The Sun.
London, England, 1869-12-25 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

The saddest season of the year is once more upon us,

remarks the Saturday Review. The external gloom corre-
sponds only too well to the melancholy with which we are
naturally impressed. We are gathered in family parties,
and are bored by people whom we love so well that our'
weariness is intensified by a sense of guilt; we are sad-
dened more excusably by the gaps which have been made
in our circle ; and many of us have madly retired into
country-houses to bestow our whole tediousness upon
each other with more persistency and fewer opportunities
of escape. This being so, what is the rational
conclusion ? We do not propose to abolish the
convivial celebration of Christmas, if only for
the sake of the pleasure which it really gives to some
people. Children -have spirits which are not .so easily
damped ; and a certain number of the poor get the tan-
gible advantage of a solid dinner, of which we should be
very sorry to deprive them, even though it is often
washed down with an undue quantity of gin. We may,
if we please, regard Christmas as an occasion on which we
submit to be thoroughly bored for the sake of the simple-
minded classes. It is something to make a sacrifice at
times, not only of money, but of pleasure, and even of the
dignity of rational beings. If anything else should be re-
quired to fill up a discourse, there is a very good field of
inquiry in the difficulty of maintaining the vitality of old
institutions. There is undoubtedly much about the sen-
timents associated with Christmas which grows stronger
instead of weaker as we grew older, and the essence of the
celebration will doubtless remain as long as people have
imaginations or a sense of religion. But it is curious to
remark how dead some of the ancient forms become, and
how depressing an effect they produce. We are wonder-
ful restorers in these clays ; we can produce a building
which shall be a perfect imitation of any given
period of architecture, and we could doubtless get
up yule logs and boars' heads and all the rest of
it with such perfect propriety as to deceive a ghost from
the Middle Ages. Somehow, there are cases in which, as
in the Eglinton tournament, the closeness of the imitation
only serves to bring out the want of real spirit in the per-
_f....coanee. Christmas has some counterbalancing pleasures
in its general melancholy foL-, art.. .n, .1..1 of
eating and drinking is always agreeable to the flesh. If
we could manage to celebrate it in such fashion that the
external forms should be natural expressions of sentiment,
instead of mechanical repetitions of traditional obser-
vances, they would cease to jar upon us,- and we might
possibly make it an exhilarating occasion, in spite of a
shade of melancholy which clings to all kinds of anniver-
sary performances. There is a certain sadness about any-
thing which reminds us that we are a year older; but it
need not be a disagreeable sadness. How this object is to
be accomplished is, however, a large question.
The Spectator, in referring to the tragedy of the Fasting
Girl, observes that it was a sad case, but its sadness con-
sists to us in the amount of folly, credulity, and supersti-
tious obstinacy it revealed, not in the death of the poor
little girl, or of the humane though unerring means taken
to discover a persistent imposture. Society, which was
being preyed on, had a right to take them, and so had
science, and it took them with all the limitations and pre-
cautions it could devise, the nurses being strictly enjoined
to give the girl food if she desired it. It had been suggested
that the girl's hysteria took the form of a positive ina-
bility to eat or drink in public, and that, therefore, the
watching itself caused her death; but the hypothesis is worth-
less. Sarah Jacobs could speak up to the hour of her death;
she was of full intelligence, and her request for food and
privacy to eat it in would have been at once obeyed
Neither nurses nor doctors, in fact, assisted death ; all they
did was to provide that an imposture should no longer
prove profitable ; and that they had a right to do, their
moral position being in no way altered by the obstinacy of
the performer.

The Saturday Review satirizes the new custom of
exchanging extraordinary articles through the medium of
a weekly journal. No flight of imagination could match
the strange combinations with which we here become
familiar. "Fifty songs and a medicine chest" are offered
for competition—a very curious old Bible for a tea-kettle,
a rifle for twelve buff Cochins. Rose-trees for an iron
fire-proof safe ; a Latin Dictionary for a side-saddle ; a
ten-guinea portmanteau for a parrot; Beppo and Don
Juan for a pair of candlesticks; which last exchange must
be on the ex funto dare lucent principle. Naturally this
strikes people as a delightful method of getting rid of
lumber. It takes a long time to learn—sometimes it is
never learnt—that rubbish is rubbish all the world over.
These columns. show us the shove and impulse by which
human nature strives to free itself from an incubus ; enli-
vened by the hope that somebody will even recognise a
want in what has hitherto been a nuisance and an incum-
brance. It does not do, perhaps, thus to describe
" Black Bee's " "large collection of preserved snakes," but
we wish rather than hope that the' offers to which she is
open will come tumbling in. There is no doubt, however,
that parties about to marry will resent the suggestion of a
huge piece of Berlin worsted-work as eligible for a
wedding present. "Mandarin," who wants offers for anti-
macassars, must, we predict, like a great many other
people, "let want be her master." We may, we trust, say
the same to possessors of savage feather trimmings, for it
would be a serious matter if such were to come in vogue as
wearing apparel. The refrain " I want "is the pathetic
note of this utterance of humanity--" I want earrings," " I
want a gold locket," " I want so many yards of lace, or fur,
-or glass beads ;" to which " I have" is set against. I have
such and such gewgaws of which I am ' heartily tired.
Sometimes the want is imparted without reasonable hope
of satisfaction, as where wo read "I want a new silk
umbrella." Pets are a favourite article of exchange, and
the wants in this direction are startling enough. Thus
"Beady" wants a small female monkey. "She must be
young, and small, and not have a projecting nose." For
this treasure a freezing machine, a child's dinner set, and
twenty new songs are offered, and the "tenderest love and
care" promised. Parrots, jackdaws, magpies are offered
for jewellery, a pet blackbird for a locket and chain, five
feather-legged bantams for a card-table. Pegs aro in
demand.

