CURRENT TOPICS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 6115, 23 March 1898, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

* lit the Hermit Kingdom women in of Corea, which haa resolved cobea. tb' play the anchorite no longer, women are still subject to severe disabilities. ' • Mrs _ Bishop, to whose, work .we referred T ' yesterday, tells that in Seoul there is ,;,... . »: curious kind' of curfew . institution, ' related, as wouldL appear, to ideas about the segregation] of the sexes. "About eight o'clock the great bell tolled a signal for men to retire into, their houses, and for women to come out and amuse themselves, . and visit their friends. . At twelve the Dell again boomed, women retired, and men were at liberty to go abroad. A lady may •;■; spend all her life there and never see the -treets of Seoul by daylight. The nocifcur- '■''.. nal silence is very impressive. There is no _-„' human hum, throb or gurgle. The darkness, i too, is absolute, as there are few, if any, lighted windows to. the^streets. Upon a silence which may be felt; the deep, ponetratijig boom of the great bejii breaks with a sound which, is almost; ominous." The seclusion' of Corean women was introduced five centuries ago. It is continued now ber cause, as some Goreans frankly "avow, Corean men distrust each other more than they do their wives, "and with good reason, for the immorality of the cities and of the upper classes almost exceeds belief." Even the late Queen confessed! to Mrs Bishop that ' She knew nothing of Corea, or __..the capital, except the street through ... which the periodical Eoyal procession passed. Daughters have been put to death by their fathers, wives by their husbands, and women have even committed suicide, according to Dallet, when strange men, whether by accident or design, have . even touched their hands, and quite lately a serving-woman gave as her reason for remissness in attempting to save her mistress, who perished in • a fire, that in >the confusion a man had touched the lady, making ' her not worth saving! The law may not enter the women's apartments. A noble hiding himself in his wife's rooms cannot be seized for any crime except that of rebellion. A man wishing to repair his roof must inform his neighbours, lest by any chance he should see any of their women. After the age of seven, boys and girls part company, and the girls are rigidly secluded, seeing none of the male sex except their fathers' and brothers until the date of marriage, after which they can only see their own and their husbands' near male relations. This state of things, it may be hoped, will now be broken down, and women will be treated as rational beings.

The amount of valuable some historical matter that lies -.ettbbs of hidden in various old manlast sions in the United Kingcbntuet. dom is beyond calculation, but year by year some fresh collection is examined and its contents made public. The latest of these is the large and valuable collection in the possession of the Earl of Carlisle at Howard Castle, a descriptive catalogue of which haa just been issued, under the authority of the Historical Manuscripts Commission. Among the documents, some thousand in number, are letters from many of the most prominent public men and women of last century. Vanbrugh, the dramatist and architect, who built both Blenheim and Castle Howard in the days of Queen Anne, the Great Duke of Marlborough, Sir Robert Walpole, the Duke of Wharton, all figure largely in these pages. Among the many visitors to the castle was the famous wit and beauty, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, daughter of the Duke of Kingston, and a short sketch of her appears in a letter addressed by Lady Anne Irwin to her father, Lord Carlisle. " Your Lordship being alone now," she writes ; " I am willing to send any trifles that I think may amuse you ; the enclosed is Lady Mary Wortley's advice to me, and my answer. She is here often, and contributes not a little to the enlivening conversation ; her piinciples are as corrupt as her wit is entertaining, and I never heard a woman, lot her practice be never so scandalous, maintain such arguments." More interesting still is a description of the dangers of travel- . ling in tho same age, written by the same young lady after her journey from London to her father in York. "I have had a good journey," she says; "and am very well, but escaped being robbed upon Finchley Common most narrowly. The York coach, not forty yards before me, was stopped and robbed. I saw the rogues do it, and could expect nothing less myself, having no other guard but Torn Bultin; butupon seeinghim armed, they rid off with such violence, either" ori purpose or design, they had near thrown Turn off his horse. Thus I fortunately

escaped, but tl ey took in auother stage coach about 100 yards behind me, and got a good booty — two watches, and above twenty pounds." In the reign of George 11. the Lady Anno became one of the Ladies-in-Waiting of the Princess of Wales, and on- January 1, 1737, she wrote to her father to cell him of some of the duties before her. Among other things, she was forced, it seems, to gamble. "The Prince has told me," she Writes, " I must play at hazard ; I remonstrated as far as I durst, how improper I was to undertake such an honour ; but the thing is not to be avoided, and to make it as easy to mo as possible the Prince has directed all the Ladies of the Bedchamber to join ; we put. in fifty pound a piece, and the Prince adds two hundred." The young lady was afraid of the result of the pro-ceeding,-both for her "conduct" and her " fortune, " but deemed it best to " put a good face upon the matter."

