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Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume 4, Issue 316, 29 July 1879, Page 3

People who have any experience of family quarrels about money must sympathise with tbe wives and offspring of Mr Brigham Young. Mr Youughad about 28 wives, who bore him an average of five children. Say he had 140 infants, and that brings him near 167 of Rameses 11., which : Mr Gladstone thinks: too many, though it falls far below the total of August the Strong of Saxony. Many of these children in turn were very much married, so that Young is quite a common name in Utah. When Mr Young died, he left moßt of his property; and how much that was nobody knows, to the church, and only provided for a few of his elder offspring. The " rank and file "of his family are unprovided for, and his thousands of heirs are expected to contest his will. The case will be one of the most colossal on record. There is an original pre-Mormon Mrs Young- still surviving. There are all manner of favourite wives of beloved grandchildren, of descendants married "in and out and roundabout "in the most complicated way. The whole Bar will be exhausted in providing counsel, and no mortal Judge can expect to hear more than a small part of the case, which will increase in difficulty at the rate of compound interest, as the value of Young's investments and the number of right heirs go on multiplying. America is . likely to outvie with the utmost ease our petty Tichborne trial, and will be able to boast the largest lawsuit as well as the biggest waterfall in the universe. Tho religious complications of course will be numerous, and the contemplative mind is overwhelmed —as in the attempt to conceive of infinity—by the prodigiousness of the affair.—.Da% News.

The Times remarks that by the death of : Mr Butt a great Irishman has passed away, and not Ireland only, but the whole United Kingdom, will feel the poorer for his death. Mr Butt possessed all the # qualities which win distinction in professional and political life ; and were it enough to produce an impression of power, were flowers sufficient without fruit, Mr Butt's life might be accounted highly successful. No career, if career it can be called, ever excited so many expectations. No career was ever marked by more disappointments. A leader of-the Irish Bar who nad fought his way steadily upwards, the architect of his own fortunes who had gained a rank independent of politics, might have kept order even in a company of Home Rulers. Mr Butt had lost his nerve amid the conflict of miserable necessities in which improvidence had involved him. If the eloquent member, for Limerick was not very fortunate in his life, he is at least happy in a death which has released him from a chieftainship dogged by anarchy arid carping suspiciousness.