The Sun. — 1860-09-15 (London, England)

THE SUN.  LONDON, SATURDAY, SEPT.::IS, 1860.  The Americans are said to be a " fast" people, but we think some people or their rulers nearer home go faster still. The French, of course, are the cleverest people in the wide world of genius and invention ; they have eclipsed all and every other people, and now they are preparing to set us down on our own proper element—the sea. Their papers boast that, by means of the superior knowledge evinced by French architects, ship-builders, and others, they will now teach us a lesson for which we must be grateful. They have failed hitherto to bring us to a sense of our position on the broad waters where great ships are to be superseded by frigates clad in armour—real mail clad ships cased in steel, against which resistance were hopeless. Well, we have seen many strange inventions in our time—some of them so clever that the very inventor burnt his fingers in showing them off. There are many things which look well and promise more—but there are also such things that in their experiment prove too clever by half. And such we take the steel plated frigates may prove upon trial. The French ought to recollect that, in the late wars, when only wind and sail helped rival fleets to manoeuvre and to fight, their ships were almost always the best sailers—in fact, their ships were built with that one idea—of outsailing all others; and yet when the hour of trial came, and close quarters were the order of the day, British pluck made amends for wind and weather and fast sailing too.  We will just remind our clever inventors, be it in wood or steel, that English sailors don't like playing at long bowls, and if the plated ships try to keep away there is such a thing as bringing them to book—by boarding—and all the steel alongside will prove of little avail on the quarterdeck, when the hurrah ! of the Boarders re-echoes  to the rush for victory. Steel will then be at a discount in the market.  It is hardly to be believed ! But the fact is undeniable, that nearly fifteen months have elapsed since the outrage to the .British flag in the Peiho, since the destruction of 400 of our gallant tars by a dastardly Chinese ambuscade, since the solemnly arranged treaty of Tien-tsin was torn asunder, so to speak, by the murderous fusillade opened upon the attendants of our Ambassador, from behind the screen of those treacherous masked Taku fortifications. Yet up to this present moment those infamous acts have remained unpunished, have been allowed to pass unchallenged, have elicited hitherto from the majesty and might of insulted England not one solitary attempt at retribution ! It was near the end of June of 1859 that the gunboats in attendance upon Mr. BRUCE, as her Britannic MAJESTY'S representative, were opened fire upon by the lawless dastards lying in wait behind those veiled batteries infamously prepared for their obstruction upon the muddy banks of the river Peiho, or Tien-sin-hoa! And here is the middle of September, 1860, and we have not heard that a single blow has yet been struck by sea or by land in those Chinese waters, to avenge our 400 dead and gone, and almost, it would seem, forgotten, our cruelly and barbarously 1, -- murdered countrymen ! Not a blow ! And yet we are actually (thanks to our steam power) within so short an interval from the scene of these atrocities that within two months from the date of their perpetration the stretched out arm of England might have summarily I avenged the four hundred British seamen who had fallen by the heinous crime of the Chinese Government ! shanghai," says the gallant captain of R.M.S. the Furious, " Shanghai is only forty-two days by the overland route from Charing Cross ; and at the entrance of the Peiho river I met a traveller in 1858, who was only ffty days from Paris !" Mark that —note those words—remember that 50 days had sufficed to bring that traveller from  u- - 7 , , 41 ik„. • _ , • E • 11 0 DROIT , AW;-'