Mrs. Stanton says:--"The two great questions now agitating Great Britain are 'Coercion for Ireland,' and the 'Queen's Jubilee,' a tragedy and a comedy in the same hour."
Speaking of the Queen's Jubilee she says:
"In this supreme moment of the nation's political crisis, the Queen and her suite are junketing around in their royal yachts on the coast of France, while proposing to celebrate her year of Jubilee by levying new taxes on her people, in the form of penny and pound contributions to build a monument to Prince Albert. The year of Jubilee! While under the eyes of the Queen her Irish subjects are being evicted from their holdings at the point of the bayonet; their cottages burned to the ground; aged and helpless men and women and newborn children, alike left crouching on the highways, under bridges, hayricks and hedges, crowded into poorhouses, jails and prisons, to expiate their crimes growing out of poverty on the one hand and patriotism on the other.
"A far more fitting way to celebrate the year of Jubilee would be for the Queen to scatter the millions hoarded in her private vaults among her needy subjects, to mitigate, in some measure, the miseries they have endured from generation to generation; to inaugurate some grand improvement in her system of education; to extend still further the civil and political rights of her people; to suggest, perchance, an Inviolable Homestead Bill for Ireland, and to open the prison doors to her noble priests and patriots.
"But instead of such worthy ambitions in the fiftieth year of her reign, what does the Queen propose? With her knowledge and consent, committees of ladies are formed in every county, town and village in all the colonies under her flag, to solicit these penny and pound contributions, to be placed at her disposal.
"Ladies go from house to house, not only to the residences of the rich, but to the cottages of the poor, through all the marts of trade, the fields, the factories, begging pennies for the Queen from servants and day-laborers."
These forced collections are not entirely for the benefit of the Queen, but are to be appropriated also to a vast variety of local objects and institutions.
The ancient philosopher Diogenes, whom even the presence of Alexander could not overawe, is one of the most marked and heroic figures of ancient history. It is said "The Athenians admired his contempt for comfort, and allowed him a wide latitude of comment and rebuke. Practical good was the chief aim of his philosophy; for literature and the fine arts he did not conceal his disdain. He laughed at men of letters for reading the sufferings of Ulysses while neglecting their own; at musicians who spent in stringing their lyres the time which would have been much better employed in making their own discordant natures harmonious; at savants for gazing at the heavenly bodies while sublimely incognizant of earthly ones; at orators who studied how to enforce truth, but not how to practice it. * * * When asked what business he was proficient in, he answered, 'to command men.'"