The Express.
London, England, 1867-12-10 00:00:00

THE EXPRESS, TUESDAY EVENING, DECEMBER 10, 1867.

OVERCOATS for the PRESENT SEASON. 1 mg. At Shoreditch, Whitechapel, Hackney, the
Gentlemen who do not mind App a fair price for first-
class WINTER OVEROOATS can on the best materials name features are presented. In the east of
at HAMILTON and K London, north of the Thames, twelve thousand
Tailors and Overcoatmakars,
105, STRAND, OPPOSITE EXETER-HALL men, representing not fewer than fifty thousand
persons, were a fortnight ago out of employment,
and, with those dependent on them, starving. The
increased severity of the past few days cannot but
have increased the number of sufferer, and the
severity of their distress. The Poor-law system
is quite unequal to grapple with this mass of
misery, even if the destitution did not include
working men and artisans who, to quote the
words of the East London Relief Committee, would
rather perish than apply for parish assistance. We
need not demonstrate that ready and speedy
benevolence is the truest economy and utilitarian-
ism. Every day that passes over the heads of a
half-starving family sews widely and deeply
the seeds of disease. Forced recourse to the
overseer may weaken the applicant's self-respect.
These hard humiliations and sufferings give strength
both to the moral and to the physical causes of
pauperism. The country, and every district
of the country, has—to put the matter on
the ground which, as being the lowest,
is therefore common to all—a direct pecuniary
interest in the health and virtue of its members,
and in combating without delay all hostile in-
fluences. The various organizations which exist
in the East of London afford channels in which a
wise benevolence may direct itself. Without
stinting in the help it offers to foreign and distant
sufferers, it will not be deaf to the cries, or the
more speaking silence, of a bitterer distress at its
very doors.

BREAKFAST.-IPPS'S COCOA.

Elie •xprefifs.

TO CORRESPONDENT.
advertisements Intended foe " The imam," London Evening
Piper, must be et the Moe, 10, &amide-street, by Two
1 on the der of permeation

DRURY-LANE.

Tuts E•vinnyo, THE IIIIIIK OY VB.Y ICE. Mr. Phelps, Hamra
7. C. Cowper, H. Sinclair, Y. Phelps, Barrett, Temple, tc. , Hrs.
Hermann Veil's. Mir Grattan. ite.—And THE LADIES' CLUB.
Ilesdames lieatrie Shirley, Kate Harfleur, 1L Vandenhoff,

HAYMARKET.

Evunra, OUR iiIIIERAN Beam Sothern,
Raym.iid, liordon. Rogers, tc. ; Maulamas titlypeodale. Burke,
Wright, Robertien, te.—TO PARIS AND BACK FOR PA. Mr.
Buckstoue.—And THE ,PECTRE BRIDEGROOM. Mr. Raymond.

Pll.l!_iCESB.3_

TUTS Munro, A LITTLE RIBTiTTON.—After which THE
COLLEEN, DAWN. MOWS. Bout:fault, D. Murray, B. Atkins, 0.
Neville. J. O. Shore, Mellon, ttc.; Mrs. houcleault, & Mims
Barnett and Eleworthy.—Aint NO. ONE BOUND THE COMM.

LYCEUM.

THI9 EValtraCE PL&IIC h .Mho Mand Shelley.—And
MOM ASD JULIET. Messrs. W. Lacy and Ryder; MD.
Voarall, Mrs. Marston, and Miss Milly Palmer.

lITZAND.

---
TM amnia, NOTRINO TO NURSE. Mr. Thorne end Miss
Ne DTO A FAULT. Messrs. Puerile. Icellord, and
James Mesdames Johnstone, Gwynne, and llughes.—And
WILLLIII TELL. WIT!! • VENOZAIfeIt.

HpLBORN.

THIN Vienna, FOR LOVM. Mears. H. J. Montagne, Price,
Garden, Westland, and U. Widdicomb; Mesdames Stephens,
Hennas, C. saunders, &c.—And MARY TeitNE.E.; Oit,
WICIOCS WILLIS. Mies Jamephs.

zaz7grina,.

Tins Mania, VIZ KING'S DEATH-TRAP. Miura Key.
mak* ; Mrs. S. laae.—Ma Mark Ployd Yr. sad liza
Langan tt Mr J. Maticeni—CAPTALY GERALD. ileum Howe,
Charitou, Sc , Madames Coartamay, laxah, *c.

OUR CONTEMPORARIES.
(THIS DAY.)

HIGII WATIM AT V LOTDO ARIDOIL
_ . ... • •

TEN DA t —Malang, O. :14m.._.....kfternonn, Ob. 67m.
tollolMOW—llornlng. lb. 21.m.......After0005, lb. 44m.

LONDON, TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10.

