The new administration in, and the consolidation of affairs in, Alsace and Lorraine, have made most satisfactory progress. By careful and well-devised management we have succeeded in driving out the population of these two provinces, two of the wealthiest in the world, in rendering their cities desolate and their smiling country a desert: in gaining for ourselves a new legacy of hatred, and arousing the disgust and, what politically is worse, the suspicion of all governments outside our own.
As a further comment on this speech we must add the dangerous symptoms of revolt exhibited by the Upper House in the Prussian diet, and the dubiously constitutional mode adopted of bringing it to submission. The influx of French gold would seem to have created a South Sea Bubble commotion in financial circles. Rent in the chief cities and towns has increased twofold; the cost of living has risen with it. This falls heaviest, of course, on the middle and lower classes, so that we are not surprised to hear, that the rate of living having increased 60 or 70 per cent. for the poorer classes during the last six or seven years, and the French gold never having filtered down to their pockets, the poor have been unable to meet their new expenses, and “ever since the conclusion of peace with France,” to quote the special correspondent of the London Times, April 11th, “the German workmen have been at war with their ‘masters.’ ” As a last comment we see the German people fleeing from this glorious consolidation of confederate governments in such numbers that the central government is compelled to call into practice measures as harsh on the one side to restrain their own people from running away as they used to force out the inhabitants of Alsace and Lorraine. We believe we have said enough of German “Unity” on its first two years of lease to show that its workings, whether internal or external, have been anything but satisfactory so far, and far from hopeful to the world at large.
The strikes which were successful in Germany were not restricted to that locality. They spread through the greater part of Europe, and reached out here to us, with varied success. New York was in many departments of business at a standstill in what is generally esteemed as the busiest portion of the year. Fortunately with us and for the greater part elsewhere, the “strikes” passed off peaceably, and the masters and workmen succeeded in coming to a compromise at least for the time being. This uprising of labor against capital formed one of the most significant, we fear most threatening, aspects of the year. There was a union and a combination among the working classes of European nations and our own, which enabled them to offer a persistent, solid, and bold front to their employers. Funds and a more perfect organization, neither of which seem to us impossible, would convert trades-unions into the most formidable power in the world. Christian education can alone hope to convert this into a legal power. At present it wavers between the dictates of good sense and fair demands and the wild and impossible, but, to half-educated men, very fascinating, dreams of the Communists. Labor is beginning at last to feel its power, its numbers, its irresistible [pg 563] force; that the world cannot get on without it, as little as it can get on without the co-operation of the rest of the world. Let the laboring classes receive an education worthy of the name, plant religion in their hearts while at school, and, when they come to face the hard problem, the division of wealth, they will be led away by no fallacious teachings that what is and always must be a necessity is a wrong done to humanity; but divorce the schools, as governments seem now resolved to do, from religion, and labor will merge into Communism.
France has borne her terrible trials with a calmness, a magnanimity, and a self-dependence which have regained for her in the eyes of the world more than she ever lost at Sedan. We speak here of the nation, not of its haphazard government. Thiers is at present a necessity; and by the aid of the bogy “resignation” which he has conjured up so often, and whereby he frightens the still cautious Assembly into submission, he has managed to hold the dangerous elements in such a state of order that the nation has been able so far to regain public confidence that its loans were caught up with avidity; it has almost freed itself from the foot of the foe; it has frowned down the folly of Gambetta; restored its army to a sound footing, and won the admiration and good-will of all by its truly patriotic bearing in the face of a rapacious, dictatorial, and merciless conqueror. But Thiers cannot last, and what is to follow? The country would not bear the rule of “the man of Sedan,” though, undoubtedly, his twenty years of firm government wrought it up to the pitch of material prosperity which even its terrible losses have been unable to destroy. The speech of the Duc d'Audiffret Pasquier on the army contracts, showing a system of finance in the army somewhat similar to that which has recently greeted our eyes in the city government, has killed Napoleonism for the nonce. We can only hope for the best in France from some other and nobler sprout of former dynasties; we cannot foresee it. We must not forget that the nation has been kneeling at its altars and shrines. Of course superior people and “witty” writers have laughed at and insulted a nation for being foolish enough and so far behind the age as to believe in the assistance of a God whom they could not contain in their capacious intellects. France has survived the laughter and disregarded the laughers; but her sons have been none the less obedient to the laws and constitution established, and thus restored confidence in their country, by acknowledging the efficacy of divine worship, and the intercession of the blessed Mother with her divine Son.
