The Sun.
London, England, 1864-12-05 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

THE " EXAMINER' ON " Tom BROWN'S" _IMAGI-
NARY APPOINTMPNT.—Of the asserted appoint-
ment of Mr Thomas Hughes as Reviser of Al ilitaly
Regulations at the War-office, with a handsome
salary, in asking whether it could be true, we said
that Mr Hughes was " known as more ready to
acrifico himself iu unpaid work for the good of his
countrymen than likely to accept, in a half sine,-
cure, the profits of a job at the expense of the coun-
try," The rumour has been disposed of by Mr
Hughes himself, in the following letter to our re-
spected
contemporary the Spectator :
Sir,—Tho purveyor of mares' nests for the Tories has
just found a notable one, which was held up in the columns
of the Standard on Monday last as a gross job of the Whigs.
As I am the supposed occupant of the nest in question, I
hope you will allow me space to show that if the present
Government are guilty of no worse jobs than this their hands
are clean enough. The Standard announces that a sinecure
office of Reviser of Military Regulations has been created,
with a salary of Xl,OOO a year,to which I have been appoin'ed.
No such office has been created,and of course no such appoint-
ment made. The present regulations governing the pay and
allowances of the Queen's forces are scattered through six
volumes, out of which officers, soldiers, and all other por-
sons interested, have to pick the law as they best can. Many
of the earlier of these regulations have been wholly or par-
tially repealed by later ones, others are very obscure in their
wording, in short there is the greatest confusion on a sub-
ject which above all others should be as simple and as clear
as poy•sible, as our soldiers are the persons chiefly interested.
The present Secretary of State for War, amongst other ne-
cessary reforms, has resolved on codifying and embodying
in the most inte ligible form in one regulation, all the re •
gulations, memoranda, and circulars now in force as to ply
and allowances. The codification has been begunin the office,
and it has seemed desirable to the authorities there that some
person outside the office, ignorant of its traditions but
familiar with this kind of work, should be employed to
revise, and (in conveyancing language) settle, the new re-
gulation. I happened to be one of several conveyancers
who had been employed by the War-office in advising on
the titles of lands purchased for fortifications under the
Defense Act. The present ' job' (and a very stiff one it is,
though not in the Standard s sense) was offered to and ac.
cepted by me as a mere piece of conveyancing, to be paid
for once for all like any other ordinary legal work, and, as
above stated, no office has been created at £l,OOO a year, or
any other salary. I hope that the army and the public
service may be the gainers by getting shortly one intelli-
gible regulation, embodying the whole and practice on
this most important subject. Should this result be attained.
I shall take it with equanimity if (as the Standard Bug.
gests) the House of Commons should strike out of the
estimates any pay which the authorities at the War-office
may reckon my services worth.--I am your obedient
servant, " T. HUGHES."

"PA—' It never rains tut it pours,' The Telegraph
has just announced that I have been appointed to succeed
Mr M'Culloch as Controller of the Stationery Department.
I tear there is oven less foundation for this report than for
the other."

For whatever is still unsatisfactory in this expla-
nation Mr. Hughes is certainly not responsible, nor
is the present chief of the War-uffice to blame if, at
a cost not worth a thought, he gets a very honest
and competent man to make a struggle for the
establishment of order where he finds disorder, the
result of generations of confusion and low disci-
pline. The War-office is, in fact, a conglomeration
of many separate offices, which date their union
only from the time of the Crimean War. The esta-
blishment, unwieldy from its very constitution, is
like the rough mass of clay in which we see only a
first rude approach to the harmonious form that
same day may be given to it. Mr. Hughes, as far as
his temporary help goes, is pretty much in the
position of the extra horse put on to help the team
in getting the coach out of the deep ruts and up the
hill. It is easy to say that the coach has its own
team already, a team of five, that its leaders are well
fed, that the coach ought never to have stuck in the
mud, and that the hill should have been avoided by
the roadmaker. The driver on the box, who made
neither the ruts nor the hill, is not the man to !Name
for his knowledge of what is necessary to the proper
driving of his stage. No doubt the work that Mr
Hughes is to bring into order is that which an offi-
cer and four civilians have, for years past, been paid
some three thousand a year for doing. The result,
one may say, ought not to be " the greatest confu-
sion." And if it be, what are the fruits of competi.
tive examination, if there is not a clerk in the War
Office, superior or subordinate, competent to give
the gist of a set of office orders in intelligible English
—if it is absolutely necessary to go outside the office
for a man with a clear head for understanding what
is done inside the office ? Or, if the work be legal,
and it is peculiarly the faculty of a lawyer or con.
veyancer to write plain English, the War Office is
said by the Army Estimates to have on its staff, at
the cost of another three thousand a year, a solici-
tor, an assistant solicitor, and four clerks, one of
them a conveyancing clerk. All this one may think
and one may say; but the fact is that there really
was a job to be done, in the most honest sense, and
that a stiff one, for which Mr Hughes has half a
dozen qualifications, including rare ability, keen
sense of duty, and a sturdy relish of hard work.

