The Press.
London, England, 1855-08-04 00:00:00

THE PRESS.

idea is only equalled by the want of taste with which it is
carried out. Fancy a modest girl, having said " Yes," and
sealed the assertion in the solemn services of the Church,
retiring to the bridal chamber of the St. Nicholas I In the
first place, retiring to an hotel would appear to her a con-
tradiction in terms ; but what would be her feelings, when
she found the walls of her apartment furnished with fluted
white silk and satin, and in the centre of the room a matri-
monial couch, hung with white silk curtains, and blazing
with a bright jet of gas from each bed-post.

We must be content with referring our
readers to Captain Murray's judicious remarks
on Canada and Cuba. It was at the latter
place that news reached him of the formation
of the Coalition Ministry, and ho humorously
describes the effect which the intelligence
produced at Havana and on his own mina :--

On my return to the hotel, I found the Press—if the
slavish tcol of a Government can justly be designated by
such a term—full of remarks upon the new British Ministry,
many of which were amusing enough; they showed a cer-
tain knowledge of political parties in England, and laughed
good-humouredly at the bundling together in one faggot of
such differently•seasoned sticks. Even the name of the
Secretary of the Admiralty was honoured by them with a
notice, in which they seemed to look upon him as a wild
democrat. They criticised the great Peet's tail going over
in a body to the enemy's camp and placing themselves at
the head of the troops ; but what puzzled them most was,
how aquellos Grey's tan Almost's por el nepotism° had not
formed part of the Ministry. I confessed they were not
more puzzled than I was to account for the mysterious
combination ; the only solution whereof which presented
itself to my mind, was the supposition that power has the
same influence on public men that lollipops have on the
juvenile population, and that the one and the other are
ready to sacrifice a good deal to obtain possession of the
luscious morsel. However,as we live in an age of miracles,
we may yet see even a rope of sand, mud, and steel-filings,
hold together.

The rope did not hold together long. The
sand and the steel-filings have given way;
nothing but the mud remains.
The miserable police regulations of Wash-
ington would appear to have annoyed our
gallant sea captain almost as much as they
inconvenienced ourselves. Many a time have
we come home from a ball or party on foot,
our cab having been appropriated by some
straggling senator, and have been thankful to
reach our hotel with no greater damage than
soaked boots and broken shins as we have
gone on staggering through the dark night
over heaps of half-thawed snow, and occasion
ally falling upon mounds of building rubbish
from uhich no friendly gas-lamp nor humble
lantern warns the benighted stranger :

The cabmen here, as in every other place 1 ever visited,
made strenuous efforts to d 3 the new comers. They tried
it on me ; so to show them how knowing I was, I quoted
their legitimate fares. " Ah, sir," says Cabby, " that's
very well, but you see, we charges more at times like these."
I replied, " You 've no right to raise your charges ; by what
authority do you do it ?" " Oh, sir, we meet together and
agree what is the proper thing." " But," says I, " the
authorities are the people to settle those things." " The
authorities don't know nothing at all about it; we can
manage our own matters better than they." And they all
stoutly stuck to their own charges, the effect of which was
that I scarcely saw a dozen cabs employed during the ten
days I was there.
Nothing could exceed the crowd in the streets, in the
hotels, and everywhere; the whole atmosphere was alive
with the smoke of the fragrant weed, and all the hotels
were afloat with the juice thereof. The city has repeatedly
been called the City of Magnificent Distancts ; but any-
thing so far behind its fellow-cities cannot well be ima•
gined. It sounds incredible—nevertheless, it is a fact—
that, except from the Capitol to the " White-house," there
is not a street-light of any kind, or a watchman. I lost my
way one evening, and wandered all over the town for two
hours, without seeing light or guardian of any kind.
suppose this is intended as a proof of the honest and
orderly conduct of the inhabitants, but 1 fear it must also
be taken as a proof of their poverty or want of energy.
Whatever the reason may be, it certainly is a reflection on
the liberality of the Government, that the capital of this
great Union should be the worst paved, worst lit, and worst
guarded in the whole Republic.

Few persons who have made any sojourn in
the United States can have failed to notice '
the rhyming notices of deaths inserted in the
newspapers. We remember that the Balti-
more Sun was in our day the journal which
most distinguished itself for its flights of
necrological poetry. We have formed a col-
lection of elegant extracts from its pages, but
few of our excerpts are better than the speci-
men quoted by Captain Murray :
On April 4, of congestion of the brain, F— E—,
son of J— and M— C. D—, aged fourteen months.
His remains were taken to G— for interment yeater•
day.
List' heard you that angel say,
As he waved his little wing,
" Coma, Freddy, come away,
Learn of me a song to sing'?
Captain Murray's views on the subject of
slavery are those of a sound thinker They

