The Sun.
London, England, 1865-10-05 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, THURSDAY EVENIAG, OCTOBER 5, 1865.

all the glories of SOLOMON, and to examine the
animal creation in its endless variety, but the
social aptitudes of man are yet more worthy of
our study and the communities which he forms,
and which are the especial objects of the Divine
care. Social science, then, has pre-eminently claims

to our regard, and promoting it is our highest duty
to our Heavenly Father, that duty we delight to
perform, rejoicing to be the instruments of His
justice and mercy, and devoutly thankful to His
goodness, which makes what He commands a pleasure
to obey." Earl FITZWILLIAM proposed a vote of thanks
to the man whose life was still devoted to public duty,
with as much earnestness as it was fifty years ago.
Lord BIZOCGIIA3I is indeed a shining light to those
who in the meridian of their days get weary of the
march of life, for during the long years of his
eventful career h© has maintained his energy, and
still after the lapse of half a century applies him-
self to his work with all his pristine zeal.

The annual autumnal meetings of Agricultural
Asssociations partake this year of a somewhat
melancholy character. However large the assem-
blage, however fine the exhibition, however satis-
factory the general result, there hangs over all the
dismal shadow of that terrible disease which has so
greatly diminished the number of our flocks and
herds, and which still defies all the efforts of
science and skill. At the same time while they lose
something in animation these assemblies gain
something in interest, since agricultural matters are
regarded with more attention than customary. The
worth of a thing is known by the want of it, says
the old adage, and, accordingly, men who were
accustomed to speak somewhat slightingly of agri-
cultural matters begin to find out that if there
were no farmers there would be some awkward
deficiencies in the commissariat. The twenty-
fourth annual assembly of the Tring Agricultural
Association was held yesterday in the grounds of
the Royal Hotel, Tring Station, a fact, which was
interesting from the circumstance of two or three
of the porters employed at the station taking ad-
vantage of the opportunity to display specimens of
the vegetables grown by them in the little plots of
waste land allotted to them by the company. This
was an encouragement to the men themselves,
and also, we hope, an encouragement to the com-
pany in the endeavour to provide their employe's
with a little healthful recreation. At the customary

banquet there was a goodly show of guests, the
most prominent among them being the members
for the county, and the principal spokesman being
naturally Sir E. BULWER LYTTON. His address
was characterised by his usual tact and ability, and
the contrast presented by the harmonious rivalry
between the exhibitors and the most active compe-

,ition in which the company then assembled was

last engaged was amusingly referred to. The charm
of these less exciting meetings is, as the right hon.
baronet justly observed, principally in the fact that
all the acerbities of political feeling are laid aside,
and Whig and Tory and Radical resolve themselves
into their primary elements of friends, associates,
and neighbours. The part of HAMLET, said Sir E.
B. LYTTON, was omitted from the show ; but though
there might be no exhibition of cattle, there were
sheep, pigs, and vegetables in great profusion and
variety. The right hon. baronet repeated the sug-
gestion which he made at Hertford, that on stated
occasions the various societies of the county should
unite their forces in one grand exhibition. This would
b 3 a good plan to adopt in other agricultural coun-
ties, since it would enlarge the area of competition,
give more zest to the meeting, and tend to neutralise
the little local prejudices and jealousies that are
almost certain to show themselves on occasions of

this sort. It would of course have been impossible
to have addressed a meeting of this kind without any
allusion to the great topic of the day—the cattle
plague ; and accordingly Sir E. B. LYTTON gave
very briefly the result of his observations on the
subject. There was, he remarked, a very great
difference of opinion respecting the origin and the
cure for the disease ; but there seemed to be little
disagreement about the best mode of prevention.
A copious use of vinegar, externally and internally,
is approved by all the authorities, while, when in-
fection has really entered a locality, chlorine and
bonfires appear to be the most powerful preventives.
As for the system of general slaughter advanced in
many quarters, the speaker very wisely protests
against it—since, he exclaimed, to add famine to
pestilence is not that which would entitle us to call
Government our protector or to accept science as
our guide. The worst counsel in affliction, he justly
observed, is that which advises us to despair, and it
is only due to the scientific knowledge and applica-
tion characteristic of our age to believe that the
present state of ignorance and perplexity must soon
be in some degree lightened. It is the duty of our
public men to endeavour to inspire confidence and
to arrest panic ; and we are glad to find that some
of our agricultural representatives have courage to
come forward with reasoning language.