THE " SPECTATOR" ON MULLER'S LETTER TO
His PARENTS.—We are inclined to think that
Muller's only posthumous work, the epistle to his
parents, which has been published this week, will
do much to fill up the missing links between the
man's character and his act. The letter is in many
respects a curious one, and, read with our know-
ledge of his confession of his crime at the very last
moment of life, one that characterises the writer.
It is reticent and sly—it is clumsily imagined and,
like the rest of Muller's proceedings, rather witless
appeal of the man to the pity and sympathy of his
parents—and the public--conceived on the plan of
abasing himself just so far as to gratify the self-
esteem of others without giving them any substan-
tial handle against him; and it is in this respect
only a continuation of the practice of his life and
the policy he had pursued throughout of conciliats
ing everybody—his fellow-workmen, the passengers
on board the Victoria on his way to New York, the
newspaper correspondents there, the police, the
chaplain, the volunteer dissenting ministers, the
jury, the judge, and all officials of any influence.
Nevertheless this confidential letter to his parents
ends with just one savage and, as it were, irrepres-
sible blow, foolishly conceived and badly delivered,
but violent and sudden, against the witness whose
evidence had led to his detection. " I remain," he
says," your loving son and brother Franz Muller,
who was sold as a slave in Lsndon by John Mat-
thew (the cabman) fur 2,000 thalers" (the reward
offered by the Government and Mr Briggs's family
for the detection of the murderer), an abrupt and
remarkable close to a flowery epistle of very
unreal religious feeling with which he seems to
have been attempting to divert his secret and
embarrassed thought. Muller was apparently a man
of a very profound, but not the commonest kind of
vanity—not the sort of vanity which attaches
an excessive importance to everything affecting
itself, but the sort which divides a man absolutely
in two, giving him a blind side which he scarcely
ever turns towards his own gaze, and a fancy side
in which alone he recognises himself. This too is
generally the amiable kind of vanity, for it is this
kind which, anxious to keep up its own dramatic
fiction, invests in fine sentiments which tend to
support the fiction, and of which it unconsciously
hopes to receive an echo back in the good opinion
of others. But it is very rare to find any vanity
even of this kind strong enough to stand the test to
which Muller put it—that of ignoring and shutting
out of his ow n view with a perfectly startling com-
posure and tenacity the greatest event of a life, and
that a crime of the first order. In alm,ost any other
character vanity, if it survived the strain at all,
would have connected itself with the crime and
come to pique itself thereupon. Not so Muller's.
There can scarcely be another case, we imagine, in
which a man ever contrived to separate so com-
pletely. and so unfortunately for himself Lis crime,
and its gains—to accept the latter so composedly
and with so little uneasiness or painful association
of any kind—and to put the former at a distance
from him as if, having answered its purpose, it was
a part of him no longer. Every account agrees
that on the day after the murder Muller was the
same sober,eomposed,quiet kind of conciliatory per-
son he had always been, without a trace of agitation.
The day after that he wrote his name in the new
hat, and wore the watch, and was showing his friends
his pretended purchases with evident pride and
unconcern. When he got on board the Victoria,
his strongest characteristic, that disposition to con-
ciliate everybody and leave a sort of sentimental
picture of himself in their minds—which was per-
haps to him the only true picture—induced him to
write from the Downs that flowery farewell to his
former friends which helped so materially to track
' him to New York. After his apprehension he
sedulously and successfully endeavoured—not to
clear himself, for he would not sufficiently acknow-
ledge to himself Muller the murderer to make any
serious effort in that direction—but to imbue every
one he came across with his own more sentimental
view of himself. He was gentle to the police, re-
spectful to the gaol authorities, confidential to the
chaplains, trustful to the jury, complimentary to
the Court, penitent and affectionate to his parents,
and ferocious only (by starts) to Mathews. Even
his final confession of the crime, delayed to the very
last moment, almost sounds to our ears like a sort
of concession made to the eternal tribunal under
the sole jurisdiction of which he was just passing,
of its right to condemn, in the hope that in return
he should get his own estimate of himself more or
less admitted in extenuation of the guilt. The
man's sentimental idea of himself was so widely
severed from the unpleasant facts of the murder and
robbery, that we doubt if the real view of himself
as a criminal ever came vividly under his notice.
