The Sun.
London, England, 1870-06-08 00:00:00

POLITICAL GOSSIP.

We take the following from the London correspondent
of the Manchester Guardian :—" Neither politics nor
fashion think it worth while to go out of town for the few
holidays of Whitsuntide. I never saw a greater number
of well-appointed open carriages, filled with well-
dressed occupants, moving about the streets and
parks as during the last two days. The hotels
are full to overflowing, and dinners, concerts, and balls
succeed one another night after night, just as though the
Land Bill were still in Committee, or the Civil Service
:Estimates had got there. Most of the Ministers
have indeed made a rush into the fresh air ; and
men of business, who represent manufacturing towns
in Parliament, have seized the opportunity to look
into their own affairs. But party associations and
coteries know of no respite in their conferences and
consultations. The various sections of the Conservatives
(for there is no mistake about the widening schism in the
Opposition ranks) never were more busy than just now.
Blackwood's criticism on " Lothair " has sounded the toc-
sin, and the Carlton is in a state of civil war. Mr. Disraeli
himself has gone into the country by the advice of his
physician, to try the effect of the genial air as a restora-
tive, which he greatly needs ; and his pitiless rival, whose
new mansion is not yet finished, though the scaffolding
is down, has likewise felt it prudent to sleep out of
town, having also suffered from a bronchial affec-
tion during the spring. Lord Cairns, too, has
been hit hard by the prolonged cold weather.
It was painful to notice the hoarseness, which he in
vain essayed to conquer, when speaking the other
day against the Chancellor's High Court of Justice Bill.
His delicacy of frame and obviously enfeebled power of
sustained effort strangely contrasted with the robust
vigour and unattenuated vitality of Lord Westbury,
whose capacity for being troublesome and whose love of
ingenious mischief appeared to be inexhaustible."

THE EARL OF DERBY ON PUBLIC
CHARITIES.

