The Press. — London, England, 1858-12-25 00:00:00

~~~~~. IPA ,Ø 2 liL No. 295.—V0L. VI. LONDON, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 25, 1858. Icf,As.larA,Vilin:SAPEEp7la. lt VrtAs. LONDON, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 25, 1658. Heaven gives our years of fading strength Indemnifying fleetness; And those of youth a seeming length, Proportioned to their sweetness. Next to the sanctuary, home rises up amid the light and shadows of Christmas as the most beautiful and blessed association. The French have no word for our English home ; and many of that interesting nation have nothing corre sponding to the thing. " Home," says a French traveller, "is the centre of the entire existence "of the English. It is the stronghold of their "fortune, their family, and their liberty." Home at Christmas time is the reunion and gathering together of the far-spreading branches that to gether form the Christmas tree. It is the spring of those living streams that freshen the waste places alike of the individual heart and the col lective community. It forms the retreat of troubled hearts, the scene of forgiven and for gotten wrongs—the quiet and sheltered bay into which the surf and spray of this world's contro versies and perplexities are not suffered to roll. It is the Englishman's refuge. Touching this holiest spot of mother earth, he renews his strength and rekindles at its hearth cold hopes and joys that help him manfully to enter on the arena and fight nobly, if not always with success, life's hard battles. Yrom the very heart we wish our readers a merry Christmas. May its sun rise on many glad households, and set on none that are not wiser and better and happier for Christmas-day. May it be in many a manly soul the Lethe of all that is painful, and the pledge and earnest and prophecy of that blessed home whose hearth-stone shall never grow cold, and the roof-tree of which shall never be shaken down. TRANSATLANTIC REVELATIONS. A CAT IS a very pleasant and amiable plaything when she purrs and makes a velvet paw ; but it is well for him who disregards the motto of the Clan Chattan, and touches her without the glove, to remember that sheathed within that velvet paw are strong and sharp claws that too much excite ment ever has a tendency to develop in a very disagreeable manner. This feline recollection is irresistibly brought to our mind by the tone and the substance of the Message of the President of the United States. The tone is purring, and the paw is velvet; but it is not difficult to see that it would not take very much to turn the purr into a growl, and that there is behind, covered with that soft fur which makes the foot fall so inaudible, a set of very sharp claws, which the owner will be in no wise scrupulous about using. At any rate, Spain seems in a fair way of at no distant day trying the experiment. Do what she may, say what she will, Spain . gives, under all circumstances, and in every conceivable position, as many and as just causes of offence as the lamb did to the wolf in the fable. Spain es Cuba, and Cuba, we are assured by possesses Cuba, " is in its present colonial con " dition a constant source of injury and an " noyance to the American people." It encou rages slavery ; and, " from its geographical " position, Cuba commands the mouth of the " Mississippi, and its immense and annually in " creasing trade, foreign and coastwise, from the " valley of that noble river, embracing half the " sovereign States of the Union. With that " island under the dominion of a distant foreign " Power, this trade, of vital importance to the " States, is exposed to the danger of being " destroyed in time of war, and it has hitherto " been subjected to perpetual injury and annoyance in time of peace." Under all these circumstances, Mr. BtxuANAH looks at rich and impeding Cuba in pretty much the same frame of mind that a bear does at a honeycomb; and if the Spaniard won't throw it down to him, it is tolerably clear that Mr. BUCHANAN means to go up the tree after it. "Its value to Spain is comparatively unimportant." There is a theory that events always reproduce themselves, and we do remem ber that there was a Sovereign under the Jewish Dispensation who reasoned and acted very like the President of the United States. There was a NABOTH who had a Cuba for which an AHAB S soul was sick. AHAB wanted to buy ; NABOTH refused to sell; and AHAB thereupon took the same course that the bear does with the honeycomb, that Mr. BUCHANAN contemplates doing with this injurious but desirable colonial possession of the distant foreign Power. Cer tainly somebody will have to find a pair of gloves for poor Spain, and America will not do amiss to remember the sequel of AHAB'S killing and taking possession. We suppose it is inevitable that a strong, vi gorous, and ambitious people, with weak, divided, corrupt, and idle neighbours