He confesses imaginary, or, if not imaginary, still
trivial faults, and magnifies them into crimes in
order to blend a sort of candour and humility with
the pathos of his position, and yet at the same time
to satisfy his own feelings by admitting a sort of
abstract criminality. He says to his parents :—" I
now plainly comprehend the sentence which stands
written in the Bible—that whosoever does not

honour his father and mother will b:-; followed by an
early death; but I cnly sen it row when it is too
late. I hope, nevertheless, that you who were so
dear to me will not discard me if the world repulse
eu. For hope ushers us info life, floats around
the happy boy, animates youth with its magic light,
and will not bo buried with the grey headed man,
for if he closes his weary career at the grave, yet at
the grave he plants hope;' and on this account I hope
that you will forgive me with all your hearts." Is
all this, with its flowery quotation, pure hypocrisy,
intended to react upon his judges in England—or
is it the view of himself which he himself enter-
tained on the whole ? We are disposed to think
the latter. Had it been other wise we could scarcely
conceive of Muller viewing the plundered hat acd
watch of his victim with guilty dread, but rather
looking upon them as filling up naturally the
lamentable voids in his personal effects.

THE " SATURDAY REVIEW" ON QUACK DOCTORS.--WO
are not so sanguine as to suppose that the conviction of the
scoundrel Wray, alias Henery, and his associate will put an
end to a trade which is too lucrative to be stopped by a single
accident like this. Its existence is due to our very superfine
morality, awl to an abuse of au excellent principle. We are
a great deal too moral and refined to believe that there
is such a crime as that of which Henery was convicted,
or we affect not to know the details of such cases. We
pretend, too, to think that some great principle would
be violated, that some interference wish some inalien-
able privilege of the British subject to ruin himself in
his own way would be committed, were we to put this sort
of thing down with a high hand. It is nothing, in another
aspect of our public squeamishness, that the blood and life
of the population should be contaminated by infection which
it is within the power of a medical police to check ; because,
if we were to regulate the evil, wo should acknowledge it,
and, acknowledging it, we should legalize it. It is a very
difficult thing to frame a law which shall prevent the rob-
beries committed by quack doctors, because we may per-
haps infringe the liberty of the subject ; we may be reviving
the obsolete privileges of a profession; we may be doing
ten thousand things, and running ten thousand risks,
which, however, if every one of them took place, would not
equal the evil to society of one case such as that of Captain
Clarke. This sort of nonsense was freely talked when it
was proposed to deal with the Holywell-street nuisance, as
it is still talked when any call is made for cleansing the
thoroughfares of London of its pollutions, social, moral, or
material. But the thing can bo done. It is a fact that
Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights, Habeas Corpus and
the Book of Common Prayer, the Englishman's Castle and
all its rights, privileges, and immunities, still survive,
though we have pessed Lord Campbell's Act, and are try-
ing some little interference with the sacred rights of prosti-
tutes at Portsmouth and Aldershot. It is quite worth Sir
George Grey's while—if ho ever indulges in such a diffis
cult operation as thinking—to think whether at least an at-
tempt to put down the tribe of Henerys would provoke a
rebellion. No doubt " the subject is beset with difficulties"
—and as our great and good Home Secretary showed,when
he was asked whether it was possible so to arrange a rail-
way train that communication should exist between pas-
sengers and the guard, we shall be assured that the Home-
office has" had its attention called to an evil for which it
cannot at present furnish a remedy. But this is just the
pinch of the case. We keep up the Home-office, with its
clerks, its staff of legal gentlemen, and its Corinthian
capital, precisely for this purpose of dealing with difficult
cases, and helping us when we cannot help ourselves.
