Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XI, Issue 7, 8 June 1883, Page 1

Current Topics

AT HOME AND ABROAD.

Ei und Bubke has compared a noisy mob who A freethinker fill , ie world with the clatter of their own selfoh im rtance to a crowd of grasshoppers that, to hear F&kkthought. the j, might seem to be the sole occupants of a pastnre where, nevertheless, a fine herd of oxen are engaged in quietly chewing the cud.— And the comparison is just, and always holds good. To hear the row that is now going on, for example, in some quarters, we might think that the brawling, "* boxing, Bradlaugh, or the dirty fellows who the other day received ft very mild and over-deserved punishment for pouring out their filth upon the most sacred truth to the Christian, the most pathetic story to the high-minded unbeliever, and their followers, and sympathisers, the bedeviled " ranters " of the colonies especially, were the only inhabitants of the realms of what is called Freethooght. We findi nevertheless, on examination that such is not the case, and we find all the nauseous clamour of the croved in question as much abhorred by Freethinkers of the higher class, as it is even by believers themselves. — M. Maxime dv Camp, then, the French Academician, who for a lifetime has been a leader amongst the literary men of Paris* and the intimate friend of most of his contemporary writers whose fame is Enropean, now comes forward and tells us what he thinks of the system that we find cried abroad by stentorian voices, as that which is to regenerate mankind— and yet M. dv Camp tells us also that he is not of the household of faith. But he sees whjat is going on in the world, and he abhors it. He especially abhors toiat he sees in Paris now, after its twelve years of the Freethinkers' pule, when, he says, more than ever, more than under the reign of Louis Philippe, more than under the second empire it seems to become the "brothel of the universe."— But what does he tell us of the faith he himself does not possess, and what of the science that the noisy crew bo bawl about and which he needs must thoroughly understand ? " They say this charity is inspired by a blind faith," he writes, " that this faith is supported on texts pretendedly revealed, which swarm with contradictions. What matter? Ido not trouble myself much about that ; those who believe are happy and I envy their happiness. If their belief is-an error, let this error be glorified since it draws them to succour the miserable, to calm suffering, to give back hope to those in despair. Faith is not justified by science ; it is too fortunate,— for the scientific truth of yesterday is the error of to day ; science does not comfort, it is religion that comforts. To mock God, to deny God this is easy, and even a little out of date." And then he goes on to explain the manner in which the war against religion in France arose and the worth of the system that they have introduced in the place of religion. « A bad saying," he says, * has been pronounced which serves as a watch-word in this campaign undertaken against works of faith and charity. It has been said : Le clericalism, voila V ennemi,—Thej are satisfied with sayings, as it is always when ignorance governs. . . . They have triumphed; they have conquered Jesuits, Oblates, Dominicans ; they have conquered certain schools where Sisters of Charity darkly taught little girls that they must be docile, industrious, and truthful. He who pronounced this unlucky saying is dead, at the age of the full command of all his faculties and of maturity. His obsequies have shown how his saying must be interpreted ;no priest has prayed over his remains ;— all superstitions were behind the funeral car, but religion was not there, because they had driven it away. I shall, perhaps scandalise his friends by telling them that a perpetual Mass was immediately founded for the repose of his soul.— The intention was good ; let it be excused. Is clericalism ftuly the enemy ? (he continues) I am too poor a cleric to decide the question, but what I affirm is, that for nations as for mankind, Spiritualism is life and Materialism is death. To give the soul a transitory existence, to reduce it to the struggles, to the deceptions of actual hfe, to make it perish at the same time as the matter that envelopes it and which it illumines, to forbid it to hope for a reward to forbid it to fear a chastisement, to promise it nothing, to render it inferior to the molecules of the physical world which are trans-

