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portant questions, sometimes even the determination of peace or war, may depend on the personal character and manner of an ambassador, we see the paramount necessity of the qualifications which can only be acquired by the experience of Much has been many years of service.

said against secret diplomacy; but secrecy is, to some extent, indispensable, as will be apparent on calling to mind. the nature of the duties an ambassador has to perform. If it were known that everything which was said to an English representative would be made public, we may be sure that he would learn very little which it would be of use for him to know. Even our present system of laying papers before Parliament has its disadvantages; but great care is taken in preparing papers to obviate any ill consequences to persons who give our ministers information. A comparison between our diplomatic service and that of foreign countries, as well as an examination into the political tendencies of the diplomacy of different nations, would be an interesting subject; but it is one which would take more space than we can now devote to the subject, and we will, therefore, proceed to make some remarks on the consular service.

A consul, except at a few such places as Warsaw and Venice, is essentially a commercial agent. At large ports consuls have much work to do, having to watch over all matters connected with British trade, and to settle the numerous disputes which arise between masters of vessels and their crews. An English consul has to furnish full information on all points relating to commerce; to make an annual trade report, accompanied by various returns of statistics, as well as to announce tariff changes, the prices of different articles of produce and merchandise, the rates of exchange, &c. He has also to send home copies of commercial laws and decrees, quarantine and navigation notices, and of all other public documents bearing on these questions. These reports are published from time to time by the Board of Trade. Consuls have also to perform notarial acts;

hospitals; and to solemnise and register marriages. Consuls were originally paid by fees, which they were authorised by Act of Parliament to charge on performing duties required of them. The appointment was generally conferred on some respectable English merchant resident at the place where it was thought necessary to station a consul; and in this manner the consular establishment was a very slight burden on the country. But subsequently it was considered expedient to appoint non-trading consuls with a salary, and lately the House of Commons' Committee recommended that fees should be received on account of Government, and that consular salaries should be further increased. We fear that the desire to extend ministerial patronage had much to do with both these alterations. At certain places, which we will briefly specify, consuls should be paid, and they should receive adequate salaries; but in all other cases we do not consider that the services to be performed justify the additional burden thus laid on the tax-payers at home.

1. Places where consuls have political as well as commercial functions, such as Venice.

2. Places where consuls have to exercise magisterial and police duties, in consequence of peculiar powers vested in them by treaties with certain countries, such as China, Japan, Turkey, &c.

3. Large sea-ports, such as New York, and Marseilles, where the consul would have enough to do to attend to his official duties.

4. Places where, on account of the slave-trade, it would be inexpedient that the English consul should be mixed up with commercial affairs, such as ports in Africa, Cuba, &c.

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1. To show a correct knowledge of English.

2. To be able to write and speak French correctly and fluently.

3. To possess a colloquial knowledge of the language of the places they are appointed to; Italian being taken for Mediterranean, and German for Baltic ports.

4 and 5. To show a knowledge of commercial law and of arithmetic. The limit of age is twenty-five to fifty, and they are required to attend for three months at the Foreign Office to learn the forms of official business.

Such are our diplomatic and consular services. The authorities at home give

a most favourable account of their efficiency, and declare that they were never in better working order. The examination system is stated to have had already a good effect, although persons who have entered under it have not yet been placed in trying or prominent positions. Our Government appears to be served abroad quite as well as other Governments, if not better; there are in its service men of great ability; and, if promotion was guided more by real merit, and less by other considerations, we need not fear the superior skill of the diplomatists of any other nation.

"THE FAUNA OF THE STREETS."

"And mine has been the fate of those
To whom the goodly sun and air
Are banned and barred-forbidden fare."

THE subterranean caverns of America, caverns many miles in extent, and uncheered by the feeblest ray of light, are found, nevertheless, to be tenanted by animals of various races. These hermits cannot in strictness be described as eyeless, for in some may be traced rudimentary organs of vision, but which have, according to Mr. Darwin, become more or less absorbed pending the lapse of successive generations-who have slowly migrated from the outer world, deeper and deeper into the sunless recesses of the cavern. Some have been supposed to regain a feeble power of vision, after living for a few days in the light. But a sort of compensation for the loss of sight is found to be given, in a strange increase of supplementary instincts, and the augmented sensitiveness of other organs.1

There seems to be no good reason for restricting this kindly law to the brute creation. Had the dungeon of Bonni

1 See Mr. Gosse's interesting account of the blind Fauna of Caverns.-Romance of Natural History, p. 81.

PRISONER OF CHILLON.

vard been his birthplace, the complaint put into his mouth by the poet, and which we have taken for our motto, would certainly have lost half its force; for where an abnormal state of existence has been the birth-lot of any creature, Nature, in pity, makes the best amends she can, or at least schools the sufferer into a patient endurance of evils, which she is powerless otherwise to control.