Or must we resign ourselves to a paternal despotism and
a foreign police ? It is past a doubt that, in every city
on the Continent, a domiciliary visit, prompt and paternal,
would in twenty-four hours clean out every one of the
scientific museums which disgrace our most public streets,
and would prevent those filthy advertisements with which,
much to their disgrace, at least one-half of the daily news-
papers pollute their columns and public morality at the
same time. This remedy is within our power, The Engs
lish newspaper press is conducted generally by honourable
men. But every newspaper proprietor who permits the in-
sertion of the advertisements of the Henerys of the day is
an accomplice in their crime. The only means of success
open to these gangs of robbers is the publicity which they
gain by newspaper advertisements. And when we come to
reckon the enormous cost of these advertisements, daily re-
peated and published in so many papers, all of which must
be taken off the profits of the infamous trade, it is no matter
of surprise to be assured that there are cases, and not a few,
in which the extortions of these villains are to be reckoned
by thousands of pounds. It may be quite true that even
the suppression of advertisements in newspapers would not
altogether stop the evil. It is still open to quacks to send
advertisements, as they now do their "sealed books," by
post and on speculation, to those classes from whom dupes
are most easily gathered, But it is quite possible to make
every person who gives an addrase, either in a book, or a
placard, or an advertisement offensive to public morals, re-
sponsible for the contents of such announcement. And if it
be said that such a stringsnt law would be open to abuse,
that it would be difficult to distinguish between scientific
and medical works and their filthy counterfeits, the answer
is that all these imaginary evils were conjured up in mks,
renca to Lord Campbell's Act. But they have not happened,
ani if they did happen, the risk of encountering them is as
nothing compared with the amount of wrong, robbery,
misery, and contamination which the present state of things
permits, and "therefore legalises," But who is to frame
the law ? Who is to say what is legitimate medical pre°.
lice ? And what is to prevent regular professional men
engaging in very irregular and unprofessional prac-
tice ? This is mixing up two questions. First, it is
quite possible, even as the law stands, to punish such
practitioners as Henery, whe is, we have heard, a watch-
maker. But further, as regards what is medical practice
and what is a sordid abuse of it, we deny that it is impos-
sible to draw the line. If the present medical registration
act is not stringent enough, lot its powers be increased. The
duty of working it ought not to be kit to the volunteer, or
perhaps the rival, energy of private medical men, or a
medical society. If there were an inspector of medical
licenses, armed with authority to shut up the shops of these
health institutions, half the trade would bo annihilated in
a single morning.
THE "LONDON REVIEW" ON THE DEAD AND GONE
" MORNING CHRONICLE."--The case of Sergeant Glover
ought to baa warning to all newspaper editors who feel in-
clined to daily with foreign monarchs. Put not your trust
in princes, nor in dukes neither, is an epitaph which de-
serves to be engraved upon the tomb of the Morning Chro-
nicle. Mr Sergeant Glover made but a sorry show last
Saturday before the Lord Chief Justice and a Westminster
special jury. Early in the case his counsel, owing to the
faultiness of the Sergeant's instructions, managed to plunge
himself into a morass, out of which he 'sever emerged.
With inconceivable folly, Sergeant Glover had omitted from
Sergeant Parry's copy an awkward passage in a letter which
was to be found in the original at length, and which cons -
pletely exculpated the French Government from all liability
up to the date of May, 1857. It seems odd that a literary
man who professes to be himself a lawyer should have taken
the trouele to got up an expensive case, only to damn it
the mo.nent it came into court by so extravagant a piece of
carelessness. The certainty of the exposure which such a
proceeding must draw down is perhaps the best proof that
Sergeant Glover's omission—.,strange as it may seem—was
only grossly negligent. No man in his senses, however in-
differently honest, would be so rash as to mutilate a docu-
ment the whsle of which must, of necessity, be in the hands
of the opposite attorney. But sincere as may be such stu-
pidity, the effect produced upon the minds of a jury is as
damaging, under such circumstances, as if fraud and
chicanery had lain beneath. It takes a great deal
of ability on the part of an advocate, and much
intrinsic virtue in a case, to retrieve the fatal
slip- A memory which can forgot so strange a dissimi-
larity between the draught of an epistle and the epistle
itself, as actually sent, is scarcely trustworthy enough to
win, without much difficulty, the confidence of impartial
observers. Better causes before now have been destroyed
by less mistakes. Before Mr. Sergeant Glover went into
the box his lawsuit was virtually at an end, and in consent-
ing to terminate the cause by an amicable arrangement. his
counsel made the best of a very hopeless and desperate affair.
The question whether or no the French Government was
willing to tamper with the virtue of an English newspaper
is not so easily dismissed. Mr Bovill intimated that down
to 1860 Sergeant Glover went on acknowledging that he
had no legal claims upon the Emperor or the Duke de Per-
signy. Even if the ex parte assertion of an advocate, be
taken as strictly proved, it still is possible that such acknow-
ledgments may have been extorted from Sergeant Glover by
the French executive as an ostentatious preliminary to a
promised settlement. Nothing would be more simple or
more common than such a plan. The unfortunate Sergeant
would, of course, eagerly sign anything in hopes of bring-
ing his illustrious debtors to account ; little calculating on
the ultimate effect of any such admissions. When all is
said that can be said against him, it still is clear that Ser-
geant Glover was allowed by the French executive to sell
himself. He may have sold himself for nothing ; but sell
himself he did ; and the reluctance of those who bought him
to pay more than they are legally compelled, is far from
proving that no moral sale took place. It is true that one
ought not to come to a strong conclusion ono way or another
upon a fragment of the plaintiff's evidence or from his coun-
sel's opening speech. But the French Government, through
Mr Bovill, supplied a piece of proof that is enough for our
purpose. They had at least received and kept Sergeant
Gloves's communications. The original paper, of which Mr
Sergeant Parry possessed but a curtailed copy, was produced
from Paris ; and after its production there can be little
doubt but that the Duke do Persigny or his agents had been
in treaty with the proprietors of the Morning Chronicle.