formed and never disappear, is to drive away from man the divine breath, and to condemn him to a forced bestiality. God is a hypothesis; so be it— but nothingness also is a hypothesis. — Let me be permitted to choose, to believe that I shall carry beyond the grave the responsibility of my life, and of seeking to anticipate the eternal light. -It must not be extinguished ; when the beacon. is not lighted during the night the vessels are shipwrecked. They have made a great noise, I know, about De Broussais' saying, * I have dissected many brains, and I have never found a soul. — The Raying is without meaning. Broussais found no soul. in dissecting brains any. more than he found sight in the orbits of the corpses that his scalpel examined. — George Sand has written : * I know only one belief and one refuge ; faith in God and our immortality ; my secret is not new there is no other.' No, certainly, the secret is not new— old as it is it can still serve its purpose, and it has not been replaced. It is strange, it is almost grievous to have to defend these doctrines ; Spiritualism has been the glory of humanity ; it is the light wherewith the highest souls are enlightened ; of it were born the three theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity, which are also ths three social virtues, without which the people are only herds fighting for existence, according to Darwin's formula, devouring one another, eating, taking their enjoyment, and falling asunder instead of dying. ' Nothing in the moral world is lost,' says Joubert, ' as in the material world nothing is annihilated. All our thoughts, all our sentiments are, here below, only the commencement of sentiments which will be completed elsewhere.' It is by such principles that they are supported who do good without any other preoccupation than that of doing good."

But M. da Camp, who writes in the Revue des Deux A fbeethinkbb Mondes of April 1, takes for the special subject of ON his article the Little Sisters of the Poor, their origin, . the religious and their work in Paris,— and while he deals with OBDKBS. his subject in the masterly way that is habitual with him, adding fresh interest by the charm of his style to 'matters that are already of intense interest, he does no spare the enemies of religion whom he also proclaims to be the enemies of the poor. " How," he asks, " have they not understood that in arraying themselves against the conventual life it was above all against the poor they were doing harm ? During the Commune, when a religious house was closed — when the congregation was conducted to Mazas, the next day were seen bands of old men, of the crippled, of the hungry, who lamented before the sealed doors, and said : Who will give us bread now ? The Commune offered them a glass of absinthe and a can of petroleum— this was all that its charity had at heart." And yet let us note that it was also of the universal brotherhood. — Its country was the world, its brethren mankind 1 And , again, M. dv Camp tells us that the lay nurses for whom the Sisters of Mercy have been obliged to make room in the hospitals, are to his personal knowledge chiefly notable for the capacity of their pockets to contain the spirit flask. His summing up of the conventual life is as follows :—": — " To forget yourself in order to think only of others, to find in the action itself the reward of the action, to ask nothing of men, to give them all, and for the rest to trust in Providence ; to live in poverty, to shrink before no suffering in order to assuage that of others ; to take care of the unhappy for the purpose of being useful to them, and not that they may be grateful for it ; to push self-denial to the contempt for social usages, is to make an act of abstract virtue, and it is perhaps, after all, the means of finding happiness here below." But let us take a quotation that is more in detail, and which contains a full example of the spirit in which the writer has executed his task. " Mystical souls," he writes, " carried away by a superhuman love escape from the world, shut themselves up in a cell, and by force of adoration, arrive at ecstasy, and almost at the contemplation of tne God to whom they burn to unite themselves ; their joy, |is ineffable. They have quitted the earth, whose miseries become invisible to them ; they soar among the depths of space, and seem lost in a Divine ether where the pleasures of the spirit bloom. These are happy, and have here below attained to a sort of immateriality 1 that no suffering can destroy ,'and which is no longer touched by the realities of existence. It is not the same with charitable beings who, renouncing with their free will what life contains or promises, seek out decay, sickness, misfortune, in order to bring it aid. Far from

