The Sun.
London, England, 1866-12-25 00:00:00

V

tras, t would now probably be reduced to some-
thing like 10, or even five. Although blood may be
thicker than water, the difference in the degree of
attenuation tends to become every day more trifling.
For instance, persons who live in large and busy
towns concern themselves much less with their less
near relations than people do who live in the coun-
try. A man may live in the same town with his
uncle without knowing anything of what the uncle
is doing, and without seeing him more than three or
four times a year, and then only by accident. In
the country, as a rule, this is quite different. Men
and women know all about the doings of their cog-
nates, take a keen interest in them, and, in the ab-
sence of a guard, meet frequently. In thoroughly
cotuitry districts anyboly would be thought " nu-
canny" who evinced any respect for the systematic
observance, and in a religious spirit, of the ancient
rites of the family. Streaking with levity or flip-
pancy of a Christmas or a New Year gathering
round the patriarchal heart would be nearly as bad
as scepticism about the Pentateuch. Yet in big
towns there is very little of this reproach attached to
a neglect of family meetings. A man may boldly
profess himself bored at the prospect of
having to dine or spend a day wth a parcel
of dull and stupid people, just because they
happen to come from a common great-grand-
father. He may even positively decline to assist at
the ceremony of the annual celebration of the family
dulness, or stillness, or quarrelsomeness. Nobody
living in town would on this account stigmatise him
as a cold and heartless person. But, further afield,
indifference to the rite of the sacred pudding would
pass for something about as bad as indifference to the
services of the Church. Indeed, it would be treated
as the thin end of the wedge. A man who refused to
partake of the Christmas morsel in company with
pompous uncles and unkindly critical aunts would
appear, to the utsophisticated minds of country
places, to have entered into fatally rationalistic
courses.

There are plenty of reasons why it should come

to pass that family ties sit more lightly than they
ever did. Increased ardour for business, for instance,
is one of them. The range of social ambition is much
higher than it used to be. Men want more money,
and consequently they are forced to devote both a
great deal more time and a great deal more attention
to money-making. The obvious result of this is a
diminished capacity for thinking and caring about
other people. There is scarcely room, in an ordi-
nary mind engrossed with the harassing anxieties
of affairs, for anybody besides his wife and children.
They alone more than fill up the spare corners of his
attention. And this increase of the intensity of social
ambition acts in a still more palpable way upon the
family. England becomes too small for the number
of her sons. How many families are there now of
which some member does not find his way to India,
to Australia, to Canada, to China, to New Zealand?
It is no longer the black sheep only who leave home.
More often they are now the most energetic and
promising members of a home who cut asunder all
retaining ties, and resolve to push their fortunes in
remote colonies and dependencies. India, above
all, makes dire gaps. The Christmas gathering is
thus most painfully curtailed. It seems as if whole

and entire families never met together nowadays

as they used to do in the days of our grandfathers.
From the point of view of mere feeling this is very
saddening. Yet nobody denies that a man had
better dine alone at Shanghai on Christmas Day,
if he is making some way in the world, than dine at
home with his grandmother and his parents and all
his uncles and aunts and cousins, if he is making no
way in the world. Loneliness, and a sense of the
disruption of family ties, are obviously not the
worst sources of gloominess that may befal a man.
For all this, however, it requires some fortitude for

friends at home to think tranquilly of the solitary
man spending his first Christmas at Shanghai. One
must be a bit of a Stoic to look at his empty place

in church or at table, when we remember for
many years his place was not empty. Of course this
is nonsense, our cynic tel:ss us; Christmas Day is
only a day comic un mitre, and he dines alone at
Shanghai 361 other days as well every year. If you
admit this, but humbly add that anniversaries bring
these things more vividly before one, our ready

friend sets you down as an incorrigible sentimen-
talist, inaccessible to considerations of pure reason,
and incapable of looking at the bare facts. As if the
bare facts were any the worse for being adorned
with gracious and tender sentiment ; or, to borrow
a simile from Mr. Carlyle, as if there were any
harm, or anything other than good, in having a soft
silken inner lining to the rough garment of one's
existence.

There is another aspect in which the family gather-
ing has altered. Every day,we seem to get more and
more removed in practice from the old conception
which made the domestic servant a quasi-member of
the family. It is not that people ignore that
they have a duty to their servants. They recognise
this perfectly in theory, and in practice even they
strive to realise it in a general way. But tho
socially scientific idea of duty to servants is widely
different from the exploded patriarchal idea. It is a
question whether, in spite of the attractive grace of
the patriarchal idea, it was not, in fact, much worse
for the servant than even the arid mercies of social

science. The patriarch always had the power of
life and death over his servants, as over the rest of
his family. The modern householder may be cold,
and stiff, and unsympathetic towards his servants,
but at least he does not bastinade them, nor have

them decapitated. Still it would make a great im-
provement if we could superadd to the modern the
more ancient theory ; and, while recognising the
liberty of the inferior, could recognise the duty of
protection and of a measure of friendship for him or
her. Considering the extent to which they are cut
_ _

off from their natural family, it would not be more

than just or humane to give them a more admitted

place in their artificial or adopted family. It will be
a long time before we get back to the feudal plan of

dining at table with the family retainers, even with

the distinction of dining above and below the salt.

Meanwhile the best thing is to recognise their right
not merely to improve themselves, which is the idea

of social science, but to enjoy themselves with as
much of true jollity as the temper of modern times
will permit.

Foreign Mail Packet List.

MAILS DUE.
Australia and New Zealand, via Southampton...— Deo. 20.
Ditto, via Marseilles Jan. 13.
Brazil and Cape Verde, by British paoket Jan. 4.
Ditto, by French packet
Cape of Good Hope, Aeoension, and St. Helena Dee. 28.
China, Penang, and Singapore, via Southampton Dec 20.
Ditto, via Marseilles. Dee. 28
Falkland Islands

Gibraltar, via Southampton Deo. 14.
India (Calcutta), and Ceylon, via Southampton Dea. 2,).
Ditto, via Marseilles
India (Bombay), via Southampton. Dec. 20.
Ditto, via Marseilles ... Dee. 23
Malta, Egypt, and Aden, via Southampton Dec. 2).
Ditto, via Marseilles Dec. 23.
Mauritius, via Southampton Dec. 2)
Ditto, via Marseil:e3. Jan. lg,
Newfoundland ... Jan. 2.
Portuga)

_
Ditto, by private ship to Lisbon.
United States and British North America, by Bri-
tish packet
Ditto, by United States packet, via Southamp-

ton ......
Ditto, via Cork
Ditto, Dy l
Panket, via Louniderry ..Dee. 1.
Coats tot Africa, Madeira, and TAicriffe Jan. 3
West Indica and Pacific (except Balialuaa and
liondurai) • Dec'29
Babaim..4, via New 1 ork.
Cuba aid !flexion Jan I'.
Det".
Bermuda, via Ilalit.tx Jan. 16.

The report that three cargoes of small arms had
been shipped. from the Baton Rouge Arsenal for a
military force to be organised on the Mexican fron-
tier proves to have been incorrect, and arose no
doubt from the shipping of arms from that place to
New York for repairs.
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