Various

“ Bribery and corruption is a universal element in civilised society; but let us talk in the meantime of political bribery and corruption. It is the theory of the law—if the law really has a theory—that in the matter of a parliamentary canvass, every man, as a celebrated Irish minister expressed it, should stand upon his own bottom. By this poetical figure, Lord Londonderry meant that the man should depend upon himself, upon his own merits and character, without having recourse to any extrinsic means of working upon the judgment of others. ”

“ Eva was kind to everybody—kind even to Topsy, a negro girl whom St Clare had one day bought out of mere charity, on seeing her cruelly lashed by her former master and mistress. Topsy is a fine picture of a brutalised young negro, who never speaks the truth even by chance, and steals because she cannot help it. Every one gives up Topsy as utterly irreclaimable—all except the gentle Eva. ”

“ No engine of a merely physical kind has ever wrought so powerfully to secure lasting international peace as the steam-engine. The locomotive is every hour breaking down barriers of separation between races of men. And as wars in future could be conducted only by cutting short the journeys by railway, arresting trains, and ruining great commercial undertakings, we may expect that nations will pause before rushing into them. ”

“ There sat the two children on the floor, with their side-faces towards them, Topsy with her usual air of careless drollery and unconcern; but, opposite to her, Eva, her whole face fervent with feeling, and tears in her large eyes.
"What does make you so bad, Topsy? Why won't you try and be good? Don't you love anybody, Topsy?" ”

“ What I doubt is, whether they who have not been solely influenced by patriotic motives, have any right to cast stones at the free and independent elector who has sold his vote for a sovereign.
If the common saying be true, that 'every man has his price,' then are we all open to bribery and corruption; and the only difficulty lies in ascertaining the weak side of our nature. ”

“ These railways, from all that could be seen, were doing much to improve the countries traversed, and extend a knowledge of English comforts; for it must always be borne in mind that the railway system, with its locomotives, carriages, waiting-rooms, commodious and cheap transit, and other matters, is essentially English. Hence, wherever one sees a railway in full operation, he may be said to see a bit of England. And is not this something to be proud of? The railway being your true civiliser, England may be said to have sent out a missionary of improvement, whom nothing can withstand. ”

“ We feel amiable, genteel, and refined; we detest the appearance of low impropriety, and would take a good deal of trouble to put it down; we look very kindly on the world in general, if the low people who are in it would only become as decorous as ourselves. In the old republics, the case was different. There men had a theory, even if a bad one, and they stuck to it through good report and through bad report. The theory was the spirit of the community, and its members sacrificed to it their whole individuality. ”

“ Put down bribery and corruption: that is fair. And more especially put down open, shameless, and brutal bribery and corruption, for its very coarseness is, in itself, an additional crime. But no reform is efficacious that does not come from within; and when refined men wage war against vulgar vices, let them look sharply to their own. I do not say, that by taking thought they will be able to do entirely away with the seductive influence of a bow, or a dinner, or a kind action ”

“ A thousand considerations like these blind them to the absence of merit and character on the part of the candidate, and lay them open to that extrinsic influence which, according to the meaning of the law, is bribery and corruption. As for the man who takes his bribe, for the sake of convenience, in the direct, portable, and exchangeable form of a sovereign, he lays it out in any pleasure or distinction he, on his part, has a fancy for. If he is a dissolute person, he spends it in the public-house; if he is a proper-behaved husband, he gives his wife a new gown ”

“ After a world of trouble, financial and diplomatic, the present ruler of Egypt has succeeded in giving reality to a scheme for a railway from Alexandria to the Nile. A glance at a map of Egypt will shew us that a canal extends from Alexandria to the Nile, to escape the sanded-up mouths of that famous river. It is mainly to expedite the overland route, so far as concerns the transit along this canal, that the railway now in process of construction has been planned; anything beyond this, it will be for future ages to develop. ”

“ For if the oxidizable miasma are destroyed by atmospheric ozone, they, in turn, cause the latter to disappear, and we have seen that it is itself a miasm. This is doubtless the reason why ozone does not accumulate in the atmosphere in greater proportion than the oxidizable miasma, notwithstanding the constant formation of one and the other.
'In all times, the idea has been held, that storms purify the air, and I do not think that this opinion is ill-founded. We know, in fact, that storms give rise to a more abundant production of ozone. ”

“ M. Schoenbein continues: 'We must admit that the electric discharges which take place incessantly in different parts of the atmosphere, and causing therein a formation of ozone, purify the air by this means of organic, or, more generally, oxidizable miasma; and that they have thus the important office of maintaining it in a state of purity suitable to animal life. By means of atmospheric electricity, and, indirectly, nature thus attains on a great scale the object that we sometimes seek to accomplish in a limited space by fumigations with chlorine. ”

