ently served. There are men of great ability in it, and men of great information, but the total effect of their work is not to instruct, not to supply grounds to the people for a judicial decision. We rarely, if ever, see a letter the visible intention of which is to pour white light upon the facts. Half, at least, of the intelligence from Constantinople, to begin with, is deceptive, the mere reflection of the opinions of men who either report the idlest rumors, or are deliberately deceptive, or, as their rivals affirm, think accuracy nothing in comparison with particular political ends. No doubt that is true occasionally, and in great crises, of State envoys also. The legations do not always believe each other, even to the extent of accepting as accurate positive statements of fact. Prince Bismarck has just stated publicly that in 1866 he did not believe one word any Austrian diplomatist said to him. But then the diplomatists know one another; they are trained to discount what they hear; they are suspicious by habit, and by a tradition still fearfully effective. The people are not. They have no means of knowing who is reporting to them; their tradition is to believe, not to suspect, and they are, like every other mass of persons, almost incurably credulous. The necessity for protecting them, therefore, is as great as the necessity for protecting children, or rather, for protecting the blind. It seems to us positively as shameful to allow a correspondent invested with powers like these to deceive the public, even through wholly unconscious defects of character, as to teach a blind man's dog to lead his master astray. The slightest approach to a doubtful statement on important affairs ought to be visited by the conductors of the journals as a breach of duty to the work, a high moral offence, a sort of treason to the country, which, after all, pays the popular envoys, as directly as it pays the members of the legations.
It is so nearly impossible for outsiders to know who is to blame for false reports, that we carefully abstain from pointing our remarks by individual references. Hardly any correspondent in Europe would decline to forward a statement which he wished to believe, and which his ambassador clearly trusted, and very few indeed would fail to be greatly impressed with the views poured into them by really important personages. The division of responsibility between informant and correspondent is almost too subtle for analysis; and the responsibility of the editor, though it exists, is not yet fully acknowledged. But we have no hesitation whatever in saying that in the face of the new standing obtained by foreign correspondents, the new influence they are obtaining over policy, and the new relations they are assuming towards all foreign governments, the anonymous ought to disappear. Ambassadors misunderstand and misrepresent, and occasionally, it is asserted, make deliberate mistatements, but at least they put their names to them. We know who they are, we know what their careers have been, and we can insist on holding their chiefs responsible for their assertions. If Mr. Layard recklessly credits stories of Mr. Gladstone, or Count Beust is eloquent on Austria's devotion to England, or Count Schouvadoff declares that his government wants nothing in this world, we know exactly who the speaker is, what he desires, and how far it is probable that he is acting under orders. In the case of the popular ambassador, we do not know even this much, have no means of deciding whether the man who says the Russians have eaten British babies, or the man who says English babies are always Russian pets, is the more likely to know, or the more worthy to be trusted. That is an unsafe position, and until it is altered, all readers ought to load with responsibility the conductors of journals whose correspondents make serious statements discovered afterwards to be false.
THE LOSS OF THE "EURYDICE."
There is reason for sorrow at the loss of the "Eurydice," the beautiful ship, and the trained officers, and the three hundred men or more, so young and so hopeful, for the loss is as great as the misery inflicted, and both are very great. And it is difficult not to be shocked as well as sorrowful at such an illustration of the irony occasionally discernible in the ways of Providence, all in the ship being condemned to a dreadful death in the very hour, so to speak, of success, when she had completed her voyage and returned home, and arrived almost in sight of port, and all on board were full of expectation and cheerfulness, and even glee; one promising officer, for instance, was hurrying to meet his young wife, married to him but a twelvemonth before, under circumstances that promised both a long lease of