all round them, should by degrees absorb them, as AARON'S rod swallowed up all the others. It was by alterna tions of annexation and conquest that the little knot of our own commercial adventurers in India ex panded into the dimensions of the possessors of an empire; but, in their case, aggression was, in truth, the only mode of self-defence, and, in the instance of Great Britain herself, her territorial increase has been the result of a prolific and enterprising race expanding within a limited mother country in a manner beyond their own control. It is otherwise with America. She has already in possession thousands upon thou sands of acres of unsettled and uncultivated land, and she cannot complain that her population have want of elbow room. It is the pure lust of territory which Mr. BRIGHT says is only to be found in monarchs and aristocrats that spurs America on to war and conquests, and it is the blood of the old Norse pirates that runs in Mr. BUCHANANS viens, as it does in ours, which is sending him up the tree after the Cuban honeycomb. We confess we do not feel quite so comfortable as some of our contemporaries at the policy which all this exhibits, and the tendencies which it reveals. The language is moderate, but under its moderation the purposes it barely veils are wild, unjustifiable, and predatory. There is hardly a single piece of advice in the large pro portion of •he Message devoted to foreign rela tions that does not contain in it the seed of some future international quarrel, a greediness of gain that is Message altogether, indeed, mind of the Suliote's song begins : dives Tainhourici, .411Clives hopes to the valiant The paragraphs about Isthmus of Central America satisfactory, and are full future difficulties. Mr. care for such co”-' ' [WITH A S 1 GRATIS. 4, and does not betray quite alarming. li p lio [dints us Ve' i I , ..... about his dr .. • •,, . -..4 e f i x 4 AO , thy larum afa ' . cf) Lit and promise .. _ii ,• ) s the transit •... ''' f r ' • bp. rica are sea '4 - ull of pr • .i' "1 1 7,4r: 4 ;i4 : ti: BUCUAN ' . - "fik - i ffr itions, we dare CHRISTMAS EVE. THERE are spots on earth still radiant with a glory that will not fade. These are the Peniels and the Meccas of mankind. Days, also, there are on which, as they turn up, falls a sunshine that clears away cares and wrinkles from many a brow, and warms with the festal fire of Heaven many a cold heart. Christmas-day is one of these—the homeliest, the holiest, and the most welcome. It is a break in Time's troubled sky— a summer in many a soul where all is winter outside—an interval of rest or refreshment amid the toils and travail and heavy burdens of this world of ours. Its return reminds those who, like ourselves, are absorbed in the literary and political discus sions of the day, that there arc times when passion should be laid and controversies healed, and the excitement and the incidental hasty word should all be forgotten and forgiven beside the manger in which the SAVIOUR lay, and amid the music which the angels sung. At such a season it becomes us to leave for a little the low levels of this life's interests, and to ascend in aspiration, if not in fact, to that sunny tableland which neither the clouds nor the tides of Time can touch. Breathing thus a purer atmosphere, we can look down and see more accurately how transient arc the things that most occupy our thoughts, and how weighty and lasting are the themes and thoughts and events which Christmas-day brings within our horizon. There will be to-morrow many sweet, and some very sad, home-scenes, in which merry Christmas feelings will be tempered by sorrowful reminis cences. Faces so happy that the door opened almost of its own accord to admit them have passed away into the shadow of death ; voices that used to sound so musical are hushed in the silence of the grave; forms once so welcome and familiar have fled like shadows from the dial plate of Time ; footfalls that used to start a thousand welcomes will no more echo in the de serted hall, and the chair that is a family history and heirloom is no more occupied. These recol lections will solemnize what other thoughts will sweeten. Changes of another kind will also appear on the pages of memory in the light of a Christmas fire. I'overty, long in pursuit, has at length come up with some. Youth has ripened into manhood, and brows once smooth are covered with grooves and wrinkles, like the brown sea sand from which the tide of life is ebbing. It is on such occasions that the words of the poet CAMPBELL occur to us, and give just expression to human experience : The more we live, more brief appear Our life's succeeding stages; A day to childhood seems a year, And years like passing ages. When joys have lost their bloom and breath, And life itself is vapid, Why, as we reach the falls of death, Feel we its tide more rapid ? ~, ~~~~ lit I)rtls. I