The Sun.
London, England, 1870-07-26 00:00:00

PUT YOURSELF IN HIS PLACE.

With this cheerful invitation that modern Radcliffe,
Mr. Charles Reade, introduces us into a very magazine
of horrors, the more than mysteries of the British Trades-
Unions. In our sympathy with his hero, we are expected
vicariously to be shot at with arrows, and slung at with
knives, and burnt up in stables, and blown up in forges—
only stopped on our way to the sky by sticking in cleft
iron bars—and splintered into bits by nitro-glycerine, a
stray arm or a leg of us " Found Drowned," to say
nothing of minor drains upon our feelings by flood and
field. The great American nation is also getting
out a novel, a serial experiment, of which we
have been favoured with some of the advanced
chapters. It is called " J ohn,"' but the title borrowed
from the British workman will do as well. John, we
glean from these early pages, is to have a very hard time
of it while the plot is being played out. He is to Put
Himself in the Place of a great many things. He is to
receive the skull and cross-bone warnings, is to have his
pig-tail cut off, and his shanty fired, is to find powder in
his forge, and poison in his puppy-stews. This is Mas-
sachusetts. In New York he is to be hanged to lamp-
posts, or beaten to death in the Bowery, or found
floating—the bits of him—down among the docks.
In Pennsylvania he is to be blown up in coal-
mines, and charged to " fire-damp," or scalded
to death in Iron Furnaces, or run down on
railroad tracks, hours after he has gasped his last sigh.
For, are not the Trades Unions omnipotent ?' and has not
labour learned at last how to hold capital in check ? And
between these mill-stones, the upper and the neither, it is
easy to see the pulverized fragments of John. But, bor-
rowing a trick from Mr. Reade, you see, after he has been
ground to powder, he comes out again, this ever-renewing
John, good as new, to undergo fresh trials and vexations,
and another martyrdom. For, now that Sambo has been
satisfactorily put out of the way, having proved that
he won't leave his place in the sunny south to take the
bread out of white labourers' mouths in the frozen
North—in fact, that he won't put himself into
anybody's place but his own, as a God-fear-
ing, upward-striving, American citizen—what would
the politicians do but for John! Put himself into
the place of the hitherto irrepressible negro, he must and
shall, say they. For a war-cry, and a shibboleth, and a
Tally-ho, what so new, so stirring ! "We won't hays
him !" say the Democrats, watching the Irish immigrant
ship safe into harbour. " We're afraid to touch him,"
whisper some of their opponents ; " we would like to, but
Nativism isn't dead yet, and 'tis much as we can do to
attend to one colour at a time !" And the standing joke
of the American people, the laughing-stock, will have to
be painted anew. It used to have thick lips and
a woolly head, and its shin-bones were of the
fashion it pleased God. Now, its eyes must be slanted
obliquely, its head must be shaven, it must dress in strange
stuffs, and carry a fan. But we'll back the American
nation, in the winding-up of its novel against any Charles
Reade on earth. We shall waken up some morning in
the Seventy-first Chapter, to find that all is serene, that
the hero John has wedded Patience, and that all goes
smoothly in workshop and forge. The " intelligent
American mechanic " will discover that the world is wide.
And in Central Park, . the Irishman with his shovel, in
Schuylkill County the Cornishman with his pick, may
possibly strike out the solid truth that the rights of labour
and capital go hand in hand, but that the crowning rights
of humanity, of flesh and blood and human brotherhood,
are through all and above all.— Tribune.

The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland has declined to
hold out any hope of a commutation of the capital
sentence passed upon the man Carr, who murdered a
woman named Margaret Murphy in Dublin some weeks
since.