“ Ozone soon begins to be formed, as shewn by the rising of a light column of smoke from the phosphorus, which, at the same time, becomes luminous. In five or six hours, the quantity will be abundant, when the bottle is to be emptied of its contents, washed out, and closed for use and experiment.
Whichever way the ozone be produced, it is always identical in its properties; and these are described as numerous and remarkable. Its odour is peculiar, resembling that of chlorine, and, when diluted, cannot be distinguished from what is called the electric smell. ”

“ And perhaps the English may by and by discover that jobbing-companies, with stupendous capital and a monopoly of conveyance, are capable of doing as tyrannical things as any continental autocrat!
[pg 180]
If a section of the English public stands disgraced in the eyes of Europe by its vicious speculation—properly speaking, gambling—in railway finance, our country is in some degree redeemed from obloquy by the grandeur of a social melioration which jobbing has not been able to obstruct. ”

“ The continent, with all its stupid despotisms, must improve, and become enlightened in spite of itself.
The newspapers lately described the opening of the line of railway from Paris to Strasbourg. Those who know what travelling in France was a few years ago, cannot wonder that Louis Napoleon should have made this the occasion of a popular demonstration. The opening of this line of railway is an important European event; certainly it is a great thing for both France and Germany. English travellers may also think much of it. ”

“ Government interference abroad is, therefore, not altogether a wrong. Annoying as it may sometimes be, and bad as it avowedly is in principle, there is in it the spirit of protection against private oppression. ”

“ Value is entirely arbitrary. One man, at the lower end of the scale, sins for the sake of a pound; and another, at the higher end, does the same thing for the sake of a kindness. The two men place the same value on their several equivalents, and each finds his own irresistible. ”

“ Those who are acquainted with the Irish metropolis—not merely with the handsome streets and squares eastward, which are now the abodes of gentility, but with the dirty thoroughfares about the cathedrals—have observed the large houses which some of them contain, now let in single rooms to a wretched population, and need scarcely be told that they were once the abodes of wealth and luxury. Fishamble Street, in this quarter of the town, is one of the oldest streets in Dublin. ”

“ It is likewise the theory of the law, that a man who suffers his judgment to be indirectly biassed is as bad as the other—and worse: that he is, in fact, a Worm, unfit to possess his birthright, of which he should be forthwith deprived. ”

“ A hurried glance, or no glance at all—a sham inspection at the best—is all that the gentlemen with moustaches and cocked-hats can manage. The very attempt to look at bushels of passports is becoming an absurdity. ”

“ A tourist can now journey from London to Paris—Paris to the upper part of the Rhine at Strasbourg, going through a most interesting country by the way—then go down the Rhine to Cologne by steamer; next, on by railway to Ostend; cross by steamer to Dover; and, finally, reach London—thus doing in a few days, and all by force of steam, what a short time ago must have been done imperfectly, and with great toil and expense. Still more to ease the journey, a branch railway from the Strasbourg line is about being opened from near Metz, by Saarbrück, to Manheim ”

“ I am not sure about bribery and corruption. It may be a bad thing, but many seem to think otherwise. Much may be said on both sides of the question. Oh! don't tell me of a worm selling his birthright for a mess of pottage: I never read of such worms in Buffon, or even in Pliny. But if they do exist in the human form, the baseness consists in the sale, not in the quid pro quo. A mess of pottage in itself is a very good thing—I should say, a very respectable thing ”

“ They preached 'the word' practically, producing all the charity it taught, inculcating the 'peace on earth, good-will towards men' which disposes even rude natures to the gentler feelings, and soothes the chafed murmurer by the tender influence of that love which is so kind. ”

“ Ozone, in scientific language, is described as 'a compound of oxygen analogous to the peroxide of hydrogen, or, that it is oxygen in an allotropic state—that is, with the capability of immediate and ready action impressed upon it.' Besides being produced by electrical discharges in the atmosphere, it can be obtained artificially by the passing of what is called the electrical brush into the air from a moist wooden point, or by electrolyzed water or phosphorus. ”

“ The great tie which will bind Russia to the rest of Europe, will be the Warsaw and St Petersburg Railway—a vast work, which nothing but imperial means will accomplish. Whether all these lines will be opened by 1862, it is impossible to predict; Russia has to feel its way towards civilisation. During the progress of the Moscow and St Petersburg Railway, a curious enterprise was determined on. ”

“ The two neighbours begin to find that ill-nature does not pay, and, like sensible people, are negotiating for a physical union by rail, seeing that a political one is out of the question. In short, a railway is proposed to be laid down in an easterly direction from the Antwerp branch, towards the border of Holland; and by means of steam-boat ferries across the Maas and other mouths of the Rhine, the junction will be effected with the Rotterdam and Amsterdam series of railways. ”

“ During the late visitation of cholera, reports were frequently spread that the atmosphere was deficient in ozone.
ENGLISH SISTERS OF CHARITY. Return to Table of Contents
How much real good could yet be done in this old, full, struggling world of ours, where so many among us have need of help, if each in his or her small circle could manage just not to leave undone some of the things that should be done. Little more is wanting to effect this than the will, or perhaps the mere suggestion. A high influence may at a time confer a considerable benefit ”