NEWS BY THE MAIL.

Globe, Volume I, Issue 69, 20 August 1874, Page 4

NEWS BY THE MAIL.

[From the Spectator .] Mr Peck’s gift to the London School Board of £SOO, to be sp°nt within the year in defraying the cost of inspection and examination of the classes instructed under the authority of the Board in the Bible and the general principles of religion and morality, — classes which the State now refuses to inspect, —has been gratefully accepted by the Board, which has referred it to the School Management Committee, to consider and report on the best means of carrying out Mr Peek’s design, in harmony with the principles already adopted by the Board. This decision was ultimately carried j,by a large majority, but not till after a prolonged discussion on what was called “ the new religious difficulty,” or the new ‘‘religious endowment question.” The superstition about the name ‘religious endowment’ is making as wild work with its special votaries as the superstition about the “ substance Alcohol” with the Teetotallers. We shall have somebody discovering soon that the meddling of the State in religious teaching is the unpardonable sin which can never be forgiven, neither in this world nor in the world to come.

Mr Samuel Morley and Mr George Dixon have had the satisfaction and the credit of effecting a reconciliation between the Lincolnshire laborers and farmers. They have persuaded the Lincolnshire Labor League to withdraw those three foolish rules—that members should not accept less wages than 18s a week ; that only a week’s notice shall be given, except in cases of contract, while wages remain below 18s a week ; and that strikes are to be confined to small areas, i.e., that the farmers are to be taken in detail ; and the committee agree to recommend to the League to provide that in all places ■where the custom is to contract by the week a week’s notice shall be given, where the custom is to contract by the month, a month’s, and where the contract is usually quarterly, a quarter’s notice. In return, the farmers have declared that they have no wish to put down the Unions, and have put an end to the Lock out, and work is to be resumed on Monday. Better still,many of the Lincolnshire farmers, who seem to be in a reasonable mood, have expressed their opinion that Boards of Conciliation would be a great advantage to the county, and it seems not improbable that, after full consideration, one will be established. The Standard i» quite out of temper at the result, calls the action of Mr Morley and Mr Dixon one of “ interference, not intervention,” and grumbles that the transaction will lead the laborers so to overrate their own importance that the peace they have just concluded is likely to be a “ very shortlived truce indeed.” Why will the Tory press write as if they grudged the laborers the rights of freemen, and as if they regarded all who try to moderate them, while warmly sympathising with their aims, as if they were fomenting a serf insurrection ? It is as short-sighted, looked at as Tory policy, as it unworthy, looked at as human sentiment. We can see no reason why the Irish Executive should hesitate about consenting to the repeal of that Convention Act passed by the Parliament of College Green in 1793, under the influence of the panic caused by an assembly of delegates from Charlemont’s Volunteer Corps. Mr Smyth, in the spirit of the new Home-rule policy, which aims at strengthening the Union by assimilating the law in Ireland to that of England, moved the second reading of a Bill to repeal this old Act in a very reasonable speech on July 21st. Mr Ball opposed him with curiously bad reasons. How is it a reason against its repeal to say of any Irish grievance, or of any blot on the Statutebook, that every Government has hitherto refused to remove it ? Again, is it in order to illustrate the propensity of the Irish Parliament to make bulls that Mr Ball says, “ The fact that Parliament and Convocation were specially excepted from its operation showed the true meaning and intent of the Act ? ” Suppose a Convention of Home-rulers were to be assembled in the Rotundo now-a-days, which would it exhibit, the strength or the weakness of the movement? And what could it do, besides framing the same resolutions, and making the same speeches, as the gentlemen who ought to have been called, what they were, delegates, lately did, under the name of a Conference, in that historic edifice ? In Ireland the permission of Conventions may be the prevention of conspiracies.

The more stringent Ecclesiastical Bills of the present session have passed the Upper House of the Prussian Diet by the exceeding narrow majority of live (51 against 40). The measures passed by the Reichsrath for all Germany were really only supplementary to the Prussian measures, and needful because involving questions of outlawry or denaturalisation, which could not be passed by any single State, but belonged to the sphere of Imperial legislation. It is only Prussia which is, as yet, embarked in a real persecution of the Homan Catholic Church.

An M.D. of the University of London, wrote a letter to the Times, to point out that while the division in Convocation on giving

degrees to women last week showed only MS voters, there are 1480 graduates ; and the inference intended to be drawn was that the majority gained for giving degrees to women does not, in the least, test thelstate of opinion in the University, That would be very plausible, if it were not evidence that some five hundred graduates who wished to support the decision actually arrived at, had signed an address to that effect before the discussion took place. Amongst these five hundred, moreover, many who actually voted, and some who actually spoke for the measure are not included. We believe the truth to be, that if the Convocation could be polled out to a man, the majority in favour of the women’s degrees would be at least as large a per-centage of the whole number of members of Convocation, as the majority last week was of the whole number then present. There is certainly not a shadow of evidence for any different conclusion.