But for the influence of some such gentle discipline, how shall we account for the uncomplaining fortitude (greater than mere Stoic endurance) of the aborigines of the London streets, of whose lifelong condition Byron's verse is only too closely descriptive? What a study in natural history is the genuine London child, excluding, we need not say, from that term the children of those whose arrival in the West-end constitutes the vernal epoch popularly known as the "London Season." We would here be understood as confining our attention to the child of the streets, the offspring of the back alleys, courts, and slums; visible semper et ubique-at all times

when a halfpenny can be lured from the passenger-in all places in which mud more particularly abounds, for mud is the element on which he thrives, like the Spartan on his black broth, a compound probably not very dissimilar in colour and consistency. In mud he eats, drinks, washes, plays, and sleeps; his favourite spot for a picnic appears to be the sewer. Not long ago, a band of infant brigands were discovered by the police quartered in a fastness-no other than the subterranean tunnel of the Fleet ditch, whose atmosphere would probably have killed any other living creature, the rat, perhaps, excepted.

The stranger may, within five minutes of his arrival in London, select an example for study. Say he arrives from the country by one of the southern railway termini, and would pass over Waterloo Bridge. His progress will be heralded by an apparition, which he might take for a well-grown specimen of the Volvox globator, or wheel insect; an acrobat, whose performances may be witnessed on the stage of the microscopein a theatre whose drop scene is supplied by the fluid of any Metropolitan Water Company. We exclude, of course, the produce of the Thames, for the Thames at Waterloo Bridge has long been incapable of supporting the minutest form of insect life. On closer inspection, the phenomenon will resolve itself into a ragged urchin, who forms an advance. guard in an extraordinary series of somersaults, revolving on his centre much as would a capital X, if possessed by the revolutionary spirit lately prevalent among our tables. Head vice heels, hands vice feet, each member interchanges both place and duty promiscuously and on the shortest notice, with a flexibility outrivalling even the Manx arms (which, by the way, consist of three legs), and with at least an equal title to the Manx motto, "Stabit quocunque jeceris," which may be freely interpreted, "Pitch him where you will he'll fall on his legs." A copper halfpenny sterling must supply the place of the golden bough as our passport across

producible by the tiny acrobat; and, even should you present him with a coin of that amount, its investment will not be effected in a manner likely to swell the dividends of the shareholders of the bridge.

So we part company at the turnstilean event of less importance, from the circumstance that fresh specimens may easily be found on the other side; nay, should it be low water, there will be visible, on looking over the balustrade of the bridge, a group which forms a ghastly parody of Mr. Frith's masterly picture, "By the Sea-side." No rosy children playing on the sands are here! The little figures resemble rather those ghosts of infants, who first met the Trojan hero on the margin of the infernal river

"A group of spectres weary and wan "With only the ghosts of garments on."

These are the mudlarks of the metropolis, though what affinity exists between the little featherless biped who, for a halfpenny, will plunge downwards head foremost into the black ooze at his feet, and the feathered one who floats upwards to Heaven's gate in a flood of song, is a problem yet unsolved. Surely, if akin to any bird, it is to the London sparrow; dirt and impudence are alike the family characteristics of both; and the very fact that any bird, albeit a London sparrow, should of its own free will haunt the streets, when by aid of wings he can attain the range of open air and wild wood, is inexplicable, save on a hypothesis like that of the author of the "Vestiges of Creation," that the bird will develop into a child, and is training for the change, or else on a Pythagorean supposition, that the child has already actually taken the form of the bird, with, alas! some human reminiscence of the kennel surviving to clog its wings, and fetter its flight skywards.

Yet a little farther, and, as we cross the Strand, others of the same type present themselves. Here is one whose vocation is apparently that of lord high steward of the crossing, his wand of

head of its bearer presents a somewhat disparaging contrast. Here is another, who, promptly availing himself of the opportunity afforded by the departure of the billsticker, has stripped off a placard from the hoarding, while yet the paste is damp and reeking. The little wretch has replaced it, but only after having carefully turned it upside down; and now, standing on his own head, reads the contents to the passers-by, who are somewhat bewildered by the inversion of the infant Daniel and the writing which he professes to expound. The performance is, of course, concluded with the usual appeal for a "'apenny;" for note that the street urchin's is no golden dream of wealth. It is invariably limited to the sum above specified, neither more nor less-" only a 'apenny."

Throughout the livelong day we shall meet him, go where we will, and (should the spectator be of a thoughtful cast) never without experiencing the somewhat mingled sensation produced by listening to a tale half humorous, half pathetic, or gazing at an actor whose performance, Robson-like, is semi-grotesque, semi-tragic. But the night advances, and, if we follow the little animal to his lair, the serious element may perchance somewhat preponderate. A visit to the Refuge in Field-lane will form no bad frigidarium, or mental douche, after the tepidarium of a crowded "at home." It may, as a Turkish bath, produce a not unhealthy reaction upon the mind blazé with the glare, and relaxed by the heat of the crush we have quitted in time, to arrive at the Refuge while it yet wants a few minutes of twelve. Enter, and you will witness a somewhat singular phase of the night side of street-nature. This is the resting-place of our pariah of the streetthe only resting-place, save which awaits him when "a longer night the one is near."