THE winter is upon us, hard and fierce. The
mason which simply diversifies the amusements
of the well-to-do classes, substituting ono sort of
out-of-door sport for another, or fire-aide enjoy.
meats for those of the open air, takes a
very different character among the lowest grades
of the poor. By them its yearly return is feared
like the periodic invasion of an enemy. Their
speculations are only whether its tender mercies
will be more or less cruel this time than the last.
A severe season which simply braces the nerves of
the well-fed, well-clothed, and well-sheltered, is
looked forward to by the poor with the dread
with which the inhabitant of a tropical climate
regards the threatened visitations of a pesti-
lence or a hurricane. The vague eulogies of
frost and snow as " seasonable," " natural," and
" healthy," which proceed from portly and well-
wrapped figures and rosy countenances, must sound
like cruel mockeries in the ears of men who have
no defensive armour against the attacks of cold
and want. The statistics of distress in the East
of London, which are familiar to our readers, are
vainly palliated by official optimism or official
blundering. We do not defend sensational
writing : it is vicious enough ; but the sensa-
tions of famine and cold are even more
objectionable. It is difficult, no doubt, for
men clothed and filled to give its full meaning
to the arithmetic of distress and poverty which
Poor-law returns or individual inquiry place
before the public. So many more paupers receiv-
ing relief this year than hat, so many more work-
men out of employment, so many more shops
closed, have to the slow imaginations of the majo-
rity bet a vague and bare meaning. Things must
be clothed in circumstances (to use Lord ELDON'S
phrase), they must be presented with the fulness
of individual detail, in order to make a strong im-
pression. There is no lack just now of represen-
tative cases, which may teach the most thought-
less what distress in London really means. The
case of the unhappy bookseller Dfuwt•x had not
faded from the public memory when its horrors
were eclipsed by the story of the PRITCHARD
family. These instances represent a sort of dis-
tress which the most perfect organization of pub-
lic beneficence or the most searching private
charity could scarcely reach. Poverty in the black
coat, as the French phrase has it—the misery
which remembers better days, and shrinks out of
sight—the lingering self-respect which feels the
agonies of starvation less than the shame of
pauperism, and resolves to keep up appearances
when all else is gone, is the bitterest of all.
Poor PRITCHARD, who began life with three thou-
sand pounds, paid his rent regularly to the last,
affected the title of " esquire," and " made up "
for the part of the gentleman, which lie could
not renounce, with a paper collar, and a piece of
silk torn from an old apron of his wife's
wrapped round his neck to serve as a cravat.
All the while he was dying by inches of absolute
starvation. His wife and children have been
saved at the last gasp from the same fate. He
would not associate with the neighbours, from
whom he carefully hid his distress. Such cases
as these can never, we fear, be made absolutely
impossible. There will always be men beaten in
the battle of life, but too proud to acknowledge
their defeat ; without the active qualities needful
to win their way, but endowed with a stoicism
capable of bearing passively the last and worst ex-
tremities. With some persons in every community,
poverty, it has been said, is not so much an acci-
dent of outward circumstances as a condition of
the organization. It has its origin in a feebleness
of the nerves, a thinness of the blood, a deficient
vitality throughout the whole system, which makes
steady purpose and strenuous exertion physically
impossible. The type of character hereditary in
many of our large towns furnishes, according as it
is associated or not with some sentiment of self-
respect, hapless victims like PRITCHARD, or the tribe
of traders in imposture, begging-letter writers,
and professional mendicants. But the distress
which a severe winter and slack trade produce
among tho labouring poor, by suspending their
employment, is not of this hopeless character. It
exists only for a season, which may be tided over
by judicious measures of public and private as-
sistance. That part of London where suffering is
now most intense was a few years ago the centre
of a thriving industry. In the Poplar district,
and especially in the Isle of Dogs, lately the seat
of an active shipbuilding trade, with ironworks,
and chemical factories, and great industrial esta-
blishments of various kinds, there are, a medical
visitor writes, "hundreds of persons quietly and
" calmly dying by inches." Four thousand per-
sona are at work where sixteen thousand once had
employment. The tradesmen—the butchers,
bakers, grocers, drapers, publicans, who are the
camp followers of the great industrial army—have
shut up their shops and gone. The number of
persons receiving outdoor relief is greatly in
excess of what it was last year ; and the number
of cases on the books of the medical officer is
more than four-fold the average of the past three
years. From many houses every article of furni-
ture has been sold. The people sleep on the
bare boards, with old sacks only for their cover-

. . -
An Italian ministry capable of accepting the Emperor
Napoleon's policy towards Rome must follow, the Daily
News observes, a corresponding polity in domestic affairs ;
but then to do this it must, like Napoleon 111., create anew
class of public men—clever adventurers who would attempt
to govern without the fres public opinion of the country.
The Italian government is acting with great judgment, but
it must be said that the government of France has been
wanting in frankness to its neighbours and allies, for It
had no moral right to ask England, hussia, and Russia to
a conference while it had already embraced, and was de-
termined to carry out, an extreme policy at all hazard/.
M. Rouher's declarations amply vindicate the wisdom of
those governments who have hitherto held aloof from the
Emperor and his conference. The experience of the last
fifteen years has not been without its lemons, and one of
the plainest of these is to have no more to do than is
absolutely necessary with the government of the Second
Empire.

TLe Post also says a declaration that the territorial
sovereignty of the lioly See, as at present defined, shall
be guaranteed for ever—for that is what it comes to—
makes the declarant a partisan. Unless, therefore, that
which has boon said in an exceptionally loud rake admits
of an explanation which the words used certainly fail to
convey, it would appear to have shut the door in the face
of a projected compromise, virtually dismissed the thought
of a conference, and abundantly justified the cautious
policy which Lord Stanley has observed.

the agency of the law, and to punish sedition with a rigour
which shall be merciful in t*, sternness.
The Star wishes to open the eyes of Englialunen to a
plain, hard, painful fact. The late demonstrations in Ire-
land mean that the Irish people would be rebels if they
could, that they are rebels in spirit already, and that they
wish the world to know it. There probably never was at
any period of our connection with Ireland a time when
that country was more widely and deeply disaffected than
it is at present.