NEWS BY THE MAIL.

Globe, Volume I, Issue 62, 11 August 1874, Page 4

NEWS BY THE MAIL.

| From the “Spectator.”! Wo have two sharp quarrels with American Republics on hand. The first case is rather obscure, but it would seem that Captain Hyde was in command of the steamship Tacna when that ship was lost. The regular consular investigation followed at Valparaiso, and the proceedings were forwarded to the Board of Trade, but the Chilian authorities not being content, arrested Captain Hyde on board a steamer, and flung him into prison. The Minister, Mr Rumbold, has demanded his release, an apology, and £25,000 as compensation, and sent for the Pacific squadron to enforcecompliance. The Chilian Government will probably do justice, as it was overborne by by popular clamour, but the other case is much more serious. The Commandant of San Jose, Guatemala, a Colonel Gonzalez, has actually, without reason assigned or offence charged, ordered the British Vice-Consul, Mr Magee, to be shot, and when his officers declined to obey to receive 400 lashes. Only 200 were inflicted, when the Government ordered Gonzalez’ arrest, seized him on board the Arizona, and it is said, will execute him. That is however, no reparation either to the British flag or to the Vice-Con-sul, and the nation will look to Lord Derby for swift and visible reparation—the punishment of the officers who permitted the flogging, though they prevented the murder, a distinct apology from the Government which appointed Gonzalez, and such compensation as Guatemala can give to Mr Magee. Satisfactory compensation is, of course, impossible,

A correspondent of the “ Times,” who signs himself “ C,” writes fin able letter to show that the admission of the laborer into the franchise would not give him representation. There are six “ peasant boroughs,” and they do not represent the laborer, nor can the artisans who have votes find representative candidates. Only two artisans have been returned, and the probability is as great that Mr Arch will be returned by a county as that Mr Odger would be returned by a manufacturing town. The writer says much more, especially about the danger to the Liberal party from the laborers turning Conservatives, but surely he is wrong in all his facts. The. artisans have not returned artisans, but they have returned membeis who vote and speak strongly for their wishes, and sometimes pour on them most fulsome adulation. A middleclass House would not listen to the Bills which, nevertheless, will be passed for the benefit of the artisan class ; nor, if artisans were not voters, would Mr Cross produce the great Bill for improving their lodgings in London which he says he has in his pocket. The small peasant boroughs, no doubt, have to learn independence ; but in one of them at least, Eye, a member who spoke strongly in favor of lock-outs, would never sit again. Let Lord Barrington try the experiment. Whether the new constituency would be Liberal or Conservative wo neither know nor care, but we.believo it would be Liberal, because it would be led by the small freeholders who carried the Reform Bill, and but for the Chandos clause, would have kept the counties steadfast to the Liberal cause. All that, however, is beside the question, which is the good of the country, and not the superiority of parties. “0 ” apparently desires some modification of the Hare scheme, and upon that point we need not say we are heartily with him. But the laborers cannot and will not wait for that reform.

Lord Carnarvon has explained the Government plan for the reorganisation of the Gold Coast, Lord Carnarvon repudiates the idea either of abandoning the settlement or paving the way for its abandonment, that he unites it with Lagos, that a capital is to be seated either at Elmina or Accra, and that a government like that at Jamaica is to be kept up at both places, passing part of the year at each and part at a hill sanitarium. The name of a protectorate is to be kept up, but the Governor is to be absolute, even over the allies, and the administration would be that of any other Crown colony, but for one thing. Slavery cannot exist in a Crown colony, and Lord Carnarvon does not sec his way towards enfranchisement, without a compensation he thinks the House of Commons would not give. We dare say he is right, the House of Commons being Tory, but all his plans will be futile till slavery has ceased. No population will work while their wages are stolen under threat of the lash, and insurrection against slavery can never be morally condemned.