flying from human miseries, the go into the thick of them with ardour, drawing back before no nauseousness, so that they may the .better assuage them. In the man they only enquire for the one who is sick in the sick they only seek out the incurable, and live in contact with the off-scouring of all ills, of all incapacities, of all infirmities. What sentiment urges them to incessant labour in the hospitals, to the adoption of the abandoned, to that inexhaustible maternity whose devotion never wearies, and which appears to regain strength even by its exercise ? The desire of pleasing God by loving the neighbour—the need of spiritualising life in sacrificing it to the misfortunes of others.— This is an admirable spectable, and I admire it. Those (he continues) who sacrifice themselves to these works of which antiquity knew nothing belong, or join themselves, to religious congregations — habit of coarse cloth or of serge, shaved bead or white hood. — The work of charity does not interrupt the work of prayer. They pray for those they save, — they pray for him who curses, and for him who persecutes. In the human being they see physical infirmity and moral infirmity ; they seek to heal both of them. Their name ? They no longer have one ; they are called Brother Joseph or Sister Madeleine, charity has closed in upon them and shut them out from the world, where they only return to seek the unfortunate to succonr, or wherewithal to succour them. Self-denial, fatigue, repugnant cares at home ; abroad the insults of blackguards ; all around a wind of Atheism which blows anil threatens to destroy the refuges, and to beat down the asylums. Whence come these heroes of charity? From everywhere from tLe town and the country ; among the men I see priests, soldiers peasants, lawyers, professors ; in the middle of the women I reckon t servants, workwomen, girls of the lower middle-class, girls of the nobility, who retain, perhaps, the memories of profane festivities where they shone before they applied lotion to the cancerons wound, or washed the linen of the filthy. There is more than one whom I could name— Sister Mary, 1 recognise you ; when the superioress pronounced my name before you, you trembled, and your head was lowered as if it would have wished to disappear under the wings of your starched cap. Your maternal grandfather, the general, was my near relative ; when I was a child I have often played with your mother, for we were about the same age. I saw you when you were little, I saw you when a young girl ; do you remember that one evening you sang to me Schubert's " Adieu " ? Your brother is a count, and goes his way through life. Existence had many seductions for you. When you were grown up, you were told,' It is time for you to^e married.' You replied, ' I will be the mystical spouse of Him who is, and 1 will take care of His poor.' You put on the heavy habit. You cut your fair locks— are they grown grey? I was not able to see them — and you became the mother of those who groan. The paleness of the cloister is on your face, which has lost nothing of its childish placidity ; your delicate hand which had such pretty almond-shaped nails has grown hard, is coarse with turning up paillasses, with dressing ulcers, and telling the ebony beads. The unhappy contemplate you with tenderness when you pass by in the dormitory, speaking a kind word to them. One fact which I remarked surprised me. When you were young, at home with your mother, in a house which looked out on a large garden, you were sad and dreamy, as if you had borne the weariness of over-long days ; when I met yott, after more than twenty years, in your infirmary, you seemed to me sprightly, cheerful, ready to laugh, and trying to make your sick people gay. Is serenity, then, fonnd there where you are ? Sister Mary, my cousin and my sister, these lines will never fall under your eyes,— which permits me to say to you : Yon are a saint 1 "

There has been a meeting held in Dunedin for the LAJJD purpose of promoting the interests of the nationanationa- lisation of the land, and as it frequently happens libation, to us with regard to meetings that are held under a similar patronage we have gained a little new and interesting information ; we have, for example, learned that although land is limited in quantity and cannot possibly be increased, " the production of grain and wool can be indefinitely increased." — Can the limited supply of land, then, grow unlimited corn and feed unlimited sheep ? — Can the infinite come forth from the finite ? — or can we grow our crops upon the briny deep, and pasture our flocks among the fleecy clouds ? — For, although we are in duty bound to hesitate before we express any doubt in the utterances of profound wisdom, still, without hesitation we may inquire, how can these things be. How can we have an unlimited supply of corn and wool without an unlimited supply of land, or, if we can so have it, is it worth while any longer to squabble as to the ownership of the laud ? But, we learn, otherwise indeed that this nationalisation of the land is no new proposal, that it is much less new in the actual trial of it, and its complete failure where it has been tried. Some half century ago, it seems, according to a correspondent of our contemporary, the New York Freeman's Jownal, a Spanish author, named Florez Estrada, wrote a work entitled " A Course of Political Economy," and whose

