Public ledger. [volume] (Memphis, Tenn.) 1865-1893, 1877-05-10


riches, and that they were a power
ful political body-too powerful for
king and pope.
The Wicked CITY OF bucharest.
Miss Berger, an English lady, has
published a oook on Bucharest, en-
titled ga Winter in the City of
Pleasure ; or, Life on the Lower
Danube" which gives a rather as
tonishing picture of the excesses
practiced by the people of that re-
gion. Bucharest is painted as a
veritable modern Babylon, far sur
passing Paris in making a business
of friyolity:
"An ignorant, superstitious cler-
gy, without a shred of morality ;
criminal intrigues without love ;
divorces without restraint; hus-
bands without wives; wives with
out husbands; families divided and
scattered, the sons with the moth
ers, the daughters with the fathers
fortunes eaten up by loans; estates
burdened by mortgages; rich men
without penny of cash; long
streets without houses; splendid
mansions and villainous novels
fine equipages and filthy cutters
magnificent dresses and scanty lin
en-; Aubusson carpets and distem-
pered walls ; princely furniture and
nothing in the larder; such is Bu-
charestw
She writes further of the place
and its people:
"From modern Babylon, on the
banks Of the Seine, they have i'm
ported all the old attractive vices,
the levity, the reckless extravaganza,
the wicked witty sayings, the we'll
bred Atheism, the comedy of adul-
terry. Paris has tainted this growing
city with the breath of corruption
You can trace her influence through
all and over all. She has transmit
ted to Young Roumania her lively
manners and her easy morals; but
the liveliness of the one and the
ease of the other have developed in
their progress eastward.
''The peasant still groans and
Sweats nnder the curse of Adam.
lie works hard, and lives hard, and
goes through an unevSntiul, labor
ious life, unvisited even by one OF
elevating influences that in more
civilized countries come occasionally
like heaven n-descended rays to cheer
tie darkness of those who toll in
order that they may not starye
Scarce the equal Of the patient OK
that he prods with his cruel goad
as it treads beside him in the fur.
rows, the Roumanian peasant has
not yet emerged from the night oi
ignorance and slavery into the day-
light Of knowledge and freedom
Centuries Of oppression on the one
side and of abject submission on
the other have dulled his intellect
and broken his spirit, and given
him the seryile, deprecating all
that is never seen on the faces Of
free men. What a world of differ
ence between these two types Of
society-the pampered sybarite Of
the city, and the tattered inhabi-
tant of the mud howell Is there
any other affinity between them
and their common claim upon the
mother earth? What points of re-
semblance are there between that
well dressed cynical offshoot of a
hot-bed civilization, the fit of whose
gloves is of more moment to him
than the rise and fall of empires,
who reclines back in his elegant
carriage that is paid for (if paid fol
at ally by the tithes wrung from the
toll of his wretched brother, and
who, gay and smiling and debon-
naire, filings to the right and left ol
him his compliments, his courtesies,
his delicate, artful Aatteries-and
that degraded son Of the soil, who
passes doggedly along in the miro,
with sodoened rags bound round
his feet and legs by thongs, a foul
sheepskin dangling from his shoul-
ders, his brown bosom bare to the
winters blast, his long, matted hair
falling over his face and eyes?"