The John Bull is glad, in the interests of justice, that
the prosecution has failed. But it cannot, it says, help
being glad in the interests of commercial morality that it
was instituted. There is, indeed, a wide difference
between wilful suppression and concealment, with a view
to one's own profit, or one's own extrication from ruin,
and suppression and concealment, equally wilful it may
be, but intended to benefit, not oneself alone, but all
who are concerned. The idea that a speculative under-
taking can be conducted with great profit and ad-
vantage if only people can be persuaded to engage
M it, cannot, however, justify from a moral point
of view the suppression of circumstances which, if
known would prevent people from so engaging
in it. The shareholders had a right to form their own
opinion, not to be tricked into a good thing. The risk
might have appeared small to the promoters of the new
company, and very likely would have appeared so to
many of those who actually took shares in that
company. Very likely, too, under less disad-
vantageous circumstances, the company might have
turned out to be the good thing which its pro-
moters expected it to be. These are the strong points in
favour of the directors • but the other side of the case
must not be overlooked. The very fact that timorous
people might have shrunk back if they had been
acquainted with the whole arrangement rendered it
more important in the interest of commercial morality
that the whole arrangement should have been dis-
closed. That the concealment was not dictated by
purely selfish motives, but by a bond fide belief that it was
for the benefit of those who were to be influenced by that
concealment, only palliates it, and cannot justify it.
The ruin brought on so many ignorant and unwary
shareholders is no less great than it would have
been, had the motives of the promoters been
less open to extenuating circumstances. The
lesson is a sharp one, but if directors for the
future abstain even from concealment dictated by the
best intentions, and allow the public to judge for them-
selves what is and what is not for their benefit, then the
lesson of these days of public humiliation and shame which
have fallen upon the ill-starred directors of Overend and
Gurney, will not have been learned in vain.

The Economist does not believe in the rumoured dis-
armament. It is essentially (our contemporary says) of
the season of pantomime. It arises out of Napo:eon's love
of conquest. And a congress, in our contemporary's
opinion, could not settle such a question. A general dis-
armament (our contemporary goes on) can only be effected
in one way—through the individual belief of each Govern-
ment, acting separately, that there is little danger
of any immediate strain on its military resources •,
and it is just as absurd to expect that the different
States of Europe, having totally different emergencies to
provide against as well as totally different systems of pro-
viding against those emergencies, should come to a joint
resolution of this kind, as it would be to expect that different
banks having totally different classes of liabilities should
come to any joint resolution as to the amount of reserve f und
they would keep. If mutual confidence can be encouraged,
if mutual suspicions can be allayed, if dynastic changes
seem less and less likely, if the question of true
" rectification of national boundaries " becomes a
forgotten controversy, if ambitious and parvenu
rulers are succeeded by commonplace sovereigns
who are in the hands of their people, and who
reign only because their people wish it—then we shall
have a real disarmament but it will be one which the
safest and least embroiled Powers will begin first, and
the most ambitious and most embroiled Powers will
be the last to join in. There is no way that
we see of encouraging general disarmament except
by giving guarantees that war can never be capri-
ciously entered on, can never be due to the mere political
strategy of a single uneasy ruler. If the Emperor of the
French wishes to secure a general disarmament, we should
say that by far the most powerful means he could adopt for
that end would be not negotiation but an act quite within
his own power—to descend into a mere constitutional ruler,
and give up all his powers of initiating a brilliant foreign
policy unsanctioned by his Parliament. That would be a
real security against sudden and unanticipated wars ; and
it is of course the possibility of sudden and unanticipated
wars, and not simply of wars of any kind, which compels
the Powers of Europe to arm on so much more magnificent
a scale recently than heretofore.

Mr. Gold win Smith will, it is expected, return to
England next year, as the American climate does not suit
his .health.
Some notice has been taken of an anecdote, to
which the Tinzes first gave currency, of an iuterview be-
tween the Pope and Cardinal do Bounechose, in which both
were made to use very strong-language. Cardinal do Bonne_
chose has since written a letter to the Universes,
in whirl, Lis
Eminence declares that the whole story i
false," and. in every particular "a puro invention."
Two medical cases are simultaneously reported. A
woman in Manchester, who had ben improperly treated
by a herbalist, died. Mr. T onsaid the
Latham, a surgeon,
attack 'under which the deceased died was such
that it would have given way to proper restortives.—
A gentleman named Douglas, who had basin an assistant in
a regular surgery, has been fined 44 and costs at Bolton for
practising as a surgeon without having duly qualified him-
self to do so by registration.