Fifty years later this pitt and same vice of gambling had fox ; r lay groftn to far greater dimenand sions, and in some of the politics, letters of George Selwyn, the wit and beau so often mentioned in the correspondence of Horace Walpole, we get glimpses of the dissolute life of Charles James Fox, the famous politician. For instance, in 1781, Selwyn writes of a gambling bout that extended through one night and far into the next day v "Brooks's " here referred to was on_ of the celebrated gaming houses, contemporary with Almack's and White's. /"'Yesterday," he says, "-about the middleof the day/passing by Brooks's I saw a hackney coach, which announced a late sitting. I had the curiosity to inquire how things were, and found Richard in his Pharo pulpit, where he had been, alternately witli Charles, since the evening before, and dealing to Adm. Pigott only. I saw a card on the table — 'Received from Messieurs Fox and ■ Co., 1500gs.' Thb bank ceased in a few minutes after Iwas in the room ; it was a little after twelve at noon, and it had won 3400 or 5000 guineas. Pigott, I believO, ' was the chief loser/ Of course Fox did not always lose, and his friends could invariably, tell when he had been lucky,' for then he appeared in new clothes. Another of the letters in the collection tells how the bailiffs were put into Fox's house by the Jews, while the master was spending his time at the " Pharo Bank," too. busily engaged in winning arid' losing motiey to pay. his debts.. Yet he found time to atteridto his parliamentary duties, for he was already famous as an orator. Pitt was just at the beginning of his great career, and Selwyn, heard him speak on- Burkes Civil List Bili in February, 1781. Of c6urse, Fox also took part in the debate. " The chief subject of C. Fox's harangue yesterday," writes Selwyn, '' was an eloge upon and Jack Townshend, who spoke, for the second time, rehearsed . these^ maxiihs ■ of his preceptor!. 'Jack did better than ihe time before, but was so eclipsed by Mr W. Pitt that it appeared to impartial people but ari indifferent performance." Six , months later Pitt had gained, a reputation, so that he was spoken of ,as being already famous. Selwyn again heard him, and was apparently not prepared to worship at his shrine. " I heard yesterday young Pitt," he writes j "I came down into the House to judge for myself. He is a young man who will undoubtedly make his way in the world by his abilities. But to give him credit for being very extraordinary, upon what I kejird ... yesterday, Trowld be absurd.'* It is certainly a matter for congratulation that letteivwriting was so fashionable, and at the same time that the writers should spend so much space on gossip. The great events of the past are recorded for us in State documents, and it is to trivial correspondence of this nature that we must turn for our knowledge of the manners and habits of other days.

Quite a storm of criticism the church has been raised in the and London papers' recently on the poor, a passage in the autobiography of Mr Joseph Arch relating an incident connected with the Church of England half a century, ago. "One Sunday," says Mr Arch, " my father was going to stop to take the Communion, and I, being a boy,' had, of course, to go out before it began. I was a little bit of a fellow and curious.. I said to myself: "What, does father stop behind for ? What is .it they do .?. I will- see. So J went out of church, closed the door, placed my eye at the key-hole and peeped through, and what I saw will be engraved on my mind until the last day of my-life. First up walked the squire to the Communion rails; the farmers v/ent up next; then up went the tradesmen, the shopkeepers,' the wheelwright and the blacksmith; and then the: very: last of all went the poor agricultural labourers in their smock-frocks." Now, here was an excellent opportunity for Anglican clergymen to expatiate on the growth of their Church in such matters. But a number of clerical correspondents of the Standard came forward to defend a system of caste under which the Carpenter's Son and His disciples would have been in duty bound to follow the squire, the farmers and the. tradesmen up the church. " A Country Parson " fails to see anything unchristian in the practice. "Somebody must go up first, and the labourers naturally hang back." According to Mr K. B. Baghot De La Bere, the reason is that" the labourers are a class who believe, rightly or wrongly, that even in God's house, humility is a virtue and class distinctions cannot wholly be ignored." One clergyman, the Rev J. R. Broughton, has the manliness to protest against the view taken by Mr Arch's critics, and recognises that this very treatment of the poor has given an immense impetus to dissent. Moreover, the growth of free and open, churches is a proof that the Church of England "no longer approves of the unchristian policy that would make poverty a sin in the eyes of God." It is the wish of all lovers of humanity, as of all friends of religion, that the Church may "rise to the occasion," but even in this country recent occurrences show what an amount of conservative hostility has to be encountered by any leading churchman who dares to express sympathy with " the common people." "