The Northern Guardian. — 1894-01-17 (Hartlepool, Cleveland, England)

LOVE AND SUICIDE.  THBRH are scores of maidens in this wide world of ours who yearn for the love of man just as much as the love-sick maidens in the pretty opera "Patience," which is at present staged at the Theatre Royal, West Hartlepool. There are scores who could sing the pretty but pathetic words with great feeling, and prompted by the best of motives :  Twenty love-siek maidens we, Love-sick all against our will. They feel certain that they would make better wives than many of their chosen friends, and it is their pure and undoubted love for man and for his benefit that they feql the pangs of love-sickness—it is not for any personal ambition. Well, love, if requited, is a splendid thing, and, if all marriages were prompted by it, there would be fewer public exhibitions of domestic troubles and trials. But the excruciating pain of love unreciprocated must be trying in the extreme to the gentle maiden, but still we are told that it is better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all. It may be, but there were girls in Newcastle and Poplar who thought very differently. They were jilted, and they could not live on the remembrance of days of cooing in the past, and the pleasant hours spent in whisperlug little nothings into each's ears. The pain, disappointment, and loss of their lovers were too great for them, and they committed suicide. Sad as the disappointment must be to girls whose lovers turn out to be false, some people are forced to bear far greater troubles (ind yet they do not all rush to the unknown world. In case there should be any of our readers who are passing through the dire troubles caused by faithless wooers, we would,Ovise them to give up the life of dreaming for one of work. There is no better remedy for trouble of any kind than that of hard and determined work.  It is good to hear that Sir Henry Loch and Mr Cecil Rhodes are of one mind, as to the settlement of the Matabele war. It would require vary little to create a quarrel of a disastrous character between this country and the South African colonies. If these colonies should express their desire "to deal else- i where "—to use the phrase employed by Mr ' Rhodes—the tendency of modern statesmanship would be to take them at their word. But it is very doubtful whether the Liberal Party would be disposed to take this view in the present instance. As against Mr Cecil Rhodes and the Chartered Company, they insist upon the power of the Crown and the supremacy of the Crown in a style which has a fine old Jacobite flavour about it. We shall never come to blows with our South African colonists about tea, but we may about the natives, particularly as the Cape standard of treatment of the black races becomes more and more influenced by Boer ideas and Boer habits. Our Imperial policy has but a blundering record in South Africa, and at the present moment it is to be wished that a stronger man than Lord Ripon were at the Colonial Office.  -000 The antics of the Thirteen Club seem to present a singularly feeble kind of fooling for grown persons to indulge in. One can imagine fourth form boys finding diversion in defying superstitions about spilling salt and passing under ladders, and thinking it excruciating fun to dine in company with imitation skeletons and counterfeit skulls. But for grown men the humour of it seems so thin that we are driven to the conclusion that the club must have an ulterior object in performing their freaks and getting their proceedings written about in the papers. What is their game? Will it all turn out to be merely an ingenious method of advertising some new kind of soap?