741

are the result of wide observation and much
thought, and tourists who have seen slavery
in the south and the nominal freedom of the
negro in the north will be disposed to agree
with them cordially
hope I have impressed my own countrymen with some
idea of the gigantic obstacles that present themselves, of
which I will but recapitulate three :—the enormous pecu-
niary interests involved; the social difficulty arising from
the amount of negro population; and, though last not
least, the perplexing problem—if Washington's opinion,
that " Slavery can only cease by legislative authority," is
received—how Congress can legislate for independent and
sovereign States beyond the limits of the Constitution by
which they are mutually bound to each other. I fret sure
that much of the rabid outcry, the ovation of Mrs. B.
Stowe, and other similar exhibitions, have arisen from an
all but total ignorance of the true facts of the case, and I
unhesitatingly declare that the emancipation of the negroes
throughout the Southern States, if it took place to-morrow,
would be the greatest curse the white man could inflict
upon them. I also trust that I may have shadowed forth
some useful idea, to assist my Southern friends in over-
taking a gangrene which lies at their heart's core, and
which every reflecting mind must see is eating into their
vitals with fearful rapidity. My last and not my least
sincere hope is, that some one among the many suggestions
I have offered for the negro's present benefit way be found
available to mitigate the undoubted sufferings and cruel in-
justice of which those with bad masters must frequently be tt•
victims. Should 1 succeed in even one solitary instance,
I shall feel more than repaid fur the many bouts of thought
and trouble I have spent over the intricate problem—the
best road from slavery to emancipation.
Since writing the foregoing, 20,000,000 freemen, by the
decision of their representatives at Washington, have hung
another negro's shackle on their pole of Liberty (?).
Nebraska is enslaved--freedom is dishonoured. As a
proof how easily those who are brought up under the in-
stitution of slavery blind themselves to the most simple
facts, Mr. Badger, the senator for North Carolina, after
eulogising the treatment of slaves, and enlarging upon the
affection existing between them and their masters, stated
that, if Nebraska was not declared a Slave State, it would
preclude him, should he wish to settle there, from taking
with him his " old msmtny,"—the negro woman who had
nursed him in infancy. Mr. Wade, from Ohio, replied,
" that the senator was labouring under a mistake ; there
was nothing to prevent his taking his beloved mammy with
him, though Nebraska remained free, except it were that
he could not sell her when he got there."

All our author's remarks on the political
institutions of the States deserve attention,
and we particularly commend to the atten-
tion of our Radical friends the following
passages on voting by ballot :
A friend of mine, who took considerable interest in this
question, was present at the elections for the State of
Massachusetts, and when, at the same time, a popular vote
was to he taken on the proposed revision of the Constitu•
tion ; this latter was by special enactment made compel.
sorily secret. How tar this object was attained, the fol-
lowing statement will show. As the voters came ep to
the polling•place, tickets were offered them by the agents
of the opposite parties, in a large room full of people.
The voters selected whichever ticket they preferred, in the
presence of the whole room, and then, in compliance with
the terms of the enactment, they sealed it up in an envelope
before depositing it in the voting-box. So much for com-
pulsory secrecy. Of course on this occasion, as on all
electioneering occasions, the voters might have concealed
their votes had they chosen so to do.
• • • • •

Let us now turn for a moment to that most witty and
amusing writer, Sydney Smith. In speaking of Mr.
Grrote's proposal for the ballot, the author says, " He tells
us that the bold cannot be free, and bids us seek for liberty
by clothing ourselves in the mask of falsehood, and
trampling on the cross of truth" ;—and further on, towards
the end of the pamphlet, he quotes an authority that
Americans must respect—" Old John Randolph, the
American orator, was asked one day, at a dinner party in
London, whether the ballot prevailed in his State of 'Vir-
ginia ? I scarcely believe, he said, 'we have each a
fool in all Virginia as to mention even the vote by ballot
and I do not hesitate to say that the adoption of the ballot;
would make any nation a set of scoundrels if it did not
find them so.'—John Randolph was right ; he felt that it
was not necessary that a people should be false in order to
be free. Universal hypocrisy would be the consequence
of ballot. We should soon say, on deliberation, what
David only asserted in his haste, that' all men are liars' "
—How strangely prophetic the opinion of John Randolph
appears when read by the light of the New York Herald
of 1832.

Again, we would draw special notice to the
appendix to vol. i. on emigration to Canada.
How long those who leave our soil to seek
fortune in a new world will continue to emi-
grate to the United States instead of to
Canada we are not sufficiently skilled in the
philosophy of human folly to surmise If any-
thing will convert them to common sense,
surely this appendix and Captain Murray's •
judicious remarks on Lord Elgin's adminis-
tration of our North American colonies (chap.
3. vol ii.) ought to do so.
In Canada they will find real liberty instead
of the miserable ignis fatuus of freedom which
in the United States leads the luckless emi-
grant to wretchedness and to despair. In

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