2nd Mar.
Ture well-known London evening paper The Star first saw the light on the 17th of January, 1888, and on the completion ofts first decade, that is, on the 17th of January, 1898, it issued its Birthday Anniversary number, fall of good writing and good drawing—for the modern daily paper at. home is nothing without illustrations, The Times indeed rarely goes beyond maps and plans; but portraits and views will, no doubt, come in due course, The modern render likes his paper to be amusing og well as instructive.
Who opening page—it is un eight-page number, and is actually " given away" at the price, one halfpenny—has' a well-written preface, headed After Ven Years," in which the Editor looks rather-at the serious side of things and says: "We ought to reflect upon our position and to realise that the happiness of a race does not rest on the multitude of rifles in her camps, on the battleships about her coasts, on the millions of square miles over which her sway extends, but upon the moral and material well-being of the people within her borders. Other nations, like us, have pride of race and pride of history; other nations, like ourselves, are animated by boundless hopes of expansion." But the most. prominent feature of the first page isa large drawing by Mr. R. Isayama, the well-known Japanese artist, adapting the native Sparrow Dance to the Star's Decennial Celebration, he drawing is full of spirit, the ten sparrows being the ten years during which the Star has shone, and there are two very Martian, "Thora. are poems by George retty verses by a Star man—not a
R. Sims, James Douglas, and Richard Lo Guallienue, letters, and an excellent portrait of Zola, with an interview, from which we take the concluding paragraph "The War Council' made a hideous mistake; they have not the courage to acknowledge and try to right it, and therefore they added to their crime by pronouncing Esterhazy innocent. If the! court-martial had resulted otherwise, the implication would have been that Dreyfus was wrongly _condemued. That's all. There is not say. I know no more about the future than you do. One must simply act up to his convictions of honour, and then quietly wait."
Phere are several paragraphs headed "Mainly about People," and it is noti able that while unsigned articles remain the rale, in these paragraphs the reader is told who writes the articles; the modern journalist is apparently by no! means cotitent to remain really known. He does not believe in hiding his light altogether. The editorial! "We" remains in the columns of our: dailies, but little gossipy notes tell us who write the leaders, who is Spec," who is " our literary critic and the most picturesque and elegant of the younger poets who is our Artist Unknown," and then, lest we should not appreciate sufficiently, we are thoughtfully told that " our dramatic critic' is a "brilliant man of letters." This is the fashion of the day, and its adoption was inevitable when newspapers ceased to be solid homogeneous sheets, bearing throughout the impress of the mind of one man, the Editor, and became miscellanies.
"The second and third pages contain a number of illustrations, including portraits of Lord Salisbury and Mr. Chamberlain, and a number of congratulatory messages to the Editor from newspapers all over the world. Some of them are commonplace, some critical, some thoughtful. We heartily sympathies with the couplet sent by the Editor of Kladderadatsch "Pin sisters are England and Germany ever; They may differ at times, but be enemies never!"
The Editor of the Moscow Viedomosti expresses, he tells us, the Russian polic opinion of England "England aims at dominating over the waves of the world. This dominion, like the waves themselves, is ephemeral.
But, through Shakespeare, to England belongs another more. glorious dominion—the dominion over the minds of the world, and this is imperishable."
The freedom, the independence, and the purity of the British Press are noted in some of these messages, and its sympathy with peoples still straggling to be free. For instance, the Sophia Svoboda says "The Editor of Svoboda has much pleasure in having the opportunity of expressing the gratitude of the Bulgarian to the noble English nation for the support they gave in 1876 and 1885 to the national cause of Bulgaria. The Bulgarians hope that Great Brit will continue to aid a small nation in its struggle for independence against the tyrant of the Bosphorus and above all against the threatened conquest by the invader of the North."
But the Journal Egyptien of Cairo is not so complimentary to England. Its Editor says "Tt is well to live long, it is better to live well.
"'this principle has been happily applied by the Star, but the Egyptians consider that your statesmen take no notice of it, in certain cases peculiar to your " proteges."
"Tt is vexatious both for Egypt and for England."
Tne general tenour of the messages, however, is very friendly to England asa whole and the Star in particular.
The fourth page contains a very powerful and pathetic short story by Dr. Conan Doyle, with a portrait of the author, and a large illustration by Marcus Stone, R.A., with a portrait of jthe artist, Marcus Stone's drawing, rudely produced as it is on a halfpenny paper which has to be printed at lightning speed, is quite worthy of his reputation, There is also a good, but somewhat out-of-date portrait of the late Father of the House of Commons. he fifth page is devoted to the news of the day, communicated in the snippets with big headings which commend themselves to the modern "constant reader." The sixth page shows three gowns of 1888, to show "what woman, fair and fickle, has worshipped for a time," a reproduce tion of a Japanese caricature of the situation in the Par East, in which the British Lion is contenting himself with looking on; and a series of fancy sketches of the mechanical production of the Star.'he seventh page has a very good portrait of the Prince of Wales and Persimmon, to whom four columns are devoted. 'I'he rest of the seventh page and all the eighth page are advertisements. ''hus we have given a fair description of a special effort of London ijonrnalism at the close of the uineteenth century, THE NEW LOAN, Srd Mar, T'z contract for the new loan was signed on 'I'vesday at Peking, and the likin in the Yangtze Valley provinces and Chekiang is to be collected by the Tumperial Maritine Customs. While this will add enormously to Sir Robert Hart's work and responsibility, the inauguration of a reform that wil be of the greatest benefit to China, When the Peking Government finds what an honest collection of likin in Central China really means, it will assuredly be anxious to extend the system to the remainder of the Empire, and this should be the beginning of the long-hoped-for financial reform without adopting which China cannot hope to preserve her independence, It will need a skilful hand and great tact to formulate and put in action the regulations that this new system will require, and there could be no more experienced person found than Sir Robert Hart to undertake this and carry it through. All who are really friends of China will hear with "great relief and satisfaction that the new loan has been settled on the terms that we have mentioned. China's external troubles are at an end for the present we must hope that the means by which they have been removed will not become the origin of any internal troubles, "but that she will have the necessary time given her for reform and reorganisation, and that her rulers will have the sense to take advantage of the respite that has been granted ber.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.