The House of Lords discussed Archbishop Tait’s Public Worship Bill on May 11th, in almost the only field night of the present session. It was severely criticised by Lord Shaftesbury, who said that while it did not touch confession, it would result in enforcing the Athanasian Creed and every detail of an obsolete ritual. Lord Shaftesbury, though “ a Low Churchman, a very Low Churchman,” said solemnly, that even though he should be assured “ that for the next halfcentury there would not be any but Low Church Bishops,” he would not Bgive them the power which this Bill proposes to give to Bishops. Dr Magee thought better of Bishops, and was very amusing about the demand that Bishops should govern by fatherliness, when there is so very little filialness shown towards them, but, as we have elsewhere shown, he did not really defend the Bill, but only apologised for it. Even the Duke of Marlborough pooh-poohed the Bill, Earl Nelson thought it very dangerous, Lord Harrowby sanguiuely hoped the amendments to be proposed might remove the difficulties in the way of the Bill, Lord Selborne wanted the Bishops to move spontaneously themselves in the regulation of public worship, rather than to be moved by the complaints of parishioners, and Lord Salisbury thought nothing could succeed which did not carefully guard the consciences and rights of all the three “ schools ” in the Church ; and when Dr Tait rose to reply, it was obvious that he regarded the Government as not very friendly to his Bill, and no party in the House as its strenuous supporters. It will hardly survive the mingled stimulants and alteratives pressed on it in committee—the object of most of its opponents being to transform its

vital principle, and of the rest to lop off Us limbs.

The Convocation of the University of London came, by a majority of 83 against 65, to an important decision—that the degrees of the University ought to be thrown open to women. The debate has hardly been more than mentioned in the papers, but the discussion turned, first, on the physical capacity of women for entering the field with men, and next, on the difference between the true ideal of a woman’s education and the true ideal of a man’s. Dr Quain was lively in the old vein of jocose allusion to women’s physical liabilities, and Dr Sibson was eloquent on the danger to their health of raising too hastily the intellectual standard at which women should be encouraged to aim ; but to the former class of reflections it was sufficient to reply that already women, in spite of their physical liabilities, are allowed to take all the night-nursing—by far the most exhausting of medical duties—and to the latter, that it is quite competent to the University to fix a much higher minimum age for women before they can be admitted to the examinations than is fixed for men. We can only hope that the governing body of the University may be willing to carry out soon the policy thus approved by Convocation. But there is plenty of room for doubt. Medical science is just now in a state of very sensitive Conservatism, and medical science is very strongly represented on the Senate of the University of London. In Convocation the majority of medical degrees was certainly against the proposal. As far as could be judged from Lord Granville’s cautious speech at the public presentation of degrees on the following day, his own mind is somewhat disinclined at present to the admission of women to degrees, or at least, if not disinclined, inclined to fear the effects of encouraging women to enter into full competition with men. That, however, could be easily avoided without refusing them the same degrees, and degrees implying precisely the same examination and the same standards of merit, by simply classifying the women entirely separately from the men. It may be, however, that the Chancellor was chiefly anxious to guard the discussion from the intrusion of the fallacy as to the “equality of the sexes,” for he began by remarking that, judging by the analogy of birds, by the plumage of peacock and cock-pheasant, he had often doubted whether the bearded men were not really the more beautiful of the two sexes,— implying, of course, that it was just as likely that men should be the most beautiful as that women should be the most energetic and capable of labour. This is a useful hint. Bat it is no reason against the practice of weighing a heavy weight and a light one in the same scales, to allege that the one is heavy and the other is light. Late on May 12th the same University’s Convocation rejected, by a majority of nearly 4 to 1 (59 to 16, including tellers), a resolution of Mr R. H. Hutton’s requesting the Senate not to permit “ painful experiments on living animals” in the Brown Hospital for Animals, which is under the management of that body. The resolution was carefully framed so as to admit experiments performed under chloroform from end to end : and it was grounded not merely on the unsuitability of permitting pain and torture in an institution established especially to relieve and cure animals, and without a word in the trust-deed pointing to such a perversion of its purposes, but also on the unfairness of identifying a neutral institution like the University of London, which knows no creed in either religion or philosophy, with one of the most vehemently-disputed and earnestlycondemned class of moral (or immoral) actions. But the hour was late and the physiologists themselves were the class most deeply interested in the debate, so they had it their own way, and the University of London, on all other matters crcedless, may be said to have virtually committed itself to one rather remarkable creed, —namely, that the persons whom the Poet-Laureate brands (even too bitterly) as—- “ Those monstrous men who carve the living hound, And stuff him with the fragments of the tomb.” —are, if inflicting no needless amount of pain, not only guiltless of cruelty, but deserving of honor. The new German Press Law appears to be a more liberal one than we imagined. According to the Berlin correspondent of the “ Times,” no paper in Germany can now be seized preventively except when the police assert that the day’s edition is dangerous, and the legality of their action must be proved before a judge within forty-eight hours of seizure. Moreover, all Press offences are for the future to be tried by the superior civil courts, composed of five learned judges. Moreover, the relief from taxation is regarded as a very great boon. All the great German papers are so cheap that the tax, sometimes as much as £4OOO a year, will remain in the pocket of the proprietor, who, it is asserted, will use it to improve his paper. He may, but the conservatism of successful papers as to details of management is very curious. Nothing, we suppose, would induce the “ Times ” to publish its domestic occurrences alphabetically instead of chronologically, or to omit its nonsensical averages of longevity, or even to leave out that most unintelligible of all public announcements sent to-day to Heligoland, Caffraria, and Lagos.” Lord Russell’s Foreign Policy motion, and the reply to it by Lord Derby, have elicited an odd line of remark from the semi-official German Press. These organs of the Government say that Lord Derby virtually committed himself to maintaining the faith of treaties, unless so far as England had fairly warned the world that she thinks any of their provisions obsolete ; that France is now quite helpless to attempt a surprise against Germany, except by way of Luxembourg or Belgium ; and that as Great Britain has given a guarantee both to Luxembourg and Belgium, Great Britain has practically guaranteed Germany against a surprise. That is very ingenious, and must make Lord Derby feel a little uncomfortable, especially as the Luxembourg guarantee (of 1867) was all his own doing, and done apparently almost against his own will and judgment. But we think he has a reply. He may say that on the very morrow of the treaty both his father and he explained how little it meant —that it was a “collective guarantee,” and that a collective guarantee fails if any one of the signatory powers breaks its engagement—so that if either France or Germany, for instance, violated her own engagement, Great Britain would be released from lier’s. Ami certainly if Germany cares at all about the matter—which