Indeed the whole history of the Morning Chronicle in its
later years renders such proof supetfluous. There is no miss
taking the dress of the literary courtezan, That its virtue had
beoome marketable in January, 1857, and marketable to a
French bidder was always obvious. Who the bidder must
have been may be a matter of judicial doubt, but in the
eyes of men of sense it is a matter of no doubt at all, The
AlortAg Chronicle has never had any hesitation in swears
ing to the identity of its seducer, and popular as is the Im-
perial dynasty of France, there are perhaps not many opu.
lent Frenchmen, totally unconnected with the Tuileries,
who would send large sums of money in converting a
second-rate English journal to the cause of the Second Em-
pire. The a priori evidence, accordingly, is all upon one
side, It is met improbable QM the 111w704 cArpilick,

like an excellent lady whose name has recently been
dragged into the Divorce Court, should have gone on fair
six long years under au erroneous idea that its virtue hO5 a':
been assailed. It Sergeant Glover is to be believed ea 1
—and we really see no reason why he should not—e 1116
more than one interview with the Duke de Persigny
settle terms of service. The Duke on these occasions nomi-
nated M. St Andre to act for him in the capacity of agent,
Nor was the Duke do Persigny the only Minister who tooic
an interest in Sergeant Glover's affairs. M. Billault rea"
nised, if not his claims, at all events his labours, and agreed
,
to assist him towards an important concession from the Ad.
ministration of the day. Lastly, Sergeant Glover affirms
that he saw and spoke to a still greater personage in API"
1837. He had, he says, the honour of an iaterview with the
Monarch who directs the destinies of France. The BroPernt
—so Sergeant Glover swears—received him with courtesl
and kindness, He thanked the Sergeant for the mode Old,
manner in which the Morning Chronicle hal acted, ann
asked what he could do for him in return. The Sergeant
—who seems to have no scruples in avowing that the
ilforisieg Chronicle's favours were venal—replied promptly
" a telegraphic concession." If all this is true the Nora;
my Chronicle may not have disposed of itself for naafi, but
at least it is ditlicult to maintain that it did nut dispose 04f
itself for expectations. The debt was allowed to becorne
debt of honour, instead of a debt recoverable at law. That
difference is an important one, as the French Governlnen
has shown. In spite of the generous intentions of the
Emperor and M. Billault, Sergeant Glover has got nothing
in the end, and Sergeant Glover is less fortunate than Ma
French compeers. The Constittetionnel and the Presse ann
themselves as freely, but they take care to make better bar:
gains. We cannot, however, regret that the proprietors et
the Morning Chronicle have not been as prosperous or I'3
munificently rewarded. That venality should go in one in'
stance unsalaried is the best guarantee that wo shall 00t
have any more Sergeant Glovers. Hereafter, few leading
articles will probably be written at the French embassy'
and Imperialism will content itself with what it can soot°
in the great Parisian market. One singular item in Set'
geant Glover's claim will perhaps be sufficient to convinc°
foreigners that a traffic in the honour of journalists is not
likely to succeed in England. Among other particular*
Sergeant Glover claimed to recover damages 44 for the 101°
sustained in the depreciated value of the newspopera ia
question" by reason of their French proclivities. Such all
item is the homage which venality pays to virtue. The
Imperial patronage for which the Morning Chronicle did a°
much was a weight greater than it could carry. The editorial
vessel sank under the load. Too late Sergeant Glover die'
covered that a journal, if it desires a position, must be Oa°
suspicion and reproach. An intrigue is fatal to its repute'
tion, and to its circulation too. The honour of a woluant
of a member of Parliament, and of a newspaper are three
things that will not bear blackening. In these commercial
days it is well to have this truth flaunted before men's eYetk
Moro than one Parliamentary celebrity like the lgornill
Chronicle has brought contempt upon himself by endeavour'
ing to serve two countries, and there aro several names t_illat
will go down to posterity side by side with that of Nr
Sergeant Glover.