Wendell Phillips died of heart disease, in Boston, February 5th. Few men become so generally known in a lifetime, without the help of public offices, as Mr. Phillips. He was an orator pure and simple, and, perhaps, when in his prime, the foremost of American orators. He has written nothing that will mark the period of his life among men, but he was a great battle-ax against slavery, and on that issue he found an opportunity to use his powers of denunciation to their maximum. As a lecturer he will be missed, for since the war here he shone the most brilliantly. Dr. Vincent expected him at Chautauqua the coming season to deliver his great lecture—“The Lost Arts.” We shall have more to say concerning him in a future number.
A letter from the wife of a missionary in Madagascar has been published in London. It was written on September 24th. She says: “The mourning for the late queen is ended. It only lasted about two months, and was not of the severe kind of olden times; this time the people were only forbidden to plait their hair, wear hats, carry an umbrella, build much, and to weave cloths, while in former times the mourning lasted at least a year, and everybody’s hair was shaven close to the head, women’s and all; they were not allowed to wear clothes at all, just mats round their waist. The new queen promises to be a worthy successor of her good mother. Her name is Rayafindrahely, but she comes to the throne under the title of Ranavalona III. The Malagasy now publish a newspaper, the Gazety they call it, once a fortnight; it is the first specimen of Malagasy attempt at printing and composing. It is after the style of our own newspapers, and gives the news of everything that happens in every part of the island, and especially of every movement of the queen and prime minister.”
The news from India that Keshub Chunder Sen is dead will occasion profound sorrow. He was in the midst of a great work, and we hoped for much from him in connection with needed reforms in India, to which his life was given. Through his open, manly renunciation of the errors of Brahmanism, and earnest protests against caste, child-marriages, and other social evils of their system, and more by his new theology, Mr. Sen was widely known. In his own land he was reverenced as a religious teacher, orator, and reformer. In this country and in England, where those marvelous outbursts of devout feeling stirred the hearts of all who heard, the chief interest centers in his theology. He, whose words so thrilled other Christian hearts, did not yet confess himself a Christian. He had renounced polytheism, and all forms of idolatrous worship, but attempted to show his countrymen, from their own sacred books, that primitive Hindoos, like himself, were monotheistic. The belief of the Brahmo Somaj, or society of which he became a minister, was a great advance from idolatrous Hindooism, and in most respects seemed like true Christian faith. His work as a reformer seemed full of promise. Who will be his successor to carry it forward, does not yet appear. His early death will be mourned as a great, if not an irreparable, loss. The inchoate creed of the community, so sadly bereaved, is not complete or fixed, and will, we hope, and perhaps now more rapidly, crystallize about the wisest sayings of their great leader. May a divine radiance from the cross of Jesus brighten its every line.
Poverty brings its temptations and makes its demands even on the priests of the church. “The other day a priest in Kerry,” says the St. James Gazette, “went to his Bishop: ‘I want you,’ he said, ‘to give me a general dispensing power for cases of perjury.’ ‘For perjury?’ said his lordship. ‘What do the people want with that?’ ‘Faith!’ answered the good father, ‘they can’t get on without it. For, first of all, the Moonlighters come to them and swear them that they must say that they didn’t know who they were; and then there’s the Arrears Act, and they have to take the oath they’re not worth a farthing; and you know in the Land Court they can’t get a reduction till they say they can’t pay their rent. In fact, my lord, the poor people have to perjure themselves at every turn.’”
Oscar Wilde, in a recent lecture in Dublin, made a remark which deserves more attention than anything which that gentleman has ever said in regard to American customs: “American children seem to be pale and precocious, and that might be owing to the fact that the only national game of America is euchre, which could hardly, if industriously practiced, tend to create and develop a fine or manly physique.” It is undoubtedly too broad a statement to call euchre our national game, but it probably is more universally played than any other. It puts us as a people in a weak light, to say that our leisure is spent in a game that calls for little thought, which gives us no outdoor exercise, and which enervates rather than strengthens, but it is the true light. We are, as a rule, making of ourselves hot-house plants. Vigorous games are shunned; weak ones are adopted. The criticism is just, and worth our attention.