The Pall Mall Gazette contained on Thursday a rough protest
against all public expressions of political indignation, on one of the oddest grounds ever put forward by a thinking man. Even if "Mr. Eyre has committed wholesale murder, and richly deserves to be hanged," it wrote, "there is no good in making a fuss about it. . . . . When an ordinary murderer is tried at.the assizes every- thing is quiet and comfortable. The judge takes his notes, and goes out for his luncheon in the middle of the day. The bar- risters who are not in the case read their briefs or their news- papers," and in short no one (except, we suppose, the.barristars on either side) uses any strong language on the occasion. In other words, any moral process once organized and become necessarily falls into a certain dry official routine, even though it has to do with great crimes, great sins, or great virtues. Of cours-. —and does it follow that the strong emotion which good and evil excite in men's minds, where there is no such narcotic influence of habit, is an evil, and ought to be dispensed with.? The surgeon oennot feel very strongly for the pain which he inflicts perhaps tendimes a day, but is it unhealthy and undesirable for the patient's Mends to feel with him ? Is not the paralysis of such feeling on the whole a loss rather than a gain of true life,—a desirable loss no doalot to those who make an art of dealing with occasions for strong.,feel- ing, yet still just as much a loss as the loss of a delicate senile of touch in the hand caused by hard manual labour ? If this writer had his way, the technical professional feeling would soon bemme distorted, because not checked by the healthy spontaneous, im- pulses of indignation or admiration.
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