object was to prove that the land, like the air and water, was to be held'in common. His theories, in fact, were identical with those that Mr. Henry George has reproduced, and which are now creating so great a stir. The correspondent of our contemporary, however, contends that Mr. George, like Senor Estrada, is wrong in asserting that property in land is different in kind from property in other things, it being acquired by means of appropriation, while property in things depends upon their production. There are, he says, two kinds of land — barren and pestiferous land, and fruitful land, and the first is to the second as the stones of a building ate to a habitable house. If building a house gives a man a right to it, then the reclamaticn of the bad land makes it the property of him who reclaims it, and the worse the land has been the better his title becomes.— But, had the early settlers in America, and no doubt elsewhere, been told that the land would not be their own, they would hardly hare laboured as they did, and often at the risk of their lives, to make it fit for cultivation. — And as to Mr. Herbert Spencer's theory that, if property in land be allowed those who are not landholders may be 'equitably expelled from the earth altogether," we may say in passing, it is a wildly extreme proposition. Besides, murder can never be equitable, and such wholesale murder it would be impossible to legalise. But, however the world goes, all men cannot live directly by the land, and there can be no cause why those who do so should not, within due bounds, . have such a title of ownership as will secure them and their children rights that need not entrench upon those of their neighbours. There can be no reason, moreover, why they should not profit byr %oy accidental circumstance that may add to the value of their land, any more than there can be to prevent the tradesman to take advantage of some exceptional circumstance that gives to his trade an impetus he has not earned, and helps him to make a fortune that, by means of his handicraft or business capacities alone, he could never have gained. And again, the improvements that raise the price of land are of value not to the landholder only, but to the community at large. If, for example, roads make the farm more valuable, they also make the markets more easy, facilitate the commerce of the country, and increase its trade. It is not the farmer only who profits by the exportation of corn, meat, or wool. But as for the examples of land nationalisation that we have at present to judge by, one was laid before us the other day by a writer in the Contemporary Review, who gave us some particulars concerning the condition of India, and how it fares under British rule. The Government tenant there, this writer tells us, is visited by the commissioner when a need arises for an increase in taxation, and he is informed that henceforth he must pay a higher rent. Some road will probably be made, says the commissioner, who evidently holds the doctrine of the unearned increment, or there is a scheme of irrigation in view, or something will presently be done to enhance the value of the land, and the tenant must pay for it in advance. The people accordingly pay and starve. Again, says the New York Freeman's Journal, " the advantages of land nationalisation have left the Egyptian fellaheen at the mercy of aliens who can force the puppet Khedive to rack-rent the wretched natives as thoroughly as Irish tenants have been rack-rented." The most striking example, however, we find is that given by the correspondent to whom we have alluded, in that of China. "In that country," he says, " the emperor is the universal and exclusive pro* prietor of the soil. He is not only the landlord ; he is the first ploughman in a population of four hundred millions. Instead of paying rent to private individuals the occupants of farms pay a landtax to the emperor. It consists partly of produce and partly of money, and amounts to one-tenth of the produce or profit after deducting the expenses of cultivation. Lands are carefully registered by the Government and their fertility estimated. Great precautions are used that neither the occupant be over-charged nor the Government defrauded, and when districts suffer from drought or inundation, the emperor generally remits the rent. In a word, the Chinese have anticipated Henry George by at least three thousand years. They proclaimed without limitation that ' the land of natural right is the common property of the whole people." But the condition of the Chinese labouring classes and tradesmen is miserable, and we are told that the poverty there exceeds that of the most beggarly nations in Europe. There is nothing new, then, under the sun, and we greatly fear that under the sun as well, there is no system that will produce a general state of complete perfection. — The nationalisation of the land will certainly not d 6 so.