The year has, happily, borne no war stain on its record; for we cannot dignify the English expedition against the Looshais in India by that title. Revolts among the natives have of late been cropping up again in British India, while the silent but steady march of Russia, with all her vast forces, nearer and nearer to the outline of the British possessions, threatens at no distant date an inevitable collision between the two powers, which, in the not very doubtful event of Russia's victory, would avenge Sebastopol, and, at the same time more than counterbalance the present supremacy of Germany in Europe.
While England was all aglow with the gorgeous story of pomp and pageantry coming from the far East, of reviews of armies, of gallant processions from end to end of the land, of displays of splendor, and more than royal magnificence flashing on the bewildered gaze of the Easterns; outshining in dazzling brilliancy their own “barbaric pearl and gold”—wrought up to win over their allegiance by giving them some idea of the vast power of that empire far away, whose representative could muster such a show of majesty—came a cruel little flash across the world telling us that the show was ended by the death of the chief performer at the hands of an obscure assassin. A few feet in advance of his party, in the gloom of evening, as he is about to step from the pier into his boat, the stroke of a knife from a hidden assailant, and—Lord Mayo, the great Viceroy, is slain. England viewed his death as a national calamity. Following close on the heels of the murder of Mr. Justice Norman by another native, of the outbreaks of the Kookas and the Looshais, it had a significance which the nation took to heart.
From a further corner of the East still comes a dread story of famine devouring 3,000,000 of people in Persia. Small succor was offered them by their Christian brethren: and such as was sent seems to have reached them with the greatest difficulty. Horrible tales are told of hunger overcoming all the ties of nature, and mothers, in their madness, devouring even [pg 564] their own offspring. The harvest for this season was a very excellent one; but its effects cannot be felt till the coming year.
The East has not exhausted its romance yet, though this time it wears a less grim visage. We refer to the discovery of Dr. Livingstone by Mr. Stanley, a reporter of the New York Herald. Everybody believed Dr. Livingstone dead: Mr. Bennett believed him living: he despatched Mr. Stanley to interview him somewhere in the middle of Africa, and Mr. Stanley obeyed as successfully as though he had only been despatched to one of our hotels to “interview” a political man. Of course nobody believed either Stanley or the Herald; and of course there has been much consequent laughing at the “easy-chair geographers,” when white, after all, turned out to be white and not black, as the learned gentlemen thus designated demonstrated to a nicety. But we should imagine that the persistent doubts of these gentlemen were the highest compliment which could be paid, either to Mr. Stanley or Mr. Bennett, as indicating the almost utter impossibility of their stupendous and brilliant enterprise. To the world at large, the finding of a man, whom, with all due respect, we cannot but look upon as self-lost, is the least part of the undertaking. Mr. Stanley's expedition and disclosures of the horrors of the slave trade have awakened a new interest in that horrible traffic, and promises to enlist the sympathies of nations in unison against it.
After a sleep of centuries Japan has reopened her gates to Christian influences and civilization—gates closed since the work so gloriously commenced by S. Francis Xavier was marred by the narrowness and selfishness and unchristian spirit of European traders. The Mikado despatched an embassy under the leadership of one of his chief statesmen, Iwakura, in order to study this boasted civilization and see what it was like. In the meantime, Christians are still suffering persecution and even death in Japan. But why should Iwakura interfere to stop it when he finds “civilized” governments, such as Germany and Italy, setting Japan a brilliant example in the same line of policy?
Correspondents give us reason to dread a fresh outbreak in China similar to the Tientsin massacre. We trust that the representatives of the European powers and our own will be alive to this. Nothing of great import has occurred in the empire beyond the marriage of his Celestial Majesty.