Colonel Egerton Leigh is evidently a true, though possibly an unconscious humorist; and, alas! there is not much humor, conscious or unconscious, in the present House of Commons. He made a motion on May 20th in favor of increasing the punishment for aggravated assaults on women, which was not less ludicrous than pathetic,—for is one to laugh or to cry when, as an illustration of the unwillingness of women to give evidence against the men who maltreat them, the case is mentioned of a woman “whose nose was much injured,” but who promptly declared that “ she had bit it herself ” ? After describing a number of particularly brutal assaults, the Colonel observed, with touching simplicity, “ Occasionally death ensued from these attacks, and then a man got hanged. But it required a good deal of interest to get hanged nowadays.” Colonel Egerton Leigh is in favor of employing the “ Cat ” as a corrective, and we have no doubt he is right. What deters women from giving evidence in many cases is, no doubt, the fear of a long sentence of imprisonment, which may possibly mean starvation to themselves and the children, but in many other cases it is absurd affection for their brutal husbands or other relatives. Mr Disraeli promised that Mr Cross would attend to the matter, and the Colonel concludes that there is some hope of “ fair-play for the fair sex.” Mr Peter Taylor made a very clever speech on May 20th in moving his too vague resolution that “it is desirable to give greater facilities for recreation of a moral and intellectual character, by permitting the opening of museums, libraries, and similar institutions on Sunday.” He entreated the Conservative party, “who could have no sympathy with the Puritans,” who “ were, indeed, untouched by their virtues and untainted by their crimes,” not to oppose his motion. He pointed out that the great authors of the Keformation, “ Cranmer, Calvin, and Luther,” (is Mr Peter Taylor accurate as to Galvin?) were earnestly opposed to Sabbatarianism. Sabbatarianism was the horrible invention of Scotland and New England. He quoted, as an instance of the extravagance of its spirit, an Aberdeen elder who said he would not forbid walking on a Sunday “ until some substitute for it had been devised and a Scotch attack on the Earl of Shaftesbury for speaking in some verses of the laboring classes of Scotland “ disporting themselves ” on a Sunday, which compelled Lord Shaftsbury to reply that the word “ disporting ” had reference only to the children. But Mr Taylor was beaten by a majority of 203 (271-68), —a defeat really due to the fear of the working-classes of promoting in any way what they thought might come to involve a custom of demanding labor on a Sunday. Mr Peter Taylor was chiefly supported by the Irish Catholics. The two working-class members, Mr Macdonald and Mr Burt, voted with him, but the members for large working-class constituencies mostly either voted against him or stayed away. The truth is, that though the work-ing-classes care for railway excursions on a Sunday, they do not as yet care enough for seeing pictures and museums to hazard any new demand for Sunday labor on that account.

Lord Monck took the occasion of a question addressed by Lord Belmore to the Duke of Richmond on May 22nd, to give a clear and interesting statement of the proceedings of the Irish Church Commission. First, as to annuities, they had fixed the terms of no less than 6201 annuities before the Ist ofJanuary, 1871, on which date the property of the Church was transferred to the commission. They then proceeded to the commutation of annuities, and of 6201 annuitants, 6675 have commuted —the total cost of commutation being £9,286,360. The sale of the lands of the Cnurch was the next great operation, but in the case of renewable leaseholds, three years were given to the tenants to convert them into perpetuities, and these three years only expired on the Ist of January, 1871. . This work is now in progress therefore. The tithe rent-charge remains to be dealt with, a slow and complicated process. The Commissioners value their entire property at £16,743.366, and estimate their liabilities at £11,556,907, and expect a probable surplus of £5,186,459. But the liquidation of a Church Establishment is a slow process, and the Commission does not expect to be out of debt, not to say in possession of its surplus, for seventeen years and a half, —in the Premiership of Lord Pembroke. Lord Edmund Fitzmaurice asked Mr Mowbray (M.P. for Oxford University) on May 20th, whether he would lay on the table of the House of Commons a copy of the trust-deed mentioned in the preamble and in section 6 of the Hertford College (Oxford) Bill, to which Mr Mowbray replied that no trust-deed is referred to either in the preamble or in section 6 of the Bill, and that no trust-deed is in existence relating to the £30,000 mentioned in the preamble. “ Thirty thousand pounds has been transferred by the donor to the Chancellor of the University, and now stands in Lord Salisbury’s name solely upon trust to hand over the same to the collegiate body to be incorporated by the Bill, and to be used for the endowment of fellowships in Hertford College. No further conditions can be imposed by the donor, and if the Bill passes, the money will be placed entirely beyond his control." This is, so far as it goes, satisfactory, and we understand that one of the working tutors of Magdalen Hall is to be made a fellow of Hertford College. It would seem, then, that the gift is substantially unfettered, and that the only equivalent which the donor has conditioned for, is the right to name the first fellows of Hertford College. We trust, however, that if the college is to become one of the regular University group, the fellowships will be conferred by competition, and not by virtue of any secret tradition as to the wishes of the donor,