NEWS BY THE MAIL.

Globe, Volume II, Issue 144, 18 November 1874, Page 3

NEWS BY THE MAIL.

[From the Spectator, August 2?..]

The Times' correspondent in Philadelphia telegraphs (August 20th) a fact which may prove of great moment in American history. The Republican Convention of Pennsylvania has refused by a heavy majority to accept General Grant as President for the third time, and has recommended Mr J. F. Hartranft, now Governor of the State. As Pennsylvania holds the balance in the Republican party, this amounts to a rejection of the President as candidate in November 1875, and will compel him, if he desires a third term, to accept the Democratic nomination. To secure this he must swerve towards the Democrat side, a movement which may involve lamentable results, perhaps an outbreak of social war in the South, which is becoming honeycombed with associations, white and black, preparing to resort to arms. The decision, of course, rests with the West, and apprehension is as yet premature ; but we fear that General Grant wishes for the Presidency, that the Civil Rights Bill is lost, and that the tendency at Washington during 1875 will be to conciliate the devotees of State rights. The Bonapavtists achieved a great success on August l(jth. The rich department of Calvados, with its half-million of people and 123,000 electors, returned in 1871 five Royalists and three Republicans, the Royalists obtaining 72,000 votes, or more than a clear majority of the electors. The Republicans came near them, and there were no Bonapartists. At a single election in 1872, the Department returned M. Paris, a very moderate Republican, by 28,0 0 votes, and left the Royalist and Bonapartist nowhere, the latter receiving only 3000 votes ; but on Sunday, though it again neglected the Royalist, and gave the Republican, M. Aubert, his 28,000 votes, it threw 40,700 for M. Delaunay, a pronounced Bonapartist, who accepts the Septennate, but demands a plebiscite, in order to restore the Empire. Great efforts are made in Paris to explain away this result, but they are not very successful, as M. Delaunay's personal popularity would not, two years ago, have helped him at all. unless he had abjured Imperialism. The battle, moreover, seems to have been fairly fought, the Government affirming that of 700 Mayors in the department, 700 are elected by the people. Only the towns went for the Republicans, and the truth seerrs to be that the peasants are disgusted with what they 'consider the sterile disputes of the Assembly, and fall back on the party which cares nothing about Assemblies. The first effect of the event will be to increase the reluctance to dissolve.

Marshal MacMahon is making a kind of semi-regal " progress" through Brittany. At Le Mans, St Malo, and St Brieuc he has been received with civility as a great soldier, but no one appears willing to " hurrah " for the President, and the reception, on the whole, is decidedly chilly. At St Malo,the Mayor unluckily said that France wanted a definite Government; whereupon the Marshal informed him, with some sharpness, that his Government was definite, that he had been entrusted with power for seven years, and that he should keep it for the full time. Consequently, the Mayor of St Brieuc, when his turn to present an address came, said, "For us, you represent order and peace. You said at the Malakhoff, 'I am here, and will remain here.' You are there; remain there." The Mayor thought himself, nodoubt, very epigrammatic; but as the Marshal does not exactly want to say he has stormed the presidential chair, and will keep there by force of arms, he replied with some stiffness that he hoped always to maintain order. The object of the " progress," which must be a horrible bore to the Marshal, is not very evident, and an explanation offered by the Paris correspondent of the Times rather taxes our credulity. We can hardly believe that the Bretons, who at all events believe their Cures, mistake Marshal MacMahon for Napoleon 111., whose death they discredit as an invention to deceive. Too many of them were in Paris during the siege. The British Association for the Advancement of Science met on August 19th at Belfast, when Professor Tyndall, as president for the year, delivered an inaugural address,

a document occupying no less than eight closely printed columns of the Times. The whole was forwarded by telegraph. We have noticed the main thesis of the address, the probability 1 liat matter is the ultimate suirce of all tilings, and its own first cause, elsewhere, aud need only add here that the lecture, hard as it must have hit some of those present, was heard with an absorbed attention, which, apart altogether from its argument, it well deserved. It ig probably the least " dry" address ever delivered before the association, and contains in a small space a nearly complete history of the European progress of the atomic philosophy. The professor's '' confession" that, he believed matter, using the word in a very broad sense, to be the ultimate cause of all, is said to have caused some sensation, but so little as • o show that his somewhat tierce demand for freedom for scientific statement was in this country hardly required. It is the right of political statement which now requires extension. Professor Tyndall will be much less persecuted socially for denying the existence of God than he would be for questioning the value of Monarchy, and may defend Atheists with much less abuse than Communists or oligarchs. English " society" nowadays holds two things to be divine, — Property and the Usual.