The Earl of Derby made a tolerably lengthy speech at
the ceremonies in connection with the Stanley Hospital
at Liverpool— an institution which the statesman has
done so much to establish by the free gift of a site
measuring some 8,000 square yards. Of speeches, said
the earl, there was no lack, but if any occasion could
justify an out-pouring of words, it was the commencement
of a useful public undertaking. But when your under-
taking is complete, continued his lordship, ceremonials
and addresses, although unobjectionable, are not to my
mind particularly necessary. When the thing is done
the best course is to say as little about it as may be and begin
afresh upon something that is likely to be equally useful in
its turn. But when you are asking your friends and neigh-
bours to tax themselves in order to execute a certain plan,
it becomes only necessary to tell them, first, that the plan
is there, ready, and only wanting funds to turn it into a
reality; and next, that it is of such a nature as to make
the supply of those funds a public duty. Now, Ido not
think, especially after what the Mayor has slid, that I need
give you many details as to the want that exists for this
hospital. Turn your eyes to the Mersey, and you will see
lining its shores a range of docks the most magnificent and
most costly, without exception, that any nation, at any
period of its history, has constructed. You will
see there works which have cost 22 or 23 millions,
and which are far from being yet complete. They
will stretch, as you are aware, when finished, far to sea-
ward of the spot on which we now stand, and remembering
the local history of the last 50 years—remembering that
miraculous growth of Liverpool and its suburbs, of which
the Mayor has reminded us ; bearing in mind, too, that
that progress, though, no doubt, at varying rates of
speed, has continued, in bad times as well as in good,
through years of cotton famine, of depressed trade, and
of manufacturing distress—remembering all these things,
it seems to me not rash to predict that there are many
present who will see this coast, up to Seaforth,
and perhaps beyond, filled up to the depth of a
mile, inland, with ships and houses, with warehouses and
railway stations, with a few churches and schools, and I
am afraid a great many public houses. In short, with all
the requirements, and all the 'accompaniments, good and
bad, of a dense and busy. population. That is for us, in
these parts, simply an inevitable destiny, unless either
foreign war, on a vast scale, or domestic disturbance, in
terfere ; and, for my part, I hope and believe we shall
have sense enough to keep out of one and the other.
Well, from the commercial and statistical point of
view—and it is a point of view with which I
acknowledge a good deal of sympathy—that is
a great result. But good and evil are easily
intermingled in human affairs. With the sunshine
you must have the shadow ; and the shadow which
the prosperity of a great trading community throws is,
unhappily, a very dark one. With every fresh applica-
tion of mechanical power you have liability to a fresh
class of accidents arising from the use of that
power. With every increase in the density of
a given population, other things being equal, you have—
I fear it is a fact established beyond dispute—an increased
liability to certain forms of epidemic disease. Where men
and women are closely packed together contagion spreads
more rapidly, and do what you will you cannot make the
air of a great city as healthy as that of a country vil-
lage. You have only to look at the rate at which
children die in places like Liverpool to see what is the
difference, and although sanitary improvement has done
a good deal already, and may do a good deal more, I fear
the difference will always continue to be considerable.
And if I turn from the sanitary to the social point of
view, it is, I am afraid, indisputable that the difficulty of
dealing with individual poverty and distress is greater in
a community of some hundreds of thousands than where
each family lives among a few neighbours, all of whom
know and are known to one another. Personal
sympathy and personal acquaintance are things
not easy to do without or to replace in the
relief of the poor ; in a great mercantile or
manufacturing community they will be rarer than
elsewhere, not assuredly because there is less benevolence,
but because everybody has got his own business to mind,
and hardly anybody knows the name of his next-door
neighbour. You may, indeed, argue that with so much
wealth and prosperity we ought not to have many poor;
but unhappily that is not a conclusion that experience
verifies. Where there is drunkenness there will always
be improvidence—generally pauperism, and often things
worse than either • and though we may be mending in that
respect—and I think, on the whole, we are—l am afraid it
must be admitted that we are still very far from being a
temperate people. So, again, where unskilled labour is
much in demand, and where, as in business connected with
shipping and docks, a good deal of that demand is uncer-
tain and fluctuating, you will have, I fear, a class per-
manently on the edge of want. Let sanitarists do what
they can —and they can do much—to check the first
growth of disease; let educationists and social reformers
exert themselves as they will to raise the lowest class of
honest labourers into a better position, we may feel quite
sure that as long as any of us live doctors will have diseases
to cure, and benevolent persons will not want for objects
of legitimate charity to assist. Well, then, I think we
may assume that if a hospital is a good thing anywhere it
willbe a good thing here. You have the river and the
docks close at hand, both of them likely, I am
afraid, to furnish an unfailing supply of casualties.
You will have all round this building a vast population
chiefly of the wage-receiving class, and I cannot expect
or hope, whatever I or you might wish, that other causes
of suffering and disease will be wanting for which the
individual sufferer is himself morally responsible. Ycu
have no rival institution of the same character within a
distance of about a mile and a half, and none such is likely,
for a long while at least, to be set up. I need hardly
trouble you further, for the usefulness of a well-managed
hospital is one of those things which you cannot easily
prove, just because no amount of argument or de-
monstration can make it clearer than it is. I have lately
had occasion to say at a meeting in London, and I now
repeat it here, that of all human institutions a well-
managed hospital is one of the least liable to abuse. There
is absolutely no room for imposture about it. A patient
has no motive for pretending to be ill when he is not, and
if he were to make the attempt he would probably fail.
Then, again, though against the ordinary contingencies of
life you may fairly expect even a poor man to provide, yet
the accident of being thrown for weeks out of work,
either by illness or casualty, and thereby losing the means
of meeting even ordinary expenses at a moment when he
has extraordinary expenses to incur, is one so excep-
tional in its character as to justify the applica-
tion of an exceptional remedy. So again you may
pauperise a man,—that is, you may teach him to
depend on begging rather than on working—by helping
him over many difficulties, because many difficulties are
apt to recur, and with them recurs the temptation to beg ;
but nobody who has been treated for a broken leg ever
wishes to break it again merely for the pleasure of being
cured. There is still another view of the case, and that is
that by bringing together the sick and the injured
into one place you enormously economize the valuable
time of the leading medical men, and thereby greatly
multiply their power of work, besides setting up a
school of medical science, which is a benefit, of course, to
every class of the community. But these things are
obvious, and I should not touch upon them except for
one reason ; but in days like these, when there is—and I
rejoice to see it—great zeal in the cause of the suffering
and the poor, but zeal not always accompanied by
knowledge or judgment, and when, accordingly, many
forms of so-called charity are afloat, many useless and
some absolutely mischievous, we suffer under double
danger. Men get fairly puzzled to choose among all
these. Those who are naturally free-handed and liberal
either shut their eyes and give blindly and indiscri-
minately to all, or reluctantly abstain from giving to
almost all from the fear that they will be doing more
harm than good ; and I need not say, in that perplexity
and difficulty, others of an opposite turn of mind find an
excellent excuse for not helping anybody except them-
selves. It seems, therefore, worth while to say, and I
say it with entire conviction, that if any one feels he has
a duty to perform in the matter of giving and is perplexed
in his choice he cannot go wrong if he selects as the
dispenser of his charity a well-managed hospital in a
populous town.

LONDON VAGABONDS.—The more we do for the
vagabond class the more their numbers increase, and the
more daring are they in their predatory warfare against
society. There are about 1,700 vagrants registered at
this moment as recipients of relief at the casual wards of
metropolitan workhouses, and fully its many more are pio-
vided with food and shelter in other ways at the public
expense. There are in London not less than 20,000 vaga-
bonds of various degrees, including the most abject street
beggar at one end of the scale, and the most accomplished
coiner or housebreaker at the other. —City Press.