can

The sleeping accommodation hardly be termed luxurious. A rug, and a sort of counter, not very unlike that in the Morgue of Paris, on which the suicide and the murderer sleep their last sleep! A raised and sloping platform

227

of wood, such as is used in a guard-room for the temporary resting-place of solthe one before us is partitioned off into diers on duty, with the difference that separate cells! Each cell has now its inmate, for it is close on midnight; and little face which this morning grinned here you may perchance recognise the its quaint appeal, comic in spite of all that hunger and dirt could do to sadden it. The tiny tumbler has played his play out the marshal of the crossing has laid aside his baton-the song of the mudlark has ended, and its dactylic refrain, "Give us a 'apěnný, please sir," lie, with all that is comic, merged in the has sunk into silence; and there they awfulness of sleep-a deep sleep evidently, for it is unbroken by even that never-ceasing, hacking cough, which night-a sound which proclaims, in sadrings forth throughout the livelong der eloquence than that of words, whence they are surely hastening. the sleepers have come, and whither

No statistics of the Registrar-General, books and Boards of Health, however however elaborate, no testimony of Blueweighty and convincing, could point the moral more strongly than that neverceasing cough, the sound of which only dies away as we pass into the open air, absorbed, perchance, in the deep vibration of the bell of St. Paul's. Heard under these circumstances, that midnight vibration may remind us of certain realities, perhaps as important as the fact that the ball-rooms of the West are even now brimming over in a hightide of arrivals, and glittering in the noontide of their brilliancy.

sibly crossed our mind-the first, What Two questions, meanwhile, have posbecomes of these children when sick? the second, What is their destiny when convalescent? As regards the first, the case of the sick child of the streets, unable to find a refuge in the hospital, is one for which kind Nature furnishes a speedy solution. To him whose acquaintance of Earth has been almost wholly derived from the mud of the streets, the analmost a truism, and the sentence, "to nouncement, "dust thou art," sounds

when a halfpenny can be lured from the passenger-in all places in which mud more particularly abounds, for mud is the element on which he thrives, like the Spartan on his black broth, a compound probably not very dissimilar in colour and consistency. In mud he eats, drinks, washes, plays, and sleeps; his favourite spot for a picnic appears to be the sewer. Not long ago, a band of infant brigands were discovered by the police quartered in a fastness-no other than the subterranean tunnel of the Fleet ditch, whose atmosphere would probably have killed any other living creature, the rat, perhaps, excepted.

The stranger may, within five minutes of his arrival in London, select an example for study. Say he arrives from the country by one of the southern railway termini, and would pass over Waterloo Bridge. His progress will be heralded by an apparition, which he might take for a well-grown specimen of the Volvox globator, or wheel insect; an acrobat, whose performances may be witnessed on the stage of the microscope— in a theatre whose drop scene is supplied by the fluid of any Metropolitan Water Company. We exclude, of course, the produce of the Thames, for the Thames at Waterloo Bridge has long been incapable of supporting the minutest form of insect life. On closer inspection, the phenomenon will resolve itself into a ragged urchin, who forms an advance guard in an extraordinary series of somersaults, revolving on his centre much as would a capital X, if possessed by the revolutionary spirit lately prevalent among our tables. Head vice heels, hands vice feet, each member interchanges both place and duty promiscuously and on the shortest notice, with a flexibility outrivalling even the Manx arms (which, by the way, consist of three legs), and with at least an equal title to the Manx motto, "Stabit quocunque jeceris," which may be freely interpreted, "Pitch him where you will he'll fall on his legs." A copper halfpenny sterling must supply the place of the golden bough as our passport across

producible by the tiny acrobat; and, even should you present him with a coin of that amount, its investment will not be effected in a manner likely to swell the dividends of the shareholders of the bridge.

So we part company at the turnstilean event of less importance, from the circumstance that fresh specimens may easily be found on the other side; nay, should it be low water, there will be visible, on looking over the balustrade of the bridge, a group which forms a ghastly parody of Mr. Frith's masterly picture, "By the Sea-side." No rosy children playing on the sands are here! The little figures resemble rather those ghosts of infants, who first met the Trojan hero on the margin of the

infernal river—

"A group of spectres weary and wan With only the ghosts of garments on."

These are the mudlarks of the metropolis, though what affinity exists between the little featherless biped who, for a halfpenny, will plunge downwards head foremost into the black ooze at his feet, and the feathered one who floats upwards to Heaven's gate in a flood of song, is a problem yet unsolved. Surely, if akin to any bird, it is to the London sparrow; dirt and impudence are alike the family characteristics of both; and the very fact that any bird, albeit a London sparrow, should of its own free will haunt the streets, when by aid of wings he can attain the range of open air and wild wood, is inexplicable, save on a hypothesis like that of the author of the "Vestiges of Creation," that the bird will develop into a child, and is training for the change, or else on a Pythagorean supposition, that the child has already actually taken the form of the bird, with, alas! some human reminiscence of the kennel surviving to clog its wings, and fetter its flight skywards.

Yet a little farther, and, as we cross the Strand, others of the same type present themselves. Here is one whose vocation is apparently that of lord high steward of the crossing, his wand of

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