A WORLD AT PRAYER

Dunstan Times, Issue 523, 26 April 1872, Page 1 (Supplement)

A WORLD AT PRAYER

—o— The London correspondent of the S. M. Herald gives the following description of the intense excitement in England at the timerj of the Prince’s illness;— “Noone who was not in London at the time can conceive the shock with which the news of tho Prince’s relapse was received. ' The bulletins issued from Sandringham had given no hint of approaching danger; every one supposed him within a week of convalesence- True, Lord Chesterfield, who had occupied the same rooms at Landesborough-house, had died. Just as the Lancet Commissioners had traced the mischief to the defective drainage of Scarborough, and were drawing sanitary lessons for the million from what might have proved so serious, the grave issue they imagined actually came, and it was announced in telegram, after telegram that the life of the royal patient was in imminent danger. I have at my side a provincial newspaper which declared him between broad leaded lines as positively dead; and it is said several funeral sermons were preached on Sunday the 10th inst. The difficulty of obtaining information was increased by an inopportune revolt of telegraph clerks, and the choking of the wires if such a phrase may be allowed —by countless private inquiries after news which ought to have been communicated officially to every station in the kingdom. As for the metropolis, it was better served with intelligence, yet not fast enough for the vast crowds which gathered in front of Marlborough House and the Mansion House, aud waited hour by hour for the expected bulletins. On Saturday, the 9th of the month, no one was sanguine ofthe Prince’s life; and when, a*'ter a momentary gleam on Sunday, a return of the more urgent symptoms was announced in the evening of that day, the case was considered, even by the best informed and most hopeful, to be desperate. The Times suspended its usual leading articles, and confined its editorial writing to the all-absorbing subject; and though the general tone of the Press was admirable, there was something painful in the thought that correspondents were prowling about the precincts of Sandringham, that pony expresses were riding through the darkness, and that in the newspaper offices memoirs of the Prince were, in all probability, in type A special form of prayer was drawn up hastily by the Archbishop of Canterbury on the Saturday; and Monday’s papers contained reports of twenty sermons by eminent clergymen cn the event of the day. Nor were the prayers limited to England. Sir Moses Montefiore set his countrymen at Jerusalem to work; the great praying assemblies of the United States joiney in interceding for the life in jeopardy; and the Parsees in India repaired to their temples to crave of their dietv tho same boon.”