24 MAY 1856, Page 19

Vnlitirat eltanings. Loan DERBY AND "THE SUN or ENGLAND."—Lord Derby

may be CAA- sidered the most fortunate or the most ingenious of orators, when we take into account the very rare and apparently unique character of the topic that shows him most to advantage. His present speciality, indeed, is one that he has taken up from others, for it was not at once that he discovered his line. Every now and then, as our readers are painfully aware, the British sun seta for ever. After a last, positively the very laat performance of this kind, on the eve of a departure, not to the provinces, or to the States, or to Rio Janeiro, but to the region of history, to the world of the dead and Pluto's dark realms, the British sun, we are bound to say, ought not, in self-respect, to show itself again. But at Lord Derby's bidding it turns out again in all its beams, and in the identical robe of pink taffeta in which i,t presented itself to Falstaff's vinous imagination. At least once in five years Lord Derby is able to reproduce this striking phenomenon, under the most different circumstances, and of course with varied effects. The sun of Eng- land set recently in the murky horizon of Free-trade. It set the next time with a nautical effect, in a fleet of foreign ships, deeply laden, from all parts of the world. On Thursday night the old " property," it would seem, had been found in a heap of illumination-transparencies, and Lord Derby showed it off on a topic which it takes a little stiff thinking to associate with the absolute ruin of the British empire. It is impossible to express the thing is shorter or simpler terms, and therefore we must say at once, that we have finally and irrecoverably renounced our place among nations, and taken up one somewhere between Naples and Modena, entirely through having admitted the fatal maxim that "free ships make free goods." Start not, gentle reader, or fair reader, as the case may be ; it is Lord Derby who 'says it, and you must go to him for the interpretation. Lords Clarendon and Cowley have relinquished this palladium, and left our ark in the hands of the Phi- listines. Her Majesty's Ministers have acquiesced in the guilty surrender. The House of Commons has consented in silence, and now the House of Lords has caught the soft infection.—Times.

THE TORY LEADERSHIP.—DI bygone times, the Tory party arrived at and conducted the government of Ns country, because they sought lead- ers in their own ranks and among those born and bred to their habits, tra- ditions, and modes of thought. When they grafted Mr. Disraeli upon their party, and submitted to his leadership in a moment of helpless indignation, they divorced themselves from party traditions, from their English habits,

• and subjected themselves to a political impotency which had seldom cha- racterized them before. Mr. Disraeli gave them what he had got to give— striking rhetoric and bitter personalities • but he did not give, because he could not give, a policy to the Tory party. How could it be otherwise ? We believe the Tory party looks upon the government of this country as a great business, not a drama got up for the amusement or the profit of the actors. Mr. Disraeli dramatizes every situation. He does not regard it as a business ; he looks upon it as a drama, in which Mr. Disraeli 1S cast for such and such a part. Looking upon all things histrionically, he now and then of course makes " a point" ; fora moment there is a glare and blaze of opposition ; Parliament resounds with speeches ; lobbies are crowded with dividing Members ; somebody wins a victory, perhaps the histrio, perhaps not; and then the whole fades away in an extremely long report of the proceedings of Parliament in the morning journals. We have seen such blazes, but not a steady concentrated fire of opposition steadily aiming at certain results. And how could it be otherwise, when the leadership of the party is in the hands of one who does not share the national sympathies and antipathies, the objects and principles of the party of which, in a moment of irritation, he waspermitted to assume the lead ? The Tories have them- selves and themselvepes alone to thank for the result. The Whigs are often twitted with not having made the most of their clever men. The Whigs are accused of keeping the high places of authority in their own hands. We won't stop to argue the question. There is one thing, however, they never were reduced to do ; they never were reduced, in default of capacity among themselves, to take up with and follow at the tail of an adventurer with whom they had no sympathies, an indifferent to politics in general, and a histrio in his mode of treating the political necessities of these islands in particular.—Globe.

