Shafi Khan, the Persian Ambassador at the Court of St. James, 
has been suddenly recalled from England by the Shah. This recall 
coincides strangely with the operations of Persia in Afghanistan, 
where it was said to have taken Herat, and with the Russian 
expedition upon Khiva, the capital of the Khanate of Khiva.°“ 
The Persian expedition and the Russian one may be considered as 
two movements, the one from the west, the other from the north, 
centered on the Punjab, the northern outpost of the British 
dominions in the East. The Russian expedition is commanded by 
Gen. Perowski, the same whose Khiva expedition in 1839-40 
proved abortive. The Russians having organized, of late years, a 
flotilla in the Aral Sea, are now able to ascend the river 
Amu-Darya. 

A large Russian fleet is cruising in the Baltic, where it recently 
took an opportunity to inspect the fortifications of Slite, and the 
harbor of the Swedish Island of Gothland, of which Russia is 
covetous, in the manner she got possession of the Island of Aland, 
close to the coast of Sweden, and strongly fortified by Russia in 
1836. From Gothland the Russian fleet proceeded to the Cattegat 
and the Sound, with a view to support the King of Denmark’s* 
intended coup d’état in the very probable case of the Copenhagen 
Diet not quietly accepting the so-called Whole-State Constitution 
(Gesammt-Staats-Verfassung) octroyed by the magnanimous Cz ar. 
The state of affairs at Copenhagen is this: the Danish Government 
has succeeded in carrying the abolition of the Lex Regia,’ and 
introducing the new law of royal succession, by the support they 

received from the Peasant-leaguers.*° This party, under the 
leadership of Col. Tscherning, aims principally at the transforma- 
tion of the Feste Gut, a sort of feudal peasant-tenure, into free 
property; and the introduction of municipal laws favorable to the 
interests and the development of the peasantry. The properly 
called national and liberal party—the party of the Eyderdanes, 
who formed the Casino Ministry*'” in 1848, forced the Constitu- 
tion of 1849 upon the King, and carried the war against 
Schleswig-Holstein—consisting chiefly of professional gentlemen, 
had neglected, like the rest of the liberal party all over the 
Continent, to consult the interests of the mass of the people, 
formed in Denmark by the peasantry. Thus their influence on the 
people was lost, and the Government has succeeded in excluding 
them almost altogether from the present Folketing, where they 
can hardly be said to muster more than ten men. The 
Government, however, having got rid of the obnoxious opposition 
of the Eyderdanes by the aid of the Peasant-leaguers, threw off 
the mask, called Mr. Oersted, who was odious to both parties, to 
the Ministry; and so far from any longer cajoling the peasant 
party, a royal veto prevented the publication of the new Municipal 
law, originally introduced by the Government itself in order to 
catch the peasants. The Peasant-leaguers, duped and abused by 
the Government, have entered into a coalition with the Eyder- 
danes, and appointed Monrad, a clergyman and one of the leaders 
of the Eyderdanes, as Vice-President of the Committee sitting on 
the Constitutional question. This coalition has baffled all hope of 
overthrowing the Constitution in a_ constitutional way, and 
accordingly the whole plan having been formed by and for the 
Muscovites, a Russian fleet appears in the Danish waters at the 
very moment of the crisis. 

All the journals of Vienna and Berlin confirm the intelligence of 
the passage of the Danube by strong divisions of the Turkish 
army. According to the Oésterreichische Correspondenz the Turks 
have been repulsed by the Russians in Lesser Wallachia. A 
telegraphic dispatch states that a serious engagement took place on 
the 21st ult. between the two armies in Asia. We must wait for 
more ample and authentic information to account for the 
circumstances which may have induced the Turkish Commander- 
in-Chief to cross the Danube at Widin, a maneuver which, at first 
view, must be regarded as a gross blunder. The Kolnische Zeitung 
announces that Prince Gorchakoff has seized upon all the 
treasure-chests (it is not said whether governmental or other) of 
Wallachia; and, according to another German paper, the same 

General has removed to the interior all deposits of corn on the 
Danube designed to be exported to foreign countries. 

The news of advantages gained by Shamyl over Prince 
Woronzoff, are confirmed by the French papers of to-day. We 
read in the Agram Gazette, that an important letter has been 
received by Prince Danilo from Russia, and the Prince after having 
received it, gave orders to have all the corn which had been 
gathered in from the Montenegrin territory removed to Zabljak. 
Cartridges are being made and bullets cast. It is said that Russia 
has informed the Vladika that a collision between the Turks and 
Russians was imminent, and that the war had a patriotic and 
sacred character; and that the Montenegrins ought to watch their 
frontiers narrowly, in order that neighboring provinces should not 
furnish aid to the Porte. 

The Wanderer of Vienna, of the 27th ult., says that a letter from 
St. Petersburg states, that the Emperor Nicholas has ordered the 
formation of an army of reserve, the headquarters of which are to 
be in Volhynia. 

On last Tuesday a riot occurred at Blackburn on occasion of the 
election of councillors at St. Peter’s Ward, and the soldiery was 
forced to interfere. 