The letters of Mrs. Carlyle lately published^ ye to A the world a further insight into the native of the philosopher, philosopher who was her husband., — and show us still more clearly the sort of maa who is to be formed and matured by a sympathetic study of Oliver Cromwell and John Enox, and a favouring view of all tyrants and bullies generally. — A strong and unyielding philosophy we find can exist in a weak mind, and be accompanied by a habitnal self-indnlgence. A force of literary pathos we learn, moreover, may exist in company with an entire want of feeling, and it is wholesome for us to be warned

that we must take even the most rnchantingly- written sentiments and opinions for what they are worth, and be in no instance misled by the glamour of a great name. Carlyle, the great writer, the exalted philosopher, was, in fact, a very small man, and his humanity was of the base°t.— Bat something more than letters and even than geniud is needed to make a man truly noble, and Carlyle had nothing else. We take our information, then, from a review of the publication to which we have referred in the London Times. Of CarlyVs wife, the reviewer writes : " She married him to serve him and to smooth his path ; she looked to be paid with love and gratitude, and with the confidences due to the most devoted of life-companions. It was her ambition to be his helpmate in immortal work and to be repaid for her cares wtth unreserved confidence. We are not uncharitable enough to say that she was altogether disappointed. Her husband did love her after a fashion of his own ; and he appreciated her within the measure of a most miserable nature. The fact that he prepared this correspondence for publication, perhaps goes further than anything else to extenuate his conduct. For it shows either that he offended grossly in ignorance ; or that, having much to regret when repentance was too late, he sought to atone his faults by - the frankest admission of them. The brief notes with which he illustrates many of the letters abound in remorseful ejaculations which cannot fail to touch us." Bnt this very remorse was, most probably, a sign of weakness and the proof of a wilful offending.— The writer remarks, too, that Carlyle was a man who prided himself upon reading character at a glance. " If," he adds, "he was blind to the pitfiul tragedy being slowly enacted under his roof, it was only because he was wilfully determined not to see." — The advice, therefore, given by this man to England that she should treat Ireland as an elephant would treat a rat, and " squelch it, by Heaven ? " came consistently from one who was himself engaged in squelching the heart of the friend who in all the world had been most devoted and most useful to him.— For Mrs. Carlyle had faithfully fulfilled her resolution in marrying him and had helped him nobly in working out his career to its success. But he left to her all the drudgery of life ; she denied herself necessaries and pinched herself while he was abroad on holiday expeditions — " from Berlin in Germany to Thurso in Scotland." Every annoyance at home was borne by hh r alone, and to spare him all the trouble— and, although there was no one who could understand him better than Bhe who had discerned his genius before it had been made known to other people, he neglected her to enjoy high-born company, and especially that of Lady Ashburton, to whom his powers of mind recommended him and whose appreciation he especially valued. Miss Jewsbury thus sums up what his wife had to endure from him :—": — " He gave her no human help nor tenderness. Bear in mind that her inmost life was solitary —no tenderness, no caresses, no loving words, nothing out of which one's heart can make the wine of life. A glacier on a mountain would have been as human a companionship. Ho suffered too, but he put it all into his work. She had only the desolation and barrenness of having all her love and her life laid waste." But at this time when the workingman is spoken of somewhat as needing only education to shine forth as a hero, and regenerate the world, it is of some use to see in his true light this man who had sprung from the working classes, and climbed to the highest eminence to which education could conduct him.— He was, after all, bnt an idol of a very common clay thateducation and genius together had superficially gilded.— The clay evidently needs something besides to temper it — and genius in most cases will, moreover, be wanting.

As a commentary on the repoit that Italy is about A hkbo's to erect a national monument to the memory of traces. Garibaldi, and as one also on the fact that the anniversary of the hero was celebrated a day or two ago at Wellington by people amongst whom, doubtless, there predominated that Anglo-Saxon element that is so devoted to patriotism at a distance, bitterly hating it near at hand, and as enthusiastic for the freedom of all the outside world as it is for the slavery of every country in whose slavery it esteems English interests to be implicated, we find an article translated by a contemporary fiom the JPopolo Romano, a Turin paper of April 7th :— " Misery, says this newspaper, " such as in Italy was never before heard of, makes those who suffer from it sigh for times gone by and curse that liberty which has alone known how to bring them greater sorrow, after having inspired them with a desire to live better, instead of which they are dying of hunger. It is a crying shame to the supporters of United Italy to permit for one moment an appeal to the past. What ! are the detested, the execrated Bourbons preferable to the House of Savoy 1 How is it that whilst under their infamous government it was unknown what democracy, equality, and fraternity amongst a people meant, to-day, while the torch of liberty inspires so many noble words, and has daszled us with the most splendid propositions, when the cry is heard from pole to pole " We are all brothers," and there cannot but be reconciliation between capital and labour, between rich and poor, nothing but harmony among all ranks of society, between governments and the governed— at this very time we have suicides