PILGRIMS AT THE HOLY SEPULCHRE.—This year there were about 5000; more than of late, but atilt a small number. It appears that the better is their position in regard to the Turks, the fiercer is their mood towards each other. They have brought with them their feuds from Asia Minor and the Gisek islands and joined them to those of the Greek and Latin Christians in Jerusalem, and have given a loose to their passions before the altar of the holiest church in Christendom. It was not only under the intoxication of the suspense of waiting for the miraculous fire, and scrambling over .one anther's heads to get near the source of the flame: there were stones and weapons deposited in readiness behind the pillars ; and more were stored in the Greek convent at hand, and given out through a window whilst the fray was proceeding. Both parties were thus prepared, it seems; and they suc- ceeded in seriously injuring each other, though the Pasha and the Com- mandant had four hundred soldiers on the spot to keep order. Many. Turks and about fifty Christians were seriously hurt by the fighting in the church;

and the fight was kept up in the streets afterwards The Pasha did what he could to prevent the rival sectaries from meeting, taking care that no Armenian or Greek entered the church during the ser- vices of the antagonist sect. The Christian Governments of Europe must do something more before next year. If they had Mohammedans brawling in a mosque in London, or Moscow, or Paris, flying at one another's throats, and mauling the soldiers sent to keep order, the Christian Powers would call upon the Sultan to take measures for abating the nuisance. It mould be no answer that the brawlers belonged to rival sects ; and the Sultan must hot be put off with such an excuse by his Christian allies. He has seen though of the stealing of relics—the stone of the Angel on the one hand, and of the silver star at Bethlehem on the other ; and of the mutual ob- stenction in building churches and rival destruction of venerable tombs, and efforts at ejection from convent and chapel. He has seen enough of the

fighting in Easter week The Sultan is loyally doing his duty lor.his Christian subjects and his allies. If the Czar entertains his father's view of the Easter pilgrimage, will he not try another limitation—that of the holy fire having answered, as far as it goes ? Will not the French Em- peror,. whom the Pope calls the Eldest Son of the Church, apply to Rome to sestram the disorders on the Latin side of the Christian feud ? Austria might help by her intercession to the same effect. Protestant Englahil can hardly exercise any direct action : but it is doing something to point out to the heads of the Greek and Latin Churches that the Christian religion has small chance of extension in the East while its professors disgrace it in its own holy places, and are safe from each other only under Mussulman pro- tection. If the grave Turk ever laughs in the face of his guest, it must be when he is told that Christianity is the religion of peace and love.—.Daily News.

SABBATH OBSERVANCE.—It is pretty certain that unless we keep Sunday holy, we shall soon cease, in any real sense, to keep it at all. We are.oue of the busiest nations on earth ; the demands on our time and strength have grown year by year more severe ; business or ambition become more and more absorbing. Well nigh all our other holidays are gone from practical life, with much hurt both to soul and body. Great temptations are often even now held out by hardly-pushed employers to induce their men to work through the Sunday. So great, so evidently mischievous is the wear and tear of life, that the law has had to step in between avarice and its victim ; to violate even the all-powerful maxims of free trade, and to interfere, by control of hours and various restrictions, in the " labour-market." The Spirit of money-getting chafes and strains at the checks imposed by law and public opinion. It is not hard to see what must follow if those restraints are discredited and disregarded in high places. If the working classes will not be content with the Sunday rest, which is theirs because the day is held to be holy, they will soon lose it as a holiday also. They will ere long be just as much expected to work on Sundays as on week-days, and just as much forced. . . . Every nerve is strained in the race of competition ; every week is scarce long enough to put the week's work in. Sunday has hitherto been held by all but universal consent amongst us as a dies non ; but this consent is based on a religious obligation. Remove that obligation, and .kunday will soon be added to our already too heavy days of labour. The day will be given wholly

i either to God or Mammon. It is to be remembered, too, that our reverence for Sunday is the last token surviving amongst our masses of respect for a positive and ceremonial precept of God and his Church. Ought not those re

who wish to revive the Church system in its fulness, to preserve with care this yet living fragment of it ? 11e English idea of the Christian year con- sists, it may be said, of fifty-two Sundays' and next to nothing else. True; but ought we not rather to try to restore the neglected holy days, than to secularize those which are still observed ? The English idea of Sunday is perhaps more straitlaced and Puritanical than has prevailed in Christendom in other times and places ; but if we impair it, let us beware lest we impair also those sentiments on which the observance of all holy seasons rests, and break the framework which might have helped us to construct a more per- fect system.—Guardian.