The Sun.
London, England, 1869-02-06 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

The Saturday Review thinks that London ought to feel a
little more secure than it does at present. It ought not to
be possible that, in a long, populous, and frequented
street, houses should be entered by means of ladders
between six and eight in the evening, two or
three rooms stripped of their most valuable contents,
and the thieves get away with the same ease, safety,
and celerity with which they entered. It ought not
to be possible for a man to go up to a gentleman's
house and carry off a pet dog in broad midday ;
and that a policeman patrolling close to the scene of
theft, when appealed to by a spectator, should calmly
plead his instructions as an excuse for not interfering. It
ought to be impossible to point out showy shops owned
by respectable ratepayers, whose principal traffic noto-
riously consists in the purchase and sale of stolen
jewellery. It ought to be impossible to point out in
body of skilled artisans one or two men—" intelligent
operatives" and electors of the British Parliament, who
are known to combine the profession of crime with their
other industry. But these things, which ought to be
impossible, are far from being infrequent. They happen,
not rarely and exceptionally, but at least every week.
Most people are convinced that even without an Act of
Parliament something more might be done than is now
done for repressing the criminal expert. To effectually
deal with the ticket-of-leave man, to deter him from
going on with his profession, to keep him from
corrupting others and to keep others from associating
with him, requires a special knowledge and experience.
Such a knowledge is possessed by Colonel Henderson.
He knows the convict, from the virgin Wickedness of his
Australian nonage to the full-blooded depravity of his
ticket-of-leave maturity. He knows the reclaimable and
the irreclaimable ; those in whom some spark of virtue
still lingers, and those who have lost even the grace of
hypocrisy. This knowledge will be of use, whether the
police be anted with new powers or left only to a wider
use of their present powers. And it will be one of the
most important duties of the new chief to suggest to the
Government such changes in the law as, without
offending the prejudices of the people, may empower tht
police to act efficiently, not only for the arrest of
detected criminals, but for the prevention of meditated
crime.

The Spectator, in considering the working of the new
Bribery Act, renders ample justice to the ex-Premier
for the part he played in the transaction :—" We
do not think that Mr. Disraeli has had sufficient credit
for the Act which transferred this duty to the reluctant
judges—an Act which will, we suspect, do more for the
English electoral system than any other reform we have
either conceived or carried out for years. We believe,
too, that Mr. Disraeli proposed what he did with a clear
understanding of its result, and a sincere desire to bring
that result about—a clear understanding which does no
less credit to his intellect than the desire to effect it does
to his political sincerity. As we have never shrunk from
expressing our generally very low opinion of Mr. Disraeli's
political morality, it is more than ever our duty to do the
fullest justice to him on an achievement like this, which
was unquestionably his achievement—unquestionably
effected with an intelligent conception of what he was
about, and which has still more unquestionably stood the
test of trial. It is worth while noting, however, how im-
measurably more important the change of method has
been, in trying the corrupt practices, than the change of
penalty for these corrupt practices. In no case, we believe,
as yet, has the law of last session been put in force for
bribery. Almost all the legal questions of the various
election trials have been legal questions under the olci,
Acts, and not under the new. The great and only great`
alteration has been in the method of procedure, and that
has been everything. Had the nolo episcopari of the
judges been listened to, and the old procedure left un-
changed, no good would have been effected at all by the
mere increased severity of penalty."

