The Sun. — 1839-01-08 (London, England)

COMMERCIAL TREATIES.  (From the British and Foreign Review for January.) Never were commercial treaties concluded between any powers, which more required the corroboration of a strong and decisive line of policy to give weight to all their provisions, than those signed in 1838 between Great Britain and Austria—bets:wen Great Britain and the Porte ; for they have been concluded, not with the vague foresight of any contingent peril, but in the face of the actual pretensions of Russia. If the English Government was not determined to act upon them with its whole strength, they would not only soon become a dead letter, but they never would come into operation at all. It becomes us, then, to inquire what political combination is best calculated to give solidity to these arrangements. _ .  The fact that Austria has assented to this treaty may fairly be taken as an admission on her part that she is not averse to an alliance utterly repugnant to her Russian connexions—an alliance, as we showed at the opening of this article, which has grown with her dread and hatred of Russian influence. It is on her part, politically considered, a strictly defensive measure : she discerns a danger, she uses her best preservative. With Turkey the case is the same, but stronger ; for with her the influence of Russia was far more powerful, her own resources far less considerable, and her position with regard to England less that of an equal than of a suppliant. The ratification of these treaties has, then, been the first act of a defensive alliance, of which Great Britain is the centre ; her eastern possossions, her maritime power, her commercial relations giving her as strong an interest as either of the other states, though the one sees its existence in actual jeopardy, and the other may tremble for the safety of an immense part of its dominions. As long as the alliance preserves a defensive character, it will confine its policy within the bounds of strict moderation, and will certainly not engage in hostilities even to recover the ground which ten years of insidious encroachments and barbarous violence have acquired for Russia : but if that power begins the attack, the position of the allies is materially altered. As long as the existing state of things remains, Austria, though in the most absolute opposition to Russia on other points, has one interest in common with the Emperor Nicholas—that of keeping down, by whatever means, the Polish provinces of the two empires. We have seen at Cracow what a union of purpose in that bad cause can effect. It is the union of brigands embarrassed to dispose of their captives and their booty. Russia proposes to murder the captives and to riot in the spoils ; Prussia, to sell the former and to trade with the latter : for Austria—equally averse to the one 'and the other—nothing remains but the difficult task of restitution. She has repented for fifty years of that atrocious mistake; she has felt more deeply than any power in Europe the disastrous consequences of the exposure of her northern frontier, and the dreadful conditions on which her moderate accession of territory was obtained ;—and we believe that we are speaking the real thoughts of the great Austrian minister, when we say that his empire will not he freed from its calamitous union pith the worst part of Russian policy, nor Europe safe from Russian incursions, until the Polish question has been boldly attacked and resolved.  As long as we were trpon terms of mere conventional politeness with the Austrian Government, our Ministers seemed to think themselves compelled to spare the sensitiveness of that power on Polish affairs : but if we are to make her our ally indeed, we must read her policy home. There is but one thing required to induce Austria to throw off the mask, which she is compelled to wear until that thing be secured—in a word,