The Sun. — 1870-07-26 (London, England)

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 TradesUnions. 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 Massachusetts. In New York he is to be hanged to lampposts, 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 coalmines, 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, borrowing 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-fearing, 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.