It has been a dry summer, but it has rained financial scandals. The heaviest part of the clearing-off shower—we hope it is clearing off—fell on New Brunswick, N. J., where first the cashier and next the president of a bank committed suicide in the midst of the ruin they had wrought. That is awful, but it is morally more satisfactory and healing than the flight into Canada. When financial wreckers are hurt to the point of remorse and suicide, the horrors of the crime of genteel stealing will begin to be realized. That sin is dangerous, too. Let us thank God and take courage.
Dr. McCosh has been re-visiting the Old World, and at a breakfast party in Belfast stated an interesting fact. “In my early life,” he said, “I applied for many positions which I did not get; but I never applied for the positions which I have since held.” There is plenty of good wholesome use for the motto: “Let the place seek the man.” It is the rule for the good places, as the case of Dr. McCosh shows. Perhaps it is more generally the rule for other places than men suppose it to be.
John Bright continues to excel in strong quotable phrases and descriptions. The House of Lords being once more in the way of reform, Mr. Bright declares that House to be filled with “the spawn of the blunders, the wars and the corruption of the dark ages of our history. They have entered the temple of honor, not through the temple of merit, but through the sepulchres of their ancestors.” The last clause will probably be as lasting as his “Cave of Adullam.”
A notable saying easily forgets its parentage. It is too much trouble for a busy world to remember who said this or that first. An expression passes into currency, and after that it is no matter who coined it. It was, we are now told, a Harvard professor who said not of Edward Everett, but of the Rev. Dr. Huntington, that his prayers were the most eloquent ever addressed to a Boston audience. The Dr. Huntington referred to was then a Unitarian of Boston, but is now Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Central New York. The Christian at Work is our authority for the precise facts. We do not advise any one to try to remember them.
The French have brought about a state of war in China, by a series of aggressive measures which seek the aggrandizement of France at the expense of the territorial rights of the Chinese empire. There is not the least justification for these proceedings; nor can we hope that good will come of it. The French are successful at home and failures abroad. The French cry out that England has done even the same; but that charge, if true, would not excuse France. England has, in all recent instances, had the protection of Englishmen or some other fair pretext. Even the jingoism of Beaconsfield could make some respectable covering for its brutality. The French simply want some land and mines in Tonquin “for the glory of France.”