The Press. — 1854-03-25 (London, England)

THE PRESS.  now falls. It is the banditti that straggle and plunder in the rear of the camp, the privateers that infest the sea,—these, after all, cause  the real misery of war, and with no gain to either side in the contest. In war (especially iu naval warfare) a nation legalises piracy ; gives free licence to burn houses, sink ships, kill men; to every sort of murder, robbery, and lust ; awl necessarily gives it to them that have pleasure in all this: it arms the worst of the human race, men of fiendlike  passions, men even more fiendlike if coldblooded and passionless, the hostes humani generic, against fair, open, honest foes ; and all with no conceivable reason beyond the knowledge that its enemy may do the same against itself. In short, the fundamental principle of the existing jus bah is, that everything which hurts your enemy must proportionately benefit yourself,—a hardly perceptible improvement on the old Scythian theory, that the strength of the slain man passes into the slayer, or the arithmetic of Borneo, by which, if you scalp a man who has already scalped nineteen, you are allowed to credit yourself with the entire score. If the reckoning up of scalps and damage done were with us, as with them, a matter of religious obligation, we could quite understand the existing theory. Our own " religion of war " we may, perhaps, gather from the prayer " to be used at sea every day," and which thousands are now daily offering on shore, that our fleet may be " a safeguard " unto our most gracious sovereign lady " Queen Victoria and her dominions, and a " security for such as pass on the seas upon " their lawful occasions." Oddly enough, the prayer and the Foreign Secretary bring the matter exactly to an issue. Which shall be the rule of warfare, to extend as widely as we can the range and security of " lawful occasions," or the " right to consider us enemies " every body we can include under the title ? We have heard of the boy who " had a good right to be " flogged" with an odd feeling of misgiving as to the extent and multifariousness of an Englishman's " rights ;" but Lord CLARENDON 's " right" is at once the most amiable and com prehensive we have ever met with. And yet Lord CLARENDON states the law correctly. We have a "right" to sink English merchandise coming to England—not only in Russian, but in neutral, in any but English bottoms (and how English ships are to come from Russia, or get there, in this time of war, does not appear). A Russian privateer has a " right" to sink an English gold-ship from Victoria. We have a " right " in return to sink a Russian corn-ship from Odessa; finally, everybody under a "letter of marque " has s right to do all the injury he can to everybody else. These are only a very few of the " rights "of war. If her Majestys Ministers, who are for ever quoting Dr. An!COLD as an authority on matters of which he knew nothing, would listen to him on a subject which he thoroughly understood, they have at this moment the first opportunity which has offered within many centuries (the two chief naval powers being for the first time at one) to humanise the system and incidents of naval warfare ; and, if the First Lord of the Admiralty would apply himself to the consi deration of a few of the terrible histories recorded in the Admiralty Court, he would perhaps be as usefully and as respectably employed as when spouting pot-valiant bravado after dinner at a partisan club.