With regard to the Wigan riots, Mr. Cowell, the leader of the 
laborers at Preston, has declared in a public meeting that— 

“he very much regretted what had occurred in Wigan. He was sorry the people 
of Wigan had no more sense than to have recourse to a system of leveling. There 
was no sense in working people collecting together and destroying the property 
they had produced. The property itself never did them any injury—it was the men 
that held the property that were the tyrants. Let them respect property and life, 

and by proceeding in a peaceable, orderly and quiet manner, they might rely on 
the struggle terminating in their favor.”* 

Now I am far from defending the aimless acts of violence 
committed by the Wigan colliers, who have paid for them with the 
blood of seven men. But, on the other hand, I understand that 
there is a great difficulty, especially for the inferior elements of 
the working classes, to which the colliers undoubtedly belong, in 
proceeding “peaceably, orderly and quietly,” when they are driven 
to acts of frenzy by utter destitution and by the cool insolence of 
their masters. The riots are provoked by the latter in order to 
enable themselves to appeal to the armed force and to put down, 
as they have done in Wigan, all meetings of the workingmen by 

No. 79, November 5, 1853.— Ed. 

order of the magistrates. The riot which occurred in the town of 
Wigan, on Friday afternoon, was occasioned by the coal kings of 
the district meeting in large numbers at Whiteside’s Royal Hotel, 
in order to deliberate on the demands of the colliers, and by 
their coming to the resolution to repudiate all compromise with 
the men. The attack on the saw-mills at Haigh, near Wigan, 
which occurred on Monday, was directed against the foreign 
colliers, brought over from Wales by Mr. Peace, the Agent for the 
Earl of Balcarres, in order to replace the turnouts of the coal 
pits. 

The colliers were certainly not right in preventing their 
fellow-laborers, by violence, from doing the work they had 
abandoned themselves. But when we see the masters pledging 
each other by heavy fines, with a view to enforce their lock-out, can 
we be astonished at the more rude and less hypocritical manner in 
which the men attempt to enforce their turn-out? Mr. Joseph 
Hume himself says, in a letter addressed to the operatives at 
Preston: 

“IT see on the list of advocates for arbitration to settle the disputes of nations, 

instead of having recourse to war, many master-manufacturers who are at this 
moment in strife against their men.”* 

The Manufacturers’ Association at Preston have published a 
manifesto in order to justify the general lock-out.” Their sincerity 
may be inferred from the fact, that the masters’ secret league, the 
programme of which I communicated to your readers about two 
months ago,° is not mentioned in a single word, thus giving the 
hue of a necessity, which the masters were unable to escape, to the 
deliberate result of conspiracy. They reproach the workingmen 
with asking for 10 per cent. neither more or less. They do not tell 
the public that, when the masters took off 10 per cent. in 1847, 
they promised to restore it as soon as trade had revived, and that 
the men have been informed again and again of the revival of 
trade by the glowing descriptions of Messrs. Bright, Cobden & 
Co., by the declamations of the whole middle-class press, and by 
the royal speech on the opening of Parliament. They do not tell us 
that bread is more than 40 per cent. dearer, coals 15 to 20 per 
cent., meat, candles, potatoes, and all other articles, largely 
entering in the consumption of the working classes, about 20 per 

> The Times, No. 21576, November 3, 1853.— Ed. 

cent. dearer than before, and that the manufacturers vanquished 
their antagonists under the banner of: Cheap bread and dear labor! 
They reproach the men with continuing to enforce an equalization 
of wages in the same town for the mills of the same description. 
Why, does not the whole doctrine, of their masters, of Ricardo and 
Malthus, proceed from supposing such an equalization to exist 
throughout the whole country? The men, they say, are acting 
under the orders of a Committee. They are instigated by 
“strangers,” “intruders,” “traders in agitation.” Just the same 
thing was contended on the part of the protectionists reproaching, 
at the time of the Corn Law League,*” the same manufacturers 
with being directed by Messrs. Bright and Cobden, “two profes- 
sional traders in agitation,” and with blindly acting under the 
orders of the Revolutionary Committee at Manchester, levying 
taxes, commanding an army of lecturers and _ missionaries, 
inundating the country with small and large prints and forming a 
state in the state. The most curious fact is that while the masters 
accuse the men of “acting under the orders of a Committee,” they 
call themselves the “United Manufacturers’ Association,” publish- 
ing their very manifesto through a Committee and plotting with the 
“strangers” of Manchester, Bolton, Bury, etc. The “strangers” of 
whom the masters’ manifesto speaks, are merely the men of the 
neighboring industrial localities. 

I am far, however, from supposing that the workmen will obtain 
the immediate end their strikes aim at. On the contrary, I have 
stated in a former letter, that at no distant period they will have to 
strike against a reduction instead of for an advance of wages.* 
Already reductions of wages are growing numerous, and produc- 
ing their correspondent quota of strikes. The true result of this 
whole movement will be, as I stated on a previous occasion, that 
“the activity of the working classes will soon be carried over to the 
political field, when the new organization of trades, gained in the 
strikes, will prove of immense value to them.” Ernest Jones and 
the other Chartist leaders, are again in the field; and at the great 
meeting at Manchester, on last Sunday, the following resolution 
was passed: 

“That after witnessing the united exertions of the master class against the 
trades of this country, by opposing a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work, this 
meeting is of opinion that the present struggle of labor cannot be carried to a 

successful issue, except by [...] subverting the monopolies of the master class, 
through the representation of the laboring classes in the Commons’s House of 

Parliament by the enactment of the People’s Charter, when alone they will be 
enabled to make laws in their own interest, to repeal those that are injurious, and 
to obtain the command of means of work, high wages, cheap food, steady trade, 
and independent self-employment.” * 

Written on November 4, 1853 Reproduced from the New-York