The great uncertainty attending the best mode of
meeting the cattle plague is one of its most dis-
heartening and harassing features. There has
been no lack of discussion, or absence of sugges-
tions ; still no one can bring forward conclusive
evidence as to the merits of his mode of treatment.
The most competent and experienced veterinary
surgeons freely confessed themselves puzzled ; and
one thing only is clear, that whether or no the
disease is of foreign extration, it can adapt itself
only too readily to the conditions of English
life. The chief difficulty at present is, how-
ever, to settle if it is best at once to
destroy the affected animals or to remove them to
places where the different modes of treatment can
be fairly tried. On all grounds the establishment
of sanitoriums seems to be the wisest course to
pursue, since it is quite evident that we shall never
grow wiser, or more capable of dealing with the
disease, or guarding against it, if we abandon the
attempt in despair, and refuse to make any effort.
A great many diseases might fairly have been de-
clared incurable by medical science some years ago
which are now under scientific control, at least in
some measure. Small-pox, most especially, owes
its cure and its prevention to a quite unex-
pected discovery, but it needed observa-
tion and labour to bring the discovery
to fruition. Had Dr. JENNER refused to
attempt to deal with the evil vaccination would
not have been heard of. How can we tell then
that there may not be some beneficial secret in
nature which can protect our herds from the de-
stroyer? There are naturally many objections to
the establishment of sanitoriums. The cattle owners
who have the misfortune to see the disease enter
their premises are eager to destroy the affected ani-
mal, in the hope of getting rid of it before their
credit is damaged, while there is a general preju-
dice against their removal for fear of spreading the
infection. But, in reality, such an arrange-
ment would be likely to diminish the risk
because if compensation were given for the,
animals brought to the place there would be no
temptation to keep infected animals in sheds along
with other cattle. The means adopted to arrest the
sprtad of the plague have certainly not hitherto
proved successful. Would it not be well, therefore,
to try another mode, and gee if it would not be

possible to lessen the injury inflicted in another way.
Prevention is undoubtedly better than cure ; but if
an evil cannot be prevented, surely it is better to
try to cure it than to abandon the attempt in
cowardly despair !

THEATRE ROYAL PRINCESS'S.

"Never Too Late to Mend."

A remarkable scene was last evening witnessed
by a crowded and at times a very excited
audience, at the Princess's Theatre. Mr. Charles
Reade's dramatised version of his own well-known
story, entitled " Never Too Late to Mend," was
the attraction of the night. It turned out to be—
in the Second Act at least—a very repulsive demon-
stration against Penal Servitude and its accompani-
ments, as they happen to be regarded from the
novelist's own particular point of view. According
to Mr. Readc's way of putting forward his
argument against the system and its working, he
would actually seem to insist upon it—that all the
Felons in our Convict prisons are Saints, and that
the gentlemen who are acting there as Governors,
together with the warders under them, who are
their tools, are so many Monsters of Iniquity.
Now we for our own part believe—quite calmly and
deliberately—that exactly the converse of all this
is the case. We believe that the felons crowding
our great convict establishments—massed together
in formidable gangs at Pentonville, and A.lillbank,
and Portland, and Dartmoor, and elsewhere, are
the very pick and cream, or rather the very scum
and dregs of the greatest ruffians and blackguards on
the face of the earth. We believe that the officers
of our great convict establishments, from the Go-
vernors down to the very humblest of the
officials, down to the very doorkeepers and
messengers, are there energetically carrying out
their duties to the utmost of their several powers,
and with the most conscientious solicitude. We
would go further than that, even, and say that

it is our firm and unhesitating conviction that Con-
victs really repentant and patient and chastened in
character, that Governors malignantly harsh and
cruel and unjust are the rare and hardly produce-
able exceptions. A Governor of a Convict Prison,
such as the one represented last evening at the
Princess's, we assert to be a wholly impossible and
apochryphal personage. We regard the repre-
sentation as nothiugless than a libellous and calum-
nious portraiture, or, to put it in other words, as
a wholly unjustifiable caricature of as honourable,
and intelligent, and highly educated, and, we doubt
not, also, as concientious a class of gentlemen as
could be found anywhere else upon our Govern-
ment establishments. It is a matter of as tonish-
ment to us that a man of Mr. Charles Reade's
ability should allow himself to indulge so
frequently in such flagrant outbursts of
a perversely wrongheaded onesidedness. It was
only the other day that he gave full swing to an
equally extravagant craze of his about our Lunatic
Asylums—writing of them in his powerful story en-
titled " Hard Cash" as though his pen were a sti-
letto, and the ink in which he dipped it the deadliest
poison. We no more believe that the officials of
our convict prisons are the blackhearted rascals that
Mr. Charles Reade would have us believe them to
be, than we could ever credit, upon the same autho-
rity (according to the inferences which were alone
deducible from some of the most astounding chapters
of "Hard Cash") that our Commissioners de lunatico
inquirendo are little better than so many drivelling
idiots, and the Masters in Lunacy either purblind
dolts or connivers at, or compounders of, felony! One
of those same Masters being to this day one of the
shrewdest among contemporary novelists, one of those
same Commissioners having been for many years,
until very recently, one of the most amiable, vene-
rable, and accomplished among contemporary poets
—the Master being the author of " Ten Thousand
a Year "—the Commissioner, Mr. Bryan Procter,
better known as " Barry Cornwall." Abuses there
may be—there doubtless—are still admitting of
being weeded out, here in our Convict Establish-
ments, here in our Lunatic Asylums. But they
are certainly not to be got rid of, we may rest
assured of that, by means of any such monstrous
and wholesale misrepresentation as that applied to
the world of Mad-houses in "Hard Cash," and to the
almost equally grimly world of Convict Prisons in

