AN IMMORAL CONSIDERATION.

I READ in the journals that "an officer of rank" at Vienna has bequeathed the whole of his fortune to his nephew, on the condition that "he should never read a newspaper."

I believe our English law strictly prevents any testator from imposing an immoral condition on his heir; and I therefore am strongly disposed to think that such a bequest as this I have quoted should not be considered as binding.

Had the "officer of rank" declared by his last will that his nephew, in order to inherit, should be blinded or deprived of his hearing, he could not have more egregiously violated every sentiment of right feeling than by this cruel edict. In fact, he would virtually consign his unhappy heir to both of these calamities together.

Now, it may be fair enough to tolerate the eccen

tricities of the living man. It is not impossible that in his character there may be many traits which will compensate for all his oddities. The whim or caprice he may ride as his hobby may not indispose him to generous actions or kindly sentiments; and we may, besides, always indulge the hope that, with a wider experience of the world and its ways, he may live to get over the delusions which once haunted him, and act and behave like his fellows.

Death, however, excludes this charitable hope, and I think it very questionable policy to give the character of permanence to what every consideration of sound sense or true physiology would regard as an abnormal and mere passing condition.

That the man who made such a will as this was insane, I will not say; but I unhesitatingly declare that he imposed a condition repugnant to good sense, and totally opposed to every consideration of reason and judgment. First of all, he assumed assumed-and of all tyrannies I know of none greater-to dictate to another, for the whole term of his life, a condition of moral blindness. Secondly, he presumed to judge not alone what all newspapers were in all lands, but what they might be in years long after his death.

That any man about to leave the world should like to declare to it before he went, "I have no sym

pathy with you; I don't care for you-for your wars, your struggles for liberty, your sufferings, or your triumphs. Nothing to me whether you be rich or poor, in sickness or in health; whether your homes be happy, or your fields be desolate; whether the crimes of your people decrease, or that new forms of vice call for new modes of repression. I don't want to know if education be spreading through your land, or to hear what results have followed such enlightenment. I am alike indifferent to the nature of your laws, and the mode in which they are administered. Uninterested in the great changes which affect States, I do not ask to be informed what the world thinks of them; of that public opinion which is the record of what condition humanity stands in at a given era, I have no desire to hear. Enclosed in the shell of my selfishness, I am satisfied to lead the life of an oyster. I compound for mere existence, and no more."

Now, I ask, is it such a nature as this that should be permitted to make a formal bequest of his bigotry and ignorance? Should the law lend itself to ratify a compact whereby this man's crass stupidity shall be perpetuated?

I am aware he was a German; and much may be forgiven him on the score of narrowness. I know, too, that his warning applied peculiarly to the jour

nals of his own land. And it is but fair to own that a German "Blatt" is about the dreariest reading a man can fall upon. The torrent of rubbishy phraseology in which this beer-bemuddled people involve their commonest thoughts-the struggles they make at subtle distinctions through the mazes of their foggy intellects the perpetual effort to regard everything under some fifteen or five-and-twenty different aspects, belabouring a theme, and kneading it as a baker kneads his dough-make up a mass of entanglement and confusion that would drive a practical energetic people to the verge of distraction.

Still, with all its

That a man should interdict such readings as these is no more strange than that he should forbid the use of some besotting narcotic, dreary in its effects and depressing in its consequences. Perhaps this testator had recognised in his own case some of the dire results of this dyspeptic literature. faults, its story was the world. It spoke of man in his works and ways with other men, how he bought and sold, made peace or war, built up or threw down; of the virtues he held high, of the vices he reprobated; what were the views he extended to the world at large, and what were the hopes that he cherished for those who were to come after him. Even through the labyrinth of German involution glimpses of these might be had; and why should

not his heir be permitted to look at life, albeit through the smoked glass of his native language?

One of our most brilliant essayists, and most accomplished thinkers, has declared that he regards a number of the 'Times' as the last report of what the world has achieved of progress; and I thoroughly agree with him. That broadsheet is the morning's "return" of Humanity, not alone recounting what it has accomplished in the preceding twenty-four hours, but how it feels after it. You have not alone the bulletin of the great battle the world is fighting, but you have an authentic report of the effective state of humanity on the next morning.

Take the most thorough man of the world of your acquaintance-the man most perfectly versed in what goes on in life, not in one class or section of society, but throughout all ranks and conditions of men-who knows where and for what the world is fighting in this quarter or in that-how it builds its ships-what it pays for gold-how it tills its fields, smelts its metals, cooks its food, and writes its novels -and I ask you, what would he be without his newspaper? By what possible machinery could he learn, as he sits at his breakfast, the last news from Shanghai, and the last ballet at Paris-the state of the funds at San Francisco-the winner at Newmarket -the pantomime at the Olympic-the encyclical