through misery, and daily chronicles of the most desolating character. If the working classes in the great cities pass life tolerably well, outside of them, in the rural districts, the bare necessaries of life are wanting. Everywhere we find the struggle for life, which is cut short by the pellagra, want of food and of wholesome dwellings. When co-operative and other societies could in part relieve this distress by procuring better food, unadulterated, not falsified, even this beneficent concession is contested by personsiwho can dream of nothing but lucre and money, and who would want more from the pockets of thoße who already contribute so much." But is it not the fitting outcome of buccaneering and diplomacy, of violence, robbery, and lying, and the unholy alliance between Cavour and the hero whom now they celebrate — between the deceitful, lying, head, and the hands ready to fulfil all its orders 1 At Begio, continues this paper, the unfortunate population have no hope of being able to obtain wherewith to keep them alive ; at Mogliano work is deficient, and, if it were not so, how could a family live on from 6d. to 7d. a day ? The peasants of the district are living on the grass from the fields and on bran. " The owner takes everything from the tenant — grain, wine, fruit, cakes, and every product. Even the very wood- belongs to him, and he puts on a fine of twenty francs if a tree happens to die. 1 ' And yet, again, the VUlagio gives us a picture of this land of liberty — of the freedom begotten of the buccaneering sanctioned the other day by the English Quarterly Review, as to ithe means to a good end and lawful because it was so— and behold the end 1—" On the other side we hare the inundations, the destruction of the woods, the pellagra, and emigration unguided, decaying dwellings, sanitary regulations neglected, and the little communes sacrificed, the agricultural schools without pupils, 50 to 80 per cent, of the population unable to read, the strikes of the agricultural labourers, the small pro* prietcrs in penury, the large ones nobly neglectful, production scarce and the land uncultivated, capital in enmity, usury flourishing, and debts ever increasing, the financial system confused, taxation absurd, immoderate, and unjust, the producers not listened to whilst the State robs them, foreign competition menacing, and the economists at variance, markets low, and general industry all. but annihilated. ..... The Italian peasant leaves his country because he is ignorant and miserable — because his labour, endless and hard though, it be, does not bring him sufficient payment to nourish himself and family — because in despair, while he sees around him riches which his own work has helped to make, he has not enough to construct a cabin a little belter than a sty, to save him from hunger and the pellagra, and so he looks to other countries, feeling persuaded that worse off he could not possibly be. He leaves his country because he sees two yards off immense tracts of land uncultivated, which he is not allowed to cultivate, though to do so would keep him from starvation. He leaves his country because taxes drive him out of bis miserable cabin, and there seems no hope of reducing them in the smallest degree ; because the tax on salt condemns him to eat meals so unhealthy that they are sufficient to drive him into melancholy madness, the hospital, or to suicide. Are we not right, then, without being pessimists, when we say it is time to provide against all this, and that quickly, before the people, to save themselves from famine, resort to violence." What, then, shall the national monument be that Italy erects to the memory of her great deliverer ?— A tower of skulls, for example, like those with which Timour is said to have commemorated his victories, for verily the materials should not be wanting, or difficult to collect. — They strew the ground in Garibaldi's wake also. — But let it be another bond of sympathy, uniting the memory of Garibaldi with the freedom-loving Anglo-Saxon element, that England has long inflicted upon Ireland what the buccaneering hero prepared the way for in Italy — famine and pestilence, and banishment. Verily there is a double fitness in the association of the black banner of the pirate with the Union Jack, and we would suggest to all our Garibaldi clubs that these flags should brave the breeze side by side at every celebration of the hero's memory.

