The Sun.
London, England, 1864-10-31 00:00:00

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graphic communication which is to connect us with
India, and eventually with China and Australia,
begins with the Mediterranean cable, or that which
runs between Malta and Alexandria, of the length
of 1,550 miles. This has proved the most success-
ful of all the long submarine cables, yet it has
snapped three times in three years, producing an
interruption of communication of 137 days by the
admission of its own engineer. The tneie first cost
of this cable is said to have been £400,000. Next
comes the no'orious It, el Sea cable. The cost of
this was .£BOO,OOO, and the Government has gua-
ranteed on that capital an interest of 11 per cent,
down to the year of our Lord 1908. This c.ible ha
proved a total failure, but we, our children, and our
grandchildren wilt have to pay for the failure the
yearly sum of £36,000! We come, then, to the
Persian Gulf cable, which was to have completed
the communication, land and sea, between England
and our Indian dominions. We do not know
what it cost, but in the estimated accounts for the
Home Government of India for 1834 we find it
credited with the handsome sum of £306,000. It
gave on the 24th of July last, and up to this day
has not been in operation. The cable, indeed, is
said not to be worth repairing, and the construc-
tion of an improved one is in contemplation. Sir
Charles Bright, its engineer, and one of the con-
troversialists in the :limes, ought to have told us
all this when he was holding np the hope of a tele•
graph to the Antipodes in three years!

THE " SPECTATOR" ON ADOPTED CHILDREN.—There
is a certain absurdity which was going the round last week
of the lady who asked a Board of Guardians for " a child
only two years old, with blue eyes, and light hair, and a
complete orphan." Ono felt that the demand had been
dictated rather by atintiment that by, eiiiaine
that the child was selected on the same principles as a doll
might have been, bat the anecdote indicated a curious defi•
ciency in our law. The practice of adoption, eo frequent in
the Roman and the modern Asiatic world, allowed by all
German laws, sanctioned by the Code Napoleon, has
never received in England any kind of legal recog-
nition. It is not opposed to our manners, is rather approved
by opinion, and is among the philanthropic an incident of
very frequent occurrence, but the law takes no notice of it,
provides no ceremonial for recerding it, and imposes no
obligations upon those who attempt it. Yet it would be
difficult to suggest a practice which might be prot:uctive
of more general benefit to a society which like our own is
unfavourable to marriage, which throws the time further
and further back in every generation, and which allows in
the same family excessive ihequalities of fortune. There are
thousands of old maids among us, well to do and excellent,
to whom the privilege would bring a new zest to their lives,
new interests, and new occupation, thousands of widowers
whose lives are passed in a sort of unwilling solitude, thou-
sands of married homes where the only thing wanting to
life is the sound of childrens' voices. There seems no rea-
son, natural or artificial, why a void due chiefly to the ac-
tion of an imperfect social system should not by that system
be filled up. Adoption of a kind is indeed already much more
frequent than the public imag;ne. Let any one of our readers
look round his acquaintance, and he will find cases where
children loft unprovided for have been brought up by rela-

tions, friends, and even strangers, with a kindness which
makes their circle at last almost forget that the children are
not their own. Indeed, the complete succsss of such ar-
rangements sometimes suggests a doubt whether " natural
feeling" is quite so strong an instinct as it is the fashion to
assume, whether it is not the relationship of intercourse
which begets family affection rather than that of blood,
whether a child does not love its mother as much from its
reliance upon her as from any natural instinct beyond its
own control. Children love nu►ses more than their mothers
very often indeed, and the poetry thrown by all races round
the relationship of foster-mother has a justification in fact.
Frequent as the incident is, h,wever, the law throws dig-

&tides in the way of a very positive kind. The ado]

child, for example, does not inherit unless through a

tionship other than the adoption, which very selelOm;*itil7
The tendency is of course to adopt relatives, btu tiey will
as often be the wife's as the husband's, andiptlititt case the
legacy duties are as heavy as if thlAfoirted were utter
strangers. So with the most just and.ex'pedient of all forms of
adoption—the recognitionof a naauf Illegitimate child, which
though provided for in everWher country of Europe, even in
Calvinistic Scotland, is inj.*lFand left without any legal sanc-
tion whatever. I:ll4.facy difficulty may be met by settle-
ments, but people irelinwilling to settle moveable property
even on their own children,—it impairs too much the
pleasant sense of possession and of choice. A still more
serious impedituct4 is the difficulty or rather impossibility
of terminating the 7riffts. oftte real parents. The natural
parents can always reclaim their offspring, at least up to
the age of discretion, and we know of a case where that
power was sacrificed for their adopted children as much as
for their own. The lady who asked for a " complete
orphan" probably dreaded contact with vulgar or evil
relatives, but the fear that all care may be thrown away by
a sudden demand for the child's restoration greatly dimi-
nishes the practice.