Lord Byron, says the London Review, accused Braham,
the singer, of pronouncing the word " enthusiasm" as if
it were written " entoosymoosy." The London Revieu
holds that it would be a good thing if such a word were
recognised by our dictionaries, as distinguishing the coun-
terfeit from the real article. There are plenty of people
in the world the whole of whose creeds and tastes are
second-hand. Their religious opinions are determined
accidents of personal proximity ; and as for pictures and
music, they go about in the most barefaced manner, asking
those whom they consider experts what is the propel
thing to admire. And then they admire it. Nor is that
the end of the puzzle ; for, apparently unconscious of the
fact that their own entoosymoosy is only of yesterday, and
quite a borrowed article, they will look down upon
and abuse others who are not entoosymoosyastical
in the same directions. This power of gettine
up feeling is probably in some way connected with queer
ideas of moral duty ; for you will often find it in
conscientious people. Yet, do they deceive themselvesl
Does the honest gentleman who has got up entoosymoosy
about a poem, a picture, or a sonata really and traly fancy
that his second-hand feelings have become incorporated
into his own very being, like the victuals he ate yesterday:
If he does, it Janet be because entoosymoosy is a thing of
crowds. It cannot exist without society, or, if it does, it
drives its subject crazy. Take old books, take articles of
vertil, take snuff-boxes, take Shakespeare and the musical
Masses—what a world of entoosymoosy there is afloat in
the world about Shakespeare ! The same about Chaucer.
The same, again, about Shelley. But if we would all of
us learn to feign nothing, to express no more than we feel,
and to proportion our beliefs to the proofs of them, we
should find—at first—that our lives were made a little more
difficult, and that some of the accustomed flutter and fuse
were missing ; but there would be the comfort of feeling
that such beliefs as we really cherished were solid, and
that when we did get excited, it was with enthusiasm, and
not with entoosymoosy.

The John Bull thinks that the game of "Beggar my
Neighbour" is sometimes played by statesmen, anc
curiously all the tricks change, and the Court cards shift
backwards and forwards. At present the game is more
interesting than usual, for it concerns Ireland and hes
Church. The popular cry, now, is all for complete
equality ; that no one Church or creed should in any way
find favour more than another ; in fact, that you should
not favour what you believe to be right, any more than
that you believe to be wrong. Not only this. You are
asked to take away the lawful and time-honoured revenues
of your own Church—not in order to give them to another
claimant, but simply that your Church should be no better
off than the poorest sect in the United Kingdom. You
are asked to take them away from the Anglican Church
in Ireland, because the mass of Irish people are Roman
Catholic and because the Church of Rome is said to have
a prior right to them. But are the people to be absolved
from paying the amount of their rates and tithes, or arc
they to be given back to the Church of Rome? By no
means. They are to be collected and disposed of by
,Government, probably to promote " secular education."
How this is to relieve the people, or satisfy the "prior
claims" of the Church of Rome, it is not easy to see.

The Saturday Review draws attention to the difficulties
of Mr. Cardwell's position, and trusts that he is making
up his mind to do the work of reform in earnest. It does
not believe that he will find it so impossible to deal with
the Horse Guards as some imagine that he will. In the
near relations which exist between the executive head of
the army and the throne it has been supposed that any
reformer would find a grave source of embarrassment; but
this is an entire delusion. No appeal would be needed to
the sound constitutional principles which have always
governed the conduct of her Majesty, for no one who ever
held the command in chief has acknowledged more frankly
than the Duke of Cambridge that the War Minister
ought to be supreme, and that the proper function of the
Commander-in-Chief is to act as his principal adviser in
military matters. The Horse Guards plotters are much
more zealous for soldier-supremacy than the head of
the Horse Guards has ever shewn himself to be.
That the time has come for the reorganisation
of the War Department, with an unflinching
regard to sound principles of administration and
to nothing else, we are profundly convinced ; and
if Mr. Cardwell appreciates the importance of the
crisis, it is no wonder that he should pause to mature his
plans before committing himself to definite action. If, on
the other hand, he shrinks from the plain duty before him,
and limits his aspirations to that heaven of feeble Ministers
—a plausible compromise sufficient to last his time—he
may well hesitate before choosing between conflicting
schemes which differ only in being more or less
ephemeralof
and inefficient. Still there are modes and degreesith meretem-
porising, and a Minister who is contentb
wone coursely
,
staving off the day of decisive action
may,
formidable than he found it himself,
transmit the difficulty to his successo
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The Conservative ladies of Burnley have grace-
fully recognised the services which Lieutenant-General the
Hon. Sir J. Y. Scarlett had rendered at the recent elec-
tion, by contesting the borough on Conservative principles,
by presenting to Lady Scarlett a magnificent silver-gilt
vase, which bad cost £360, and which had been entirely
subscribed for by the ladies themselves.
STRIKE OF SEAMEN AT NEW YORK.—The seamen
of this port are on a strike for higher wages, and a pro-
cession of about 1,200 of them paraded the lower streets
yesterday. A meeting was afterwards held, and several
against speeches
shippingwere
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keepers,
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are demanding, a heavier commission for It.
rAILM Jima 26. ship ing c;4Ym—