The Economical and Statistical Section of the Association has been presided over this year by Lord O'Hagan, who delivered an opening address on August 20th. The late Lord Chancellor is himself a Belfast man, and he described with complacency the extraordinary progress that his native town has made during th > last half-century. The population of Belfast in this period has nearly multiplied five-fold. Where there had been a single manufactory hundreds have sprung up, and new industries of vast magnitude, including shipbuilding yards and ironfoundries, have risen into fame. Lotd O'Hagan attributes this remarkable growth to the cultivation of political economy in Belfast, and we wish we could believe that the backwardness of Irish enterprise could be so easily counteracted. But Lord O'Hagan himself is obliged to admit that agriculture is almost as much as ever the mainstay of Ireland. The Land Act, he was forced to confess, had not, on one important point at least, answered the expectations of its authors. The purchase clause had been but little used, and the applications of tenantfarmers for loans to enable them to buy their holdings have not only been few, but are diminishing. Lord O'Hagan did not attempt to assign the cause of this failure, or to suggest a remedy. It can hardly be alleged that an insufficient degree of Government aid is the reason, for out of a total sum paid for land so purchased of £219,522, £192,000 was advanced by the Commissioners of Public Works, the balance only being provided in ready money by the tenants. A New York newspaper has circulated a sensational rumour that the promised cession of Porto Rico by the Spanish Government to the Germans, was really the consideration which induced the Cabinet of Berlin to interfere so actively on behalf of the recognition of Seranno. The Spanish diplomatists have been instructed to contradict this report, which had been seriously taken into consideration in the United States, and no doubt such an arrangement was never formally mooted. But that Prince Bismarck has a hankering after colonies does not admit of doubt, and he would have been quite willing to take over Porto Rico from Spain if the Government at Washington had consented to forget or ignore the Monroe decree. It would, however, be more than the political life of any American party is worth to allow that dogma to be violated, and the eagerness with which the American Government was interrogated, and forced to pronounce itself upon the first breath of the business settled the matter. It became the cue of Spanish diplomacy at once to deny that any such transfer was in contemplation. No doubt the Americans bounce a good deal about their ability to uphold the Monroe doctrine by force, and we greatly question whether the navy of the United States could hold its own for a week in the Antilles against the combined fleets of Germany and Spain. But both the European Powers have after consequences to fear, and in fact the game was seen to be not at all worth the candle.

Mr Fawcett addressed bis late constituents at Brighton on August 24th in a long and excellent speech, the most striking feature of which was an admission that Mr Gladstone's retirement from the leadership would be a loss not only to the liberal party but to the whole country. He defended him strongly against the charges of desiring power and resisting the Church Regulation Bill in the interests of Eitualism. This admission is the more important because, as Mr Fawcett gently puts it, " nobody can accuse him of unreasonable partiality for Mr Gladstone." Mr Fawcett, we peceive, thinks with us that the conduct of the Government in dealing with the endowed schools will stimulate all Liberals to action, and that it has lost much by allowing its followers to moke reckless promises which cannot be fulfilled. Indeed, Mr Fawcett calculates that the Treasury will have to exercise the most frugal economy in order to avoid a deficit, Sir S. Northcote having discounted the natural increment of the revenue more completely than it was ever discounted before.

Mr Bcecher's answer to the Tilton charges have appeared. He denies absolutely the accusation affecting Mrs Tilton, both generally and particularly. As to the curiously strong expressions of contrition in his letters to Mr Tilton, he explains that they were dictated by remorse, in the first place for having interfered between Mr Tilton and his wife, in consequence of the cruelty and infidelity of the former, and in the second place for having procured Mr Tilton's dismissal from the editorship of the Independent . " Efforts to settle the difficulty followed," and iu the course of these, Mr Heecher wrote and signed the ambiguously-wordtd letters on which Mr Tilton relies. It seems clear that Mrs Tilton, driven to madness, as can well be imagined from her published statement, by the inexplicable moral tortures inflicted on her by her husband, assented at random to statements and retractations, and retractations of retractations, which were seized upon by one party and the other as if the unfortunate woman were really a [competent witness. Mr Beecher says that Mr Tilton levied " black-mail" on him—a charge which, if well founded, changes the aspect of the whole business —but if so, why did he yield to the demands of a crim'nal extortioner, or why does he not now prosecute Mr Tilton for the attempt ? Surely the line to be taken in the first instance by an innocent man o! high character against whom such a charge is brought is that of simple denial, and an appeal— JJtruvi creditis, Quirites?