As a specimen of the governing Briton abroad we A CHA.BMING may, in all pprobabilityy y take one "J. 8.," who writes epistle. to an Anglo-Indian paper, and whose letter may well incline us to receive as true the hardship and oppression of the natives lately reported to the Contemporary Review by an English officer. It is not, however, with India that this letter deals, but with Ireland ; its contents, nevertheless, show us what the people in subjection under a man of such a disposition, and of those like-minded with him, must necessarily suffer. This writer, then, is naturally very pious, and his study has been of the unaided Word, which has taught him that the Irish Celts are descended from those " Phoenicians, Canaanites, etc., who escaped from the hands of Joshua and the Israelites through the unfaithfulness and disobedience of the latter." The result had been foretold by God, and is now manifest to man in the state of Ireland. The writer does not quite venture to propose that England, on whom the mantle of Joshua and the Israelites has fallen, should bow atone for this criminal neglect by a general slaughter of the Irish people, but short of that he would have every-

thing done to make up for the error of the ancient days. " The race is not fit for freedom, as in an article of yours the other day was well said," he adds, and from this we learn that the editor is of one mind with his correspondent. The correspondent's plan is, then, that the franchise shall be taken away from Leinster, Munster, and Connaught, that from Mr. Parnell down every one connected with the Irish party shall be placed like ticket-of-leave men under police surveillance, and for ever disqualified from taking part in an election to Parliament or any municipality. •' The municipal charters should be taken from Dublin and all the disfranchised towns, and they should each be placed uuder the rule of a military officer with a sufficient armed force. He should have power to shoot down anyone offering armed resistance, or stone-throwing, night-prowling with sticks or other weapons, or who refuses to obey an order to disperse at any time. The farce of summoning any of that race as jurymen should be finally abolished, and full power placed in the hands of the presiding judge, who could be assisted, but not overruled, by assessors from the grand jury lists. These should be invariably composed of men of Norman, Saxon, or Welsh descent, who have settled in Ireland from time to time." Our correspondent evidently does not know that Carey, for example, is of Welsh or Devonshire descent, or, perhaps, he does know it, and thinks that Irish juries composed of Careys would be the most convenient, as indeed they would occasionally. But to return to his noble epistle : " The province of Ulster could ■^Pfe exempted from the new regulations. But whether in Ulster or in j England the police should have power to arrest anyone suspected to have been a member of any of the Leagues, and to search their houses. They should, if they choose to live in the British Islands, get permisiion, on pain of imprisonment with hard labour, for every change of residence. Besides the governors of towns, the other three provinces •hould be parcelled out into military commands, and a military officer should rule over the whole from Dublin Castle. These arrangements should be final, and those so-called Celts who did not like them could leave the country. Power should rest in the Lord Lieutenant to deport any man from any part of Ireland. The governor' of such a prison as Kilmainham, and indeed all the military magistrates, should have power to flog a man guilty of the violence reported of that model town councillor Mr. Carey. Fifty or a hundred lashes each time would soon put an end to such exploits, which are only ventured on because the perpetrators are confident that their skins are safe." And these are the sentiments that an enlightened Englishman of the day is not ashamed to give to the world, and that %n enlightened English editor, one employed in spreading English civilisation among the Asiatics, is not ashamed to publish in his newspaper. But with such officials as this presiding over the people of India can we wonder at the atrocities of the mutiny ? — like begets like, and brutality breeds atrocity. Can we wonder if all India is disaffected and looking forward to education to bind it together into one firm and successful resistance to the foreign rule. And, again, if this letter is to be taken as a sample of the minds of any considerable portion of the English people, and that it is, our belief is confirmed by the utterance of certain editors among ourselves, as well as by those of a section of the English Press, the times look threatening for the Empire. For an empire falls by the corruption of its people, and what baser corruption can there be than this murderous hatred — this furious, unreasoning tyranny ? But how like hypocrisy it looks to find Englishmen celebrating the anniversary of a reputed hero of liberty abroad, while Englishmen also are advocating the methods of extreme brutality against those who are laying claim to their free* dom at Home.