The Committee on Public Education in the New York Legislature, led by Mr. Abel Goddard, made a report on a “Dime Novel Bill,” recently, in these words: “Any person who shall sell, loan, or give to any minor under sixteen years of age, any dime novel or book of fiction, without first obtaining the written consent of the parent or guardian of such minor, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, punishable by imprisonment or by a fine not to exceed fifty dollars.” Objection is made to this bill, that it is indefinite, in that it fails to explain what a dime novel is, and that we can not deal by legislation with the injurious influences of any form of literature. In reply, it may be said, there are more than forty thousand miles of railway in this country from which the sale of certain pernicious publications are excluded. Mr. Anthony Comstock and his co-laborers have been explaining for several years what the “dime novel” is, and how injurious it has been to boy and girl readers. This bill is a new ray of light on a dark subject.
Karl Marx, the father of modern socialism, has recently died. He was a former correspondent of the New York Tribune, and the author of “Capital.” He has been expelled from half the countries of Europe, and proscribed in nearly all of them. The fruit of the seeds he has sown can not now be told.
The motto of M. De Lesseps seems to be—excavate. After giving us the Suez Canal and beginning a scheme for linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, he tells us that Sahara shall cease to be a burning waste, and be made to furnish vapors and cooling winds; that the desert shall become a sea. The project is not a new one, but has presented such monstrous obstacles that no one but engineers of the wildest imagination have contemplated it seriously. M. De Lesseps announces that, let him have one hundred machines of a power equal to one hundred thousand men, and the work shall be accomplished. The scheme will be discouraged. M. De Lesseps’s trip to Tunis has already been called “a fool’s errand,” but when we see the mountain tunnelled, the continents joined, the oceans about to join hands, it is best to consider before we say that any project is impossible, especially when M. De Lesseps is the engineer.
Apropos of the Panama Canal, the work is begun; ten thousand men are there, and out of these but a few are sick, thus largely disarming the statement that men can not work there. It need not be feared that the international squabbling will in any way interfere with the canal company’s work. The son of De Lesseps recently stated in an interview that that canal company was simply a business firm, and was there to dig the canal—all other questions were for the nations to settle.
As wise and true a policy as has been advanced on the Irish question, is contained in a remark by Lady Frederick Cavendish, whose husband was murdered at Dublin. She says: “I pray that neither the unspeakable greatness of my sorrow nor the terrible wickedness of these men, may blind either myself or any of the English people to the duty of patience, justice, and sympathy, in thoughts, words, and deeds, with regard to Ireland and its people at large.”