Sweaborg and Bomarsund into Seloastopols for the conquest of Sweden aid Denmark. Everywhere the story is the same— the most unprovoked seizure of nations which were doing her no wrong, except, perhaps, that they spared her CZARS, even the great CZAR himself, when they might have led them captive. Gratitude these varnished savages want a word for. We desist, however, from the endless topic of Russian villany. The politician who canfiot perceive that it is now or never,-cost us what it may, is beyond our power to reason with. We have not learned all our political logic in the counting-house and the till. The following quotation ought to settle the question :—" The acquisitions of Russia from Sweden, equal the remainder of Sweden ; from Poland equal the Austrian empire ; from European Turkey equal Prussia, exclusive of the Rhenish provinces ; from Asiatic Turkey equal the small German States, Rhenish Prussia, Holland, and Belgium ; from Persia equal England ; from Tartary equal European Turkey, Greece, Italy, and Spain. The total acquisitions of Russia in 64 years equal her whole European Empire before that time !"