THE "SATUIIDAY REVIEW" ON PHOGRESS.—As every-
thing is done by association in our days,so there are compa-
nies of thinkers, in perhaps a new sense—people who club
their ideas and throw them into a common stock, not on ac-
count of their identity of thought or aim, but as if with view
of realising the magic of numbers, the strength of an imposing
title, and of a united front egainst a common foe. One of
these companies has taken to itself the striking title of
Advanced Thinkers, with the motto " Excelsior," and
shows us what wonders can be effected by a name, not only
on those who hear it, but on its self-elected possessors—
especially if those who use it do not know its meaning, as
is the case both Mr Longfellow and the Advanced Thinkers,
who ought to be, like Saul, taller than his neighbours. The
sense of fellowship arising from a common badge end title,
the concerted action against established ideas, seems to in-
duce in them a feeling of advance, of general successful
movement, which it would have been impossible for the
most sanguine member to entertain as a private solitary
thinker, and which is so far unreasonable that not one
brother of the community holds positively with another, or
believes in his panacea. As members of the company, these
men talk as though they expected some fundamental
radical change in human nature, and as if this change were
already at work; and they can so manage books and
figures that their accounts shall seem to prove it; only we
observe that the view is not an actuating one, and that,
in their private capacity, they have no more faith in
men than the rest of thew°, ld. So we conclude that the theory
needs an association for its full development, with a ma-
chinery of commissions and reports; for no man of any
school, looking aboirt him in a humble retail sort of way,
can make his conclusions fit in with theirs. We do not
positively deny the facts or deductions of the grand scale,
but we are unable to reconcile them with our personal ex-
periences, and we fail to perceive that the members
of the fraternity aro more successful in this than ourselves.
It is a strange thing, if we think of ft, that the world should
have reached this time of day, and that it shou'd be matter
of dispute whether it is immeasurably better or immeasur-
ably worse than when history first reveals it to us—the
disputants not being wholly at variance as to what is better
or worse. It really depends on a few points, not of the
essence of the question, whether wen pronounce the world
they live in to be miserably degenerate and vicious beyond
all former precedent, or a scene of perpetual improvement—
of fair performance, and yet fairer hopes. And it is, perhaps,
equally strange to the neutral looker-on that the feelings of
a partisan of either faction towards such specimens of
the world in dispute as come immediately before him
should be so little influenced by his theory, or influenced, if
at all, by a rule of contra ry. The asserter of progress has
apparently arrived at his favourable conclusions in spite of
his face-to-face intercourse with mankind, and of a sour,
critical tendency that renders ordinary acquaintance dis-
tasteful; while the mourner over the world's degeneracy is
as likely as not to be a good fellow of the genial sort, who
gets on with everybody he meets, and is generally pleased
with his company. And this paradox presents itself so
often that we come to expect that every proclaimer of the

world's perfectibility will despise most people, and hate

some one or two with a particular rancour; while the
favourite of society, and the man who enjoys himself in it,
is pretty sure to be one who sighs for the good old times,
and finds nothing in the moderns to compare with the
giants of the past. Dr Johnson, who lived in an age of
good fellows, had occasion to quarrel with this universal
tendency to exalt the past. "I am always angry when

I hear ancient times praised at the expense of modern

ones," he says—a sentiment that might almost consti-
tute him a prospective member of the band of associate
thiukors, but that his grounds for his op nion would not

satisfy their more confident claims, and would reduce him
to neutrality in the contest. " There is more learning in
the world than there was formerly," he goes on to say,
"for it is more universally diffused, We may not have a
Bentley or a Newton, but more men know Greek and Latin
and mathematics than formerly." Thus he believed in great
men of the past, though not in the past's general superiority,
and would have had something to say, we doubt not, to Mr
Emerson's view that the world has not yet seen a Man, and
that it rent, ins for the New World to produce him.
II w-
ever, this anticipation of a pre-eminent and model man is
not a necessary part of the new hopes. The advanced
thinkers seem to look rather to a gradual assimilation, to
end in universal equality. There is to be no Saul in the
future towering above his fellows, for the whole host are
to reach Saul's stature. They aro ready, in fact, to meet
their opponents with the admission that progress is fast
doing away with great men. There will be no more
philosophers of world-wide fame, because all men will
be Aristotles and Bacons; there will be no more
learned men, because all will surpass Bentley and
Newton. We shall call no man saint, because all
will have passed cur present standard of saiutship. If we