we doubt—we should recommend Prince Bismarck to question Lord Derby as to his present mode of interpreting a “ collect've guarantee.” Possibly Mr Disraeli may be more disposed to let it mean something than the late Lord Derby was, and possibly the present Lord Derby may reflect the change. Certainly it was Mr Disraeli who said, in 1871, that we ought to have interfered in 1870 as guarantors, under the Treaty of Vienna, of the Saxon provinces of Prussia. And if he held himself bound by such very rotten pack-thread as that, he may hold the Luxembourg Treaty one of paramount obligation. Mr Cross’s Licensing Bill is not through yet, or likely to be. The victuallers are not satisfied with it, and everybody else is more or less against it, while Mr Cross told the House that the hours he had inserted in the Bill were merely suggestions, and the House might deal with the Bill as it liked. That is not what either the publicans or the public want. The publicans want the question ended by the Government which they helped so greatly to elect, while the public wants the Government to lead, and not to be a mere funnel for the contradictory orders of an incompetent committee of the whole House. The dispute will be arranged somehow, of course, perhaps in the true Conservative way, by letting things remain as they are ; but there is no subject upon which Government were expected to be so sharp, decisive, and even stern as the licensing laws, and no subject upon which they have shown such uncertainty and feebleness. A Government which cannot pass, and pass quickly, the Liquor Bill it likes, may be the best of all possible Governments, but it is not a strong one. By a curious oversight, we forgot to mention last week the remarkable result of the conflict in the Irish Church Synod on the subject of the Athanasian Creed. After much dividing and a failure in the House of Clergy to obtain a sufficient majority for the abolition of the damnatory clauses, which were voted down by the laity by immense majorities, both Houses concurred in the following solution—to leave the Creed unaltered in the latter part of the Prayer Book, but to print it in the Morning Service, with the damnatory clauses cut out, for recitation in place of the Apostles’ Creed on the festivals when its substitution for that Creed is directed. And as we understand, it will be left at the option of the individual clergyman whether he will read it in its unrautilated or in its mutilated form. It is remarkable that the Primate, who encouraged his episcopal colleagues to veto this compromise, declaring himself “ Athanasian against the world,” was beaten by the more prudent members of his own order. One of the most remarkable of the incidents was that Chief Justice Whiteside, who always ranked as an Evangelical of Lord Shaftesbury’s school, and is a Tory of the Tories, abandoned the creed, “in a speech,” says a correspondent, “ that would have delighted Dean Stanley,” since it proved that the creed was certainly not due to Athanasius, and that it was unreasonable and bigoted to insist on its use. Mr Miall will take note of this, and panegyrise disestablishment as the great liberaliser of churches. And certainly a liberalised Whiteside is a sort of prodigy, if not a miracle. But after all, our own Bishops, who are not disestablished, would have acquiesced far more cheerfully in a like fate, than did Archbishop Beresford and the Bishop of Derry.

The Duke of Rutland has issued a delicious circular to the laborers on his estates. He tells them, in a grandfatherly way. which we cannot reproduce without reproducing the letter, that their conduct has been exemplary; that as respects the Union, the question is not whether it is lawful to belong to one, for it is. but whether it is expedient, and his Grace decides that it is not. The relation between the farmer and laborer, he says, “ must either be confidential or mercantile,” and the former is the better, because under it the labourer’s family and children are better cared for and protected, while under the latter the labourer is treated as a machine. He supported his tenants in the lock-out, because he thought that was the best course, notonly for the farmers, “ but the labourers also,” apparently on the Catholic principle that fasting is good for the soul; He also tells the laborers that many who have gone away have come back again, and winds up by hoping that mutual concession will produce agreement. The letter is, we doubt not, perfectly well-in-tentioned, and it is a pity the Duke should not act on such nice principles himself. Just let him tell his tenants that if they will treat him “'confidentially,” and be very kind to his family, and not regard him as a machine, he will not quarrel about the amount of rental in cash. His tenants are sure to like it, and he would be the most popular of landlords. He would be a poor one, of course, but then, you see, “ no paltry saving of money could compensate for the loss of kindly feelings” between class and class. What is the difference, in the Duke’s mind, between hiring out his land as he does, and hiring out his labor as the ploughman does

A meeting of the British and Foreign School Society was held on May 11th, under the presidency of Earl Russell, at which a letter from Mr Bright was read, apologising for his absence, and saying, what will hardly please his constituents, that “ the bulk of opinion in England, as in Scotland and Ireland, is in favor of some religious instruction in schools, and it is to be deeply regretted that the moderation and simplicity of your system could not be accepted by all Christian persons and seels.” Mr Forster, who was present, spoke in the same strain. The British-School system was the system at which the School Boards were more and more aiming. It was nonsense trying to make children theologians. It could do no good, though it would probably do directly “ very little harm.” Still he could not have dispensed with denominational effort when he had to make so great a call on the country to supplement it, and he had therefore been compelled to avail himself of the forces he found in possession. Lord Russell himself said very little, except in favor of Mr Forster, which he balanced by praise of Lord Sandon, on the strength of having known Lord Sandon’s father and his grandfather for a long time—a reason for familiarity, but hardly for panegyric. Nor did it improve the case for Lord Sandon, when Lord Russell declared that he had always held it much mort. important to improve the quality than to increase the quantity of education—“the Thirl Standard” certainly not being superior in quality to “ the Fifth.” However, in spite of Lord Russell’s dictum, educational quantity is just now quite as important as educational quality. We want the best education of the greatest number,