THE DECLINE OF CIVILIZATION.
By Editor
THE San Francisco Chronicle has the following editorial comment on the way that Sullivan, America's champion human bull-dog, has been received by royalty in England. The Chronicle's comparison is a just one; but it seems to forget that Sullivan went to England with the official indorsement of the most cultured city in the United States, and that the bloody sports of the arena are fully as popular in this country as in England. Rome's decline began with the introduction of gladiatorial shows; why are we not justified in concluding that England and America are going the same way? A London dispatch says: "The Prince of Wales, who was very much prepossessed by the American's independence, sent his equerry to a well-known jeweler's in Bond Street and ordered a handsome gold watch to be made, bearing the inscription, 'To John L. Sullivan, Boston, U. S. A., with best wishes of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales.'" Does not this carry the reader back at once to the pages of Suetonius and Gibbon, and to the times when the brawny gladiators were the pets and boon companions of the dissolute masters and rulers of the Roman Empire? Can we not, in our imagination, see Domitian, given over to those vices which evoked the merciless satire of Juvenal, not the least of which was the emperor's inordinate fondness for the sports of the arena and the delight at the sight of human blood? Does not this gift from the heir of the British throne to John L. Sullivan, with the best wishes of the giver, unavoidably recall the decadence of the Roman Empire, and conjure up the picture of the times when the sect called Christians were butchered to make a Roman holiday, and when cruelty, luxury, and licentiousness reigned supreme in that city which had been the mistress of the world? And who is the man whom the future king of England so delights to honor, and to whom he extends a token of his admiration and his best wishes? Simply a man who enjoys the notoriety of being the most powerful brute that walks erect; a creature who can strike a harder blow with his fist than any other living animal except the gorilla and the grizzly; a human being who, so far as the record shows, has never done a kindly or manly or generous act in his whole life, who has never used his vast strength for the protection of the weak and feeble, who has never done his country or his kind one moment's service; but who, on the contrary, has been a rowdy, a bully, a swashbuckler, a terror to women and inoffensive men, a drunkard, and a brawler, and altogether a disreputable and wholly useless member of society. This is the man whom Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, heir apparent to the kingly and imperial throne of Great Britain, honors with his presence, and favors with his best wishes.