" Never too Late to Mend." Not thus—not after
this fashion—has Mr. Charles Dickens applied his
genial, cordial, powerful pen to the sweeping
away of abuses in a hundred different directions.
The refined sarcasm applied to the weaknesses
of the powers that be, by that greatest of all
humourists—as he is, also, none the less distinctly
to our thinking, about the most practical
among all living Social Reformers and
Philanthropists--the exquisitely refined sarcasm ap-
plied by him to the Powers that Be when dubbing
their haunts by the generic name of the Circumlo-
cution Office, and their hereditary occupants by
the cognomen of the Tite-Barnacles—touched into
inimitable ridiculousness by such fantastic little
touches as that of the wild search of ter the eyeglass
by the infatuated stickler for tonnage, the polishing
of the gun-barrel with a silk handkerchief, and the
spreading of marmalade with a paper-knife in the
august regions sacred to the inner mysteries of Red
Tape—all this, one might infer, must be so much
mere idle babble and preposterous small-talk to
one whose irony rages into vituperation, and whose
rhetoric raves into bullyragging. According to
Mr. Reade, there is habitually installed in power
at tho Home Office, under the polite desig-
nation of Old Circumbendibus, a Demon of State
Darkness, who has, sometimes, but only, upon very
rare and fitful occasions, freaks of compunction in-
ducing him to come down upon some arch-delin-
quent, such as Hawkes like a very Deus, or rather
Diabolus ex-Machine. The representation of the
system upon which, according to Mr. Charles
Reade, penal servitude is, or was (we cannot rightly
catch which he really means), carried out, or in -
flicted, or endured (however we may like to put it),
in our Convict Establishments is—so far as we can
comprehend the purport of the dark and dismal
picture presented to view by Act the Second of
" Never too Late to Mend," to all intents
and purposes very much like the ill-directed
blow of an insensate axe levelled at the very roots
of Social Order! It is, according to our belief and
apprehension, an elaborate, and distorting, and
libellous misrepresentation of one of not the least
important departments or divisions of our common
Government. If there be any power of histrionic
Censorship left remaining at the command of the
administrators in the Lord Chamberlain's office, it
is incomprehensible to us why it cannot be applied
to the sweeping out of view of such a manifestation
as that marking the ghastly Second Act of " Never
Too Late to Mend." And in saying this we
attach but small blame, if any, to the manager
of the Princess's—the responsibility, as it ap-
pears to us, appertaining to the author—that is, to
the author's astonishing want of judgment, to
the author's astounding violation of good taste. As
far as the management of the Princess's in regard
to this play is concerned, the piece from first to
last has been put upon the stage magnificently. And
this is, if possible, more conspicuous in the Second
Act than in any other portion of the drama—a
Second Act that we feel convinced, nevertheless,
ought at once to be swept from public view alto-
gether. As a piece of stage illusion the building-up
of the two scenes of the prison interior, the Tread -
mill, that is, and the Corridors, are simply marvel-
lous. But--in those scenes, the spectacle presented
to observation, is, to put it just as simply, to our
thinking at any rate, absolutely sickening and re-
volting. Maledictions the most hideous, brutal curses
and brutal blows, the fiendish tormenting of angelic
prisoners by a Demoniac Governor, an attempt at
murder, and a still more desperate and imminent at-
tempt at suicide (all but accomplished !) are among
the choicest morceaux of this unparalleled laying
bare of the secrets of the prison house. And—through
it all—between the Demon Governor and his Myr-
midons on the one hand and those etherialised and
almost beatific Felons on the other—there moves
serenely the form of a Prison Chaplain, so incon-
ceivably and preternaturally perfect of his kind,
so intensely, not to say nauseatingly " goody"
in every hair of his whiskers, and in every flagiolet-
like cadence of his dulcifluous voice that, with all
possible respect foz him, it would really be a relief

to one's feelings at last if only, by somebody or
another, he were either kicked or bonnetted. There
is in the mere delicacy with which the lips of this
immaculate person (clad all in black even to his
gloves) ale-wiped at intervals by him with a snow-white
handkerchief—evidently to clear away the oozings
of the milk of human kindness welling up from his
bosom—an amount of aggravation that seems to us
wholly beyond the powers either of description or
of assuagement. The performance last night was
in many respects rather extraordinary. It consisted
exclusively of one piece upon that the first night
of its representation. Yet, beginning though the
entertainment did, very punctually at seven o'clock,
it was not completed until of ter midnight. A
play of four acts, thus, occupying (intervals and
all included) more than five hours in its perform-
ance ! And the attractions, in regard to the drama,
were, it must be allowed, very numerous, and some
of them even remarkable. A celebrated Novelist had
therein dramatized, with his own hand, one of his
most famous productions—a narrative-fiction pub-
lished originally, if we are accurate in our remem-
brance of it, in four rather large volumes, en-
titled "It Is Never Too Late To Mend." This
Dramatized version of the Novel, moreover, was
not only known to have been done by the Author
of the Work himself, but it was produced upon the

stage of one of the most popular of the London
Theatres—the characters being distributed among
the members of one of the best companies in
the metropolis, under the direction of one of the
most successful theatrical managers of the day.
The scenery lavished upon the piece, again, was
such as, even in these days of sensational effects in
that department, the audience recognised as having
about it, every now and then, something quite
exceptional in its splendour. Instance this, the
English villagescene in the first, and again,
(under another aspect) in the last Act—to say
nothing of the Log Hut, and, still more, of
the cascade among the gold diggiags in the
far southern interior of Australasia. The prin-
cipal character was entrusted to Mr. Vining
himself, Tom Robinson, the London Thief.
The next best character being awarded to one
of the cleverest actors in the whole company,
Mr. Dominick Murray, to wit, who, in the con-
genial part of Crawley, added another leaf, as
the phrase is, to the laurels already won by him
through his impersonation of the despicable Process-
Server in Arrah-na-Pogue. Mr. George Mel-
ville was the hero of the dramatic tale, George
Fielding Miss Rodgers representing George's
rustic sweetheart. As the scheming attorney,
Meadows, Mr. Villiers looked for all the world
very much like Mr. Gladstone-ground young-
again, while Mr. Mead's make up as Isaac

Levi, the Jew, was sufficiently picturesque.

Nevertheless---after all has been said in re-
gard to the great, and, as we conceive,
really heinous mistake manifested in the whole
conception and execution of this Second Act—let
but the author at once make up his mind, let but

the manager at once issue his fiat for the elision of
the whole of it—not of part merely, but of the whole
of it—and " Never Too Late to Mend" may yet
have a run. Not otherwise ! It is only fair
to add that the curtain descended at last amidst
signs of feeble but uninterrupted approbation,
the author being summoned to the front of one of
the stage boxes to bow his acknowledgments. So
far as the words uttered by the manager could be
caught through the hisses and exclamations of
" Shame !" excited by the exhibition to which we

have thus referred at so much length because of its
having rendered the whole of the Second Act of
the Play so intensely repulsive, Mr. VINING was
understood to have spoken as follows :
Ladies and Gentlomen,—The drama we are representing

to-night is an adaptation from a novel which it is believed
has done a vast amount of good. (Applause.) We are not
representing a system as it exists, but the abuse of a system
—(applause)--and for the truth of our representation I re-
fer you to the blue-book. (Hissing, cries of " Off, off,"
and "We don't want the blue-books.") I do not desire that
this question should be discussed in a theatre ; but
if an evil does exist, it is but right that it
should be rooted out. (Applause.) If there has
been. an amount of sibillation from those who dissent
from the piece, it must be admitted it has received a great
deal of support from those who approve of it. I have
always had, and I hope I always shall have, tho greatest
respect for the opinion of the public ; but I don't think the
opinion expressed to-night is a correct or disinterested ono,
especially as a great majority of those dissentients have not
come to the theatre free. (Cheers and hisses.) I, there-
fore, hope that the piece may be permitted to proceed
Ladies and gentlemen, until I,have a correct expression of
public feeling in this matter, and beg to announce that this
drama will be repeated every evening until further notice,

Since writing the above we have examined the
columns of our morning contemporaries in order to
learn how far our own ideas and theirs, in regard to
that most odious Second Act, coincide. And from
these, our morning contemporaries, we are tempted
to give, in evidence of the unanimity of feeling
excited among theatrical critics upon the subject,
the following brief fragmentary passages :