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

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

THE " EXAMINER.' ON "TOM BROWN'S" 'IMAGI-
NARY AtrOINTMENT.—Of the asserted appoint■
anent of Mr Thomas Hughes as Reviser of Military
Regulations at the War-olllce, with a handsome
salary, in asking whether it could be true, we said
that Mr Hughes was "known as more ready to
sacrifice himself in 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.
epectcd 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 ol Reviser of Military Regulations has been created,
with a salaryof £l,OOO a year,to which 1 have been appointed.
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 per-
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tially repealed by later ones, others are very obscure in their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 po-sible, as our soldiers aro 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 pay
and allowances. The codification has been begun in 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
Defence Act. The present job' (and a very stiff one it is,
though not in the Standards 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 tho gainers by getting shortly one intelli-
gible regulation, embodying the whole law and practice on
this most imprtant subject. Should this result be attained,
I shall take it with equanimity if (as the Standard Bugs
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. HuguEs."
" P.S.--qt never rains but it pours,' The Telegraph
has just announced that I have been appointed to succeed
Mr M'Culloch as Controller of the Stationery Department.
I fear there is even 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-office 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, tbo
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. Th 9 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
positieu 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 aro 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 blame
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 compoti.
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 intelligibleEngtish
—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 Ilugbee has half a
dozen qualifications, including rare ability, keen
sense of duty, and a sturdy relish of hard work.
TIIE " 6PECTATOB." ON MULLER'S LETTER To
Ills PARENTS.—Wo are inclined to think that
Muller's only posthumous work, the epietns to his
parents, which has bean published this ?reek, 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, road 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 ho had pursued throughout of conciliate
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 London by john Mat-
thew (the cabman) for 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 ho.recogniscs 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 own view with a perfectly startling coin-
posure and tenacity the greatest event of a life, and
that a crime of the first order. In almost 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, wo imagine, in
which a man ever contrived to separate so com-
pletely, and so unfortunately for himself his 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,composed,quiet kind of conciliatory per-
son ho had always been, without a trace of agitation.
The day alter 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
cbaplaine, 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 cars like a sort
of concession made to the eternal tribunal under
the eole 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 filets 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 1
now plainly comprehend the sentence which stands
written in the Bible—that whosoever does not

honour his father and mother will be followed by an
early death; but I only see it now when it is too
late. I hope, nevertheless, that you who were so
dear to me will not discard me if the world repulse
me. ' For hope ushers us into life, floats around
the happy boy, animates youth with its magic light,
and will not be 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 be himself enter-
tained on the whole P We are disposed to think
the latter. Had it been otherwise we could scareely
conceive of Muller viewing the plundered hat and
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, and to an abuse of an 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 with 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, we 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 Chaste 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 over indulges in such a diffie
cult operation as thinking—to think whether at least an at-
tempt to put down the tribe of Henery . 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, wo 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 tho 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, kit 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 Eng-
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 iu 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
bo said that such a stringent 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 refe-
rence to Lord Campbell's Act. But they have not happened,
and 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 P Who is to say what is legitimate medical prat •
Lice P 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, who is, we have heard, a watch-
maker. But further, as regards wlsat is medical practice
and what is a sordid abuse of it, we deny that it is impos-
sible to draw the lino. If the present medical registration
act is not stringent enough, lot its powers be increased. The
duty of working it ought not to be left 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 be annihilated in
a single thorning.
THE "LONDON REVIEW" ON THE DEAD AND GONE
" MORNING CHRONICLE."—Tho case of Sergeant Glover
ought to be a warning to all newspaper editors who feel in-
clined to dally 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 .Dlorning Chro•
nick. 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 never 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 com-
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 trouble to got up an expensive case, only to damn it
the moment 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 while of which must, of necessity, be in the hands
of the opposite attorney. But sincere as may be such stu-
pidity, the (Afoot 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 forget 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-
eigny. Even if the ex pal* 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 ono
ought not to come to a strong conclusion ono way or another
upon a fragment of the plaintiff's evidence or from his coune
eel'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
Glovei's communications. Tho 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 de 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 superfluous, There is no mis-
taking the dress of the literary courtezan, That its virtue had
become 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
Illorni4 Chronicle has never had any hesitation in swear••
ing to the identity of its seducer, and popular as is the Im-
perial dynasty of France, those 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 most improbable that the Morning Chronicle, .

like an excellent lady whose name has recently been
dragged into the Divorce Court, should have gone en oar
six long years under an erroneous idea that its virtue be
been assailed. If Sergeant Glover is to be believed 011?$
—and we really see no reason why he should not—bellat
o
more than one interview with the Duke de PersignP.
settle terms of service. The Duke on these occasions not.
nated M. St Andre to act for him in the capacity of age%
Nor was the Duke de Persigny the only Minister who We`
an interest in Sergeant Glover's affairs. hi. Billault reo°6s
nised, if not his claims, at all events his labours, and aria
to assist him towards an important concession from the"-:
ministration of the day. Lastly, Sergeant Glover effirll7
that he saw and spoke to a still greater personage Mal
1857. He had, he says, the honour of an interview with the
Monarch who directs the destinies of France. The EroPer°:
—so Sergeant Glover swears—received him with corn
and kindness, He thanked the Sergeant for the mode 51/A
manner in which the Morning Chronicle had acted, 0111't
asked what he could do for him in return. The Sergeeu
—who seems to have no scruples in avowing thet
Morning Chronicle's favours were venal—replied prorePY
" a telegraphic concession." If all this is true the Yers;
ing Chronicle may not have disposed of itself for wench °,
at least it is difficult to maintain that it did not dispose o;
itself for expectations. The debt was allowed to beats,
debt of honour, instead of a debt recoverable at law.
difference is an important one, as the French Governin"
has shown. In spite of the generous intentions of tb6
Emperor and M. Billault, Sergeant Glover has got uothieog
in the end, and Sergeant Glover is less fortunate than 110
French compeers. The Constitutionnel and the Pease °°.,
themselves as freely, but they take care to make better IND;
gains. We cannot, however, regret that the proprietore °
the Morning Chronicle have not been as prosperous or 0
munificently rewarded. That venality should go "8 ill;
stance unsalaried is the best guarantee that we shell
have any more Sergeant Glovers. Hereafter, few
articles will probably be written at the French em
baseit
and Imperialism will content itself with what it can secure
in the groat Parisian market. One singular item in Sec
geant Glover's claim will perhaps be sufficient to couvnt
foreigners that a traffic in the honour of journalists ie
likely to succeed in England. Among other partieubo4
Sergeant Glover claimed to recover damages " for the 1%66
sustained in the depreciated value of the newspePer6;
question" by reason of their French proclivities. 82011,0-,-
item is the homage which venality pays to virtue. h,":
Imperial patronage for which the Morning Chronicle di 6,
much was a weight greater than it could carry. The editeris'
leadia
vessel sank under the load. Too late Sergeant Glover dig;
covered that a journal, if it desires a position, must be eb°/
suspicion and reproach. An intrigue is fatal to its rep
tion, and to its circulation too. The honour of a vi°l33_,'
of a member of Parliament, and of a newspaper are thi7j
things that will not bear blackening. In these col:3030:
days it is well to have this truth flaunted before men's eye;
More than one Parliamentary celebrity like the Nors'"
Chronicle has brought contempt upon himself by endeavour;
ing to serve two countries, and there are several naraeetfb6r
will go down to posterity